10 Tabletop Scenes That Defined My Board Gaming in 2024
Top 2024 board game moments from the notebook in my head. It was a cinematic year.
Every board game session has a bravura move, catastrophic fuckup or well-placed quip that crystallizes the game. Or the session. Or a new friendship. Presented here: An unranked look at my top 10 board game memories of 2024.
1. Star Wars: Outer Rim - Never Tell Rygar About the Odds
Star Wars: Outer Rim multiplayer: Rygar toasts himself in advance of some swashbuckling shit he’s about to pull off.
The setting: the Outer Rim, where the Empire’s grip is loose enough that Syndicates, Hutt and Rebels can effectively jockey for pockets of control. It’s a good place to make one’s fortune.
The players: The Don as Han Solo, myself as Ketsu, and Rygar as Dr. Aphra. It’s our first-ever play. Our first few turns. Ryan attempts the Kessel Run job almost immediately. The Kessel Run is supposed to be hard, with several layers of skill checks. I try to explain this to Rygar.
He’s not hearing it. He simply picks up the eight-sided dice and starts passing the checks. He hits the third one and I’m still trying to tell him about ways he can increase his odds of passing. “I’m gonna crit it,” he says. And does. It was only the fourth turn or so and he had just run away with the game. He pushed all his chips on the table in the opening sequence and won.
You can hear the whole story — along with my solo and multiplayer review of this game — in Ep. 80: Star Wars Outer Rim and a Nice Glass of Farmer’s Punch.
2. Project L: Joe Serves Up Some Savory Italian Understatement
Learn Project L with Joe, who will show you how to build and eat a spicy meatball
So my homie Joe down at the game shop — who I nicknamed Project J because he taught me this game — is doing his usual thing at Project L, an inviting and addictive affair where you draft bright plastic polyominoes to fill up scoring boards of various values.
Joe is a machine at this. I am a mere laborer, painstakingly crafting a few scoring boards across the table from his gleaming point factory. This particular loss is bigger than the others. I’ve somehow become worse at this game than when he taught it to me. A four-point gap is usually a pretty resounding win…but I have just posted a score of 18. To Joe’s 29.
Now, Joe is not sparing with his editorializing during a game, but to his credit, he also doesn’t gloat. When I announce my score, he is impassive. He lets out a small sigh, pauses, and says, “That’s a spicy meatball.”
We both knew I just got gutted.
That’s all that had to be said.
I finally bought a copy of this game for myself down at Frontier Geeks, so look for a proper review sometime in 2025 in a Game of the Week segment and hopefully an end to the double-digit losses.
3. Final Girl: Madness in the Dark - The Wicked Bitch is Dead
Final Girl: Madness in the Dark - Once you start swinging the Hook-Handled Bone Hammer, you don’t stop until the Ratchet Lady is flat and motionless
It’s my 15th attempt to beat The Ratchet Lady in the halls of Wolfe Asylum, playing as Veronica, a teen who must do what we expect all horror leads to do: Get her head together, save some of her friends, find a weapon and fight back all on her own.
Except this movie never seems to materialize. I have to yell CUT like 15 games in a row because the Ratchet Lady and her little minions are slicing Veronica to ribbons on every attempt.
Until.
I get some early breaks and get the right weapon early. And start swinging it liberally. Veronica clobbers her way down several hallways, stalking the Ratchet Lady and taking every opportunity she can to mount big attacks. Veronica tracks her down and kills her in the Doctor’s Office. And the room fills with confetti. I’m sprinting up and down my living room and yelling. It’s the most vindicating, elusive solo win of the year, which you can hear about in more detail in Episode 83: Dark Colorado Beers and Rich-Tasting Boardgame Replays.
4. Survive! Escape from Atlantis - The Sharks Eat All the Thanksgiving Leftovers
Survive the Island (The Board Game Formerly Known as Survive! Escape from Atlantis): These look like real nice folks until one of them triggers a 10-foot tidal wave that pushes you into a shark’s mouth
This is currently the game down at Frontier Geeks, along with its successor title (Survive the Island), which is now in stock at the shop and which you should get if you like chaotic fun by the barrelful.
Our new friends Bethany and David put this one in front of us after we’d stuffed ourselves on Thanksgiving…and what a hoot we had trying to pilot people off an island that’s about to get broiled by emergent volcanos.
There’s a massive scramble for the boats as you take turns manipulating sea monsters and kaijus and sharks to mess up everybody else’s escape plans. It’s simply a blast that roused me from a deep food coma and has turned into our go-to for quick, fun, evocative “take that!” contests.
I went into it in more detail in Episode 84: Enough Thanksgiving Board Games to Make You Puke. Check it out.
5. Vale of Eternity: The Don Activates His Sleeper Cells
Vale of Eternity: The Don adds another powder keg to a card combo that’s gonna go sky-high in about three more turns
Every time I think I have this game about surveyed, some new twist in how to summon and score the pretty monsters on the cards up and bites me in a new place.
Thanksgiving Eve: My old HS buddy Hurricane 75 visited and we sat down for a game with The Don down at the game shop. The Don sat and did almost nothing for six turns, then unveiled an interlocking scoring combo of creatures and effects that turned him from a speck in the rear view mirror to a faint glimmer on the horizon.
Which is to say, Vale of Eternity keeps proving its value and showing me new facets months after I thought I’d seen all its tricks. I said last summer that the card pool needs to grow (which it is), but it was nice seeing that the base game is still plenty to chew on. It keeps popping up on the year-end roundups of other boardgame bloggers and YouTubers I follow, so that testifies to its sticking power.
I talked about Vale of Eternity in some detail back in Episode 79: After the Board Games of Summer Are Gone if you’d like to give it a listen.
6. Thunderbolt Apache Leader: Laughing and Eating in a C-130
Thunderbolt Apache Leader: A whole mess of enemy battalions queued to overrun my airbase; this stew needs a pinch of C-130
You can get a squadron shot to pieces really quick in Thunderbolt Apache Leader, which is the most rules-intensive thing I played in 2024. It absolutely rivets me. When I’m in the middle of a campaign, everything else vanishes at the margins. It’s that engrossing.
By the time of my spring campaigns, I’m branching out, trying new aircraft combinations to run the missions. And I finally see what the C-130 Specter can do after learning its special flight and attack rules.
Oh my. It is destructive.
I sent it out alone and chortled as the guns bristling from its port side just raked everything it could see with lethal fire. I whooped as I saw that drawing damage markers didn’t bring the sweaty apprehension as usual; that thing was so high in the air, so chockfull of countermeasures, that I was shrugging off the kind of thick surface-to-air fire that had been mincing my smaller craft for weeks. I had to mop up pieces of breakfast from the terrain tiles after I was done taunting the enemy elements, across whose faces I had just drug a giant, veined dong. Which felt good after losing so many games of cat-and-mouse with smaller craft.
This game is my muse. I wrote a four-post blog series about my learning experiences and the first of a new series: Learning Thunderbolt Apache Leader: An Improving Commander’s Notebook, where I mine the game for every bit of comedy and drama I can find as I develop myself into an intermediate player.
Every time those primary weapons start chattering, my keyboard lights up, too. Sometimes I beat myself up because I never captured those fiction ideas or worked with discarded essays, but I feel like this game gave me occasion to do my best writing of the year. Check out the blog and tell me if you agree.
7. Cascadia Solo: Eating Shit on Reddit After My Fake High Score
Cascadia solo: Check it out, I placed 26 animals. That is cheating.
Playing Cascadia, a beautifully executed nature tile-laying game, was my extended palate cleanser after Thunderbolt Apache Leader. I played it allll summer, chasing a rating from the rulebook: The 110-point solo game, for which you earn the Ascended ranking. I would play the thing half of every morning, racking up 105s, 106s, even a 109. But I never hit the 110.
Until one morning I picked up my cup of coffee and made those patterns of habitat tiles and animal tokens dance like I could see the mind of the creator in a perfect clockwork universe. I’d scored over 130 points.
I take a pic and post it on the Reddit solo boardgaming community to brag about it. And it’s not until I see the picture on my post that the explanation for the stratospheric score becomes clear: I miscounted my tile supply for the solo variant, hypnotized myself and took several extra turns. When you grant yourself extra tiles and animals, there’s all kinds of amazing scores you can hit.
I had to walk it back in front of everyone on the thread. Luckily, they were very nice about it.
The quest for the 110-point solo game continues. I reviewed the game in Episode 79. It was the light-playing, easy-setup answer to the heavy thud of war that was Thunderbolt Apache Leader, and it ate a disproportionate amount of my 2024 calendar.
8. Cockroach Poker: Eating Bugs With Matthew Schniper
Cockroach Poker: Matthew Schniper demonstrates the importance of having something to wash down all the bugs you eat after clumsy bluffs
Cockroach Poker is one of the best things you can own for fast-moving, funny bluffing with a deck of cards. It was an easy teach, but that’s not really what this play was about: It was more about who was at the table: Matthew Schniper of Side Dish with Schniper, who does the most exhaustive and generous food writing and podcasting you’re going to consumer in Colorado Springs. He paid the Purgatoire Valley a summer visit and I played a round with him and Lauren.
It bolstered me to see a face from the old days. It was nice to know that Colorado Springs hasn’t forgotten about me entirely. I finally had an ear for a curated valise of observations, theories, recommendations and complaints I’d been carrying around since I moved down here. And I got to see my adopted region with new eyes when he published his excellent travelogue after his 48-hour whirlwind trip through Trinidad.
9. Warhammer 40,000 Conquest The Card Game: Having My Own Weapons Turned Against Me
Warhammer 40000 Conquest the Card Game: You, too, can get steamrolled and added to the trophy wall
I doubt I’ll ever have another game that will transfix and possess me like Warhammer 40,000: Conquest did. It gave me everything I wanted: a thematic and thrilling way to have battles in the W40K universe without having to buy codexes and minis and take part in the rest of the economically sordid gavage of the Games Workshop assembly line.
For four years, I had a small group who loved it as much as I did, and they all had one thing in common: They were former Magic: The Gathering guys who left the game behind for various reasons and who loved the Conquest application of theme or just got sick of Magic and its burgeoning supply of cards and conditions.
For about 45 minutes, I found another kid like that down here in Trinidad: A former competitive Magic player who, not even done with his undergrad studies, had more or less set the game down. He didn’t know anything about Conquest or W40K or how well its theme manifested in the game’s warlord-driven system, but he liked the idea of a saner, smaller card pool. I played him once. He murdered me in that little pool.
When I teach this game, an event that gets more rare with every year, I usually hand the neophyte my Ork deck built around a slugger named Nazdreg. The scheme is straightforward and strong. And within three turns, he was playing it smarter than I ever had, especially impressive considering you also have to consider which of five planets you want to invest your resources in, as the game models key engagements of a running battle for supremacy in a ten-planet sector tucked away in Warhammer 40K’s sprawling, ultraviolent and cynical expanse.
He grasped the nuances of the the Ork cards with frightening speed. Outplayed me badly on the planet strategy, too. It was breathtaking. Beheaded by my own pupil in minutes flat. And that would be the last of it, because this young swordsman returned to college not long after our match and, like a lot of young locals who have a plan, has no immediate reason to return.
Hell of a game, though. Good job, youngster.
10. Space Hulk: Death Angel - The Psychic Attack Heard Round the World
Space Hulk: Death Angel, The Card Game: This game still makes me yell
No fewer than 12 Blood Angel Terminators are arrayed in a column down the table, marching into the pitiless jumble of a space hulk filled with cunning, agile Genestealer aliens. I’m teaching the game to Rygar and The Don, so I’m braced for early catastrophe as they learn to maneuver and shoot in that bulky relic warplate.
It doesn’t take long. A member of my squad, Brother Adron, gets flanked by a xenos swarm comprising no fewer than eight Genestealer cards. It is not survivable. But then Lexicanium Calistarius, the group’s battlefield psyker under the command of The Don, attacks.
Lexicanium Calistarius has a special ability: If he rolls a skull icon on a six-sided die — something which you can do 50% of the time — he gets to attack again. More skulls? More attacks.
The Don pitches a skull as Calistarius’s eyes turn argent and deadly empyrean power incinerates the first band of Genestealers bearing down on the helpless Adron. Then he pitches another one. And another. And another, the deadly energy arcing from beast to beast. He used a special token once during the attack that gave him a reroll, but all told, he cooked the entire column of Tyranids. All eight cards in the swarm. Slumped and smoking.
It was then I shouted. I shouted so loud that poor Bethany, who had just arrived and was observing the action, buckled in her chair. A table full of Magic players right next to us all looked up in alarm. Rygar told me that was my last bit of yelling for the night, which was a self-solving problem, as I have never seen an attack like that in my 14 years of playing this game, and had no chance of seeing another one that night.
We folded up the cards and started a different game that would include David and Bethany because Rygar is a good host and not a hyperfixated, drunken teenager. I would have let those poor people sit there for an hour while we played that out. Better judgment and manners prevailed, but I saw it. The most legendary close-quarters attack ever made in service to the Emperor and Sanginius. I was on that ship and I saw it.
What was the most singular scene that materialized on your game table in 2024? If something unforgettable now forms in your mind’s eye, hit me up on the Breakup Gaming Society Contact page and shoot me a note about it, I may read it on a future episode or feature it on the blog. You have the storytelling stick, should you want to seize it.
Cascadia Solo: I Thought I Was a Thrice-Ascended EcoArchitect, But I Cheated
I notched a 133 in Cascadia’s solo mode and I can definitely say I’ve peaked
Moments after publishing this post, I finally spotted the reason why I was able to rack up such an obscene score: I took too many turns. There are 26 animals placed here. So, regarding the text that follows: It’s all erroneous. I forge on humbled, still in pursuit of an Ascended 110+ score.
What do I do with this game now? Frame it? File it away? I’d been chasing the 110+ “Ascended” solo score ranking of Cascadia all summer, notching 100+ games regularly. A 110+ score seemed like it required a subtle extra layer of calculation I just didn’t have.
Then this. I gasped when I totaled the top half of the sheet. 93 points. I checked it again. And again:
• Bears (Card C, Families): 18
• Elk (Card B, Formations): 15
• Salmon (Card C, Families): 10
• Hawks (Card D, Territorial): 25
• Foxes (Card D, Dynamic Duos): 25
I didn’t realize I’d hit the Bear Families bonus until my next to last move, but I had focused on building diverse axes of animals that I could bookend with Territorial hawk pairs. In the back half of the game, owing to the vagaries of the draw, I did something else I usually don’t do: Went for a third pair of foxes, which turned out to be massive.
Add 40 points of terrain/nature token leftovers and I think that’s 133 — 20+ points in excess of any of my best-ever games up to that point and a mark I don’t imagine I’ll hit ever again. So I quadruple-checked the score. Took a pic, swept my eyes around the room to note the jarring gulf between what just happened on this table and the oblivion of the remaining day, then packed it up.
What a morning. What a game.
Vale of Eternity, Wingspan, Cascadia: The Games of Summer
Vale of Eternity, Wingspan and Cascadia all found my table in summer. Preliminary notes here.
I acquire, learn and play slowly, so this doesn’t happen often: My play-pace over the last six weeks has totally outstripped my ability to makes sense of it on a microphone. Notes/initial impressions on new acquisitions here; look for a deeper dive in upcoming episodes.
The titular Eternity, a dragon who simply presides for the ‘Gram
Vale of Eternity
Buying a game with no solo mode is a major act of optimism for Breakup Gaming Society (me). I was rewarded by having something like seven different people join me for games, from hardcore M:TGers to casuals. They all loved it. One of them had his own copy the next time I saw him.
I’ve seen a few breathless reviews (unmerited) and a lot dismissal in comment threads (misguided). It’s a good game, as much for its timing in my life as anything.
See, now that’s just lovely
Wingspan
Another purchase where I went against my usual instincts in the name of game shelf biodiversity. It’s every bit as beautiful to see and touch as they say it is. I foundered in the three rulebooks and programmed instruction. I just could not picture how a turn worked. (Liz Davidson solved that. Thanks, Liz.) But I’ve got a solo game under my belt and will try it again, hopefully with others. But that’s low-priority because…
This is what the fuck I’m talking about right here
Cascadia
This game is my new girlfriend. I’ve played solo and against two other folks, each time appreciating the growing contrast between the ludicrously simply play steps and the colorful, crunchy puzzle you find yourself in about a third of the way through. (“Oh, this is nice…fuck. How do I keep the bears happy and find somewhere for this contentious hawk. Oh, my.”) Interpreting the variable scoring patterns of the animal’s five species is producing more moments of confusion than I would like, busting the flow. But I’m going to put up with that and figure it out because I woke up this morning thinking about playing this. Which I’m going to do now. Fuck blogging.