State of the Game Room 2020

My yearly list of what has arrived in the game room and maybe even what we’ve played over the past year.

History

State of the Game Room 2016 – It was in Jan of 2017 but it was for 2016.
State of the Game Room 2017 – End of 2017 recap.
State of the Game Room 2018 – And end of 2018.
State of the Game Room 2019 – Last year’s recap.

Statistics

153 New Entries in the Inventory database since December 30th 2019.
22 Arkham Horror: The Card Game additions.
30 Shadowrun additions.
11 Dungeons & Dragons additions.
17 other RPG purchases.
27 new and used Board Games.
13 new and used Card Games.

I say New and Used in a few places. This is because of two events over the past year. First is a friend and fellow gamer moving away from Colorado and back east to Virginia. Wen is a consummate gamer and an all around great guy. We miss him in Colorado. As part of his departure, he was selling off some gaming gear. As someone always on the lookout for games, I headed down and looked over his gear. While I did get a pretty good stack (filled up the trunk on the motorcycle), the ones of note are Formula E, which is Elephant racing! 😀 and an old game I used to have as a kid, Stratego.

Shadowrun

The second event was helping a fellow gaming who was having some personal troubles. He was selling some of his older, and hopefully not in use gear and making it available to the Shadowrun Facebook group. Bull is a pretty well known Ork so many folks stepped right on up. Generally I picked up some of this and some of that. In particular a Nerps pack of cards, a Shadowrun poster, Leviathan, and a few other bits.

Speaking of Shadowrun, I have a few interesting items this year. As part of a display of gear for the Shadowrun Facebook group, I snapped a pic of the crazy number of Limited Edition books that came out for Shadowrun 5th Edition. And it turns out I missed two for which I was able to easily track down. One from Catalyst itself and one on Amazon. And in addition, I snagged the Executive Edition for 6th.

The other picture was of all the miscellaneous Shadowrun kit like dice ($150 a pack!!!), pins, glasses, and posters. I even have a Chessex Vinyl Shadowrun cover.

A friend from work happened to get two copies of the Shadowrun Sprawl Ops board game and he gifted it to me knowing I play. We’ve had several discussions on Shadowrun before he was laid off.

But the best was tracking down the last two cards from the Denver Box Set. There are 6 plastic passes for use to travel between the sections of Denver and each box only has 2 meaning you had to hunt for the correct box. I was able to get two more from eBay back in 2006 when I got back into gaming and then stumbled upon someone selling a box with the last ones I needed, which included the Aztlan pass. This gave me a complete set of cards!

Due to the Covid Virus and mask requirement, when the Shadowrun Masks became available, I picked up 5 sets along with other bits like dice and an S Shadowrun pin.

Over the past year, Jamie from Atomic Goblin Games in Longmont Colorado, dumped some of his extra stuff that was just sitting around into my lap. As such I acquired several Netrunner bits as part the tournament kit and a pack of Star Wars X-Wing tournament bits. He’s also given me two sets of the Shadowrun miniatures and card decks as he gets them from Catalyst for free. He also got some Dark Souls miniatures expansions that I was able to get for his cost since I was the only one that played it.

The last bit of gear was from a posting on the work communications system (WebEx). We’d played some Munchkin this past year and I mentioned it and someone said there was a Munchkin RPG. Oh really. I was able to track down the available books and picked it up. Very fun reading.

reddit Questions

Several things this year has reduced the number of games we wanted to play. We were doing a lot of house hunting and finally purchased a house in August. There were a lot of different requirements and deadlines but we got it done. Add in all the moving hassle and less time was available for gaming. While the band was able to come up on weekends to practice, due to the drummer’s job change, we lost a lot of gaming time. Then Colorado went Red so we couldn’t even have guests over. Jeanne and I did get some gaming in. We both changed jobs towards the end of the year which had us doing more work related stuff; getting up to speed on the different technology for example.

Blog and Photos

Link to my blog where I go into more detail and have more pictures.

How Long Have You Been Gaming?

Well, I’m 63 now and started playing various games as a kid. My grandfather played gin and gin rummy with me when I was over and the adults played pinochle although I was able to play from time to time as well. We played all the standard games. Monopoly, Battleship, and even Chess. We started gaming more when we started doing Family Home Evening (Mormon thing) and I was introduced to Outdoor Survival, an Avalon Hill game. From there into wargaming and beyond!

Gaming This Year

We played quite a few games this year, in part due to Covid. Formula De, Raccoon Tycoon, Resident Evil, Munchkin, The Witches, Ticket to Ride (Rails and Sails), Splendor,The Doom That Came To Atlantic City, Car Wars,Nuclear War, Shadowrun Sprawl Ops, and Savage Worlds: Deadlands.

Favorite Board/Card Games

Of the past years plays: Probably the Resident Evil card game. That surprised me as being a pretty good game.

More current games: Ticket to Ride: Rails and Sails, Castles of Burgundy, Discoveries of Lewis and Clark, Bunny Kingdom, Formula De and Splendor.

Older: Car Wars, Cosmic Encounters, Nuclear War, and Ace of Aces.

Incoming and Outgoing

Generally Jamie down at Atomic Goblin Games will pick some out for me to check out. Other than Shadowrun books and paraphernalia, the only thing coming in is via Kickstarter and it’s the Steve Jackson Car Wars game.

As to outgoing, I just don’t do that. I was close to selling off a bunch of my collection back in the 90’s when I got into video games but I backed out and have since see many people who regretted getting rid of this game or that. I have the room for the gear, so it stays. Maybe next year. 🙂

Game Room Pictures

As to the game room, I did pick up another couple of Ikea Kallex boxes. A 4×4 one and a 2×4 one which I put on top of the 4×4 one resulting in a 6×4 configuration. Currently I have 4 5×5 shelves with a 1×4 shelf on top of each, 2 4×4 shelves with a 4×2 on top of each, a 1×4 shelf, and 2 2×4 shelves with a 2×2 on top of each for a total of 192 Kallex squares of games.

And Pictures! These are going from entrance left side clockwise around the room.