#oneaday Day 547: Goodness

Lots of lovely things due to come through the post very soon indeed. There's the Evercade, of course, which I've mentioned a few times and am extremely eager to get hands-on with; there's the PC Engine CoreGrafx Mini or whatever it's called over here, which Amazon now estimates will be here on Saturday, and, of course, there's Game of the Year, 51 Worldwide Games, aka Clubhouse Games.

The latter should be here tomorrow and I'm looking forward to it a great deal. I enjoy tabletop play, for sure, but with things as they are right now getting together with friends isn't an option — and with two (and possibly a third at some point soon) of my regular tabletop gaming friends rather inconsiderately having children, that's something of a rarity even when the world isn't being swept by a global pandemic and worldwide protests.

The fact that 51 Worldwide Games incorporates a bunch of "classics" rather than anything modern and new is appealing, to be honest; while I do enjoy a lot of modern tabletop games, many of them play for an extremely long time and have a tendency to get overcomplicated, particularly from a components perspective. I think I've mentioned Gloomhaven on here before, which is a beautifully produced game, but has approximately six billion components, takes three hours to set up and even longer to play and consequently became exhausting and not fun as a result. Backgammon, meanwhile, you need a couple of dice, some tokens and a board and you're away.

I'm actually quite interested in getting to know how to play some classics a bit better, because getting the hang of some of these games with simple to learn, hard to master rules might help me out with the mental block I have concerning strategic thinking in more complex games. If I'm not having to think about tons of overlapping mechanics and referring back to the rulebook and can instead concentrate on some simple but broadly applicable mechanics, I feel like I'll probably be able to get a much better feel for things. But we'll see.

Either way, I'm genuinely looking forward to 51 Worldwide Games a great deal — so hopefully I'll be able to report back with some first impressions tomorrow!