Board gaming was my main hobby for several years. There was a phase where I would spend lots of time watching reviews and keeping up with latest releases, doing occasional deep dives to find some hidden gems, and of course having multiple board gaming sessions a week. At my peak I was playing 4 or 5 times a week, during my PhD several years ago.
After moving into my current place, I started hosting boardgames often. Every month I’d pick out 3 or 4 Saturdays and Sundays in the next few weeks, message a whole bunch of board game friends, and then spend 6 or 7 hours on each of those days gaming, if not more. I enjoyed it every time!
I cannot remember when but at least several years ago, I realized that board games give you a false sense of socialising. Yes I am in a room with people, and we are doing stuff together, but there is little to no bonding. I actually do not know anything about these people - except maybe a sense of what games they like and how they play. This is not representative of all board gamers - many board gamers makes lots of close friends through board games - but for I and a decent fraction of board gamers do not build new friendships through board gaming. To put it bluntly, if I was in any kind of emergency, I would not call any of them for help and they would not call me.
I said I knew this several years ago, but the board gaming only reduced during 2025. What’s the reason? Basically I was fine with it. If we are all having a good time in the moment, why does it matter if we are not developing close friendships.
However, and I cannot remember the timing of all this and there are likely multiple co-occuring things going on, the interest died down a lot in 2025. One part is definitely this aspect of not bonding - something I want to do is be more intentional about my friendships. But another part is that I finally reached the point (after playing over 650 different games according to my boardgamegeek profile) where am I no longer keen to play games and new games in particular.
The odds of a new game being more enjoyable than one of my favorite 30-50 games is very low.
I am less motivated to learn the rules for a new game myself, and I have little patience for terrible rules explanations which are unfortunately common. (Turns out teaching is hard and most people suck, even more than most people realize. That’s a whole series of blogposts I plan to write at some point.)
Even the games in my collection whose rules I already know and which I like a lot, the enjoyment in those started to saturate and plateau.
A distinct sign of this change happened the last time I attended Lobstercon, a board game weekend in Eastbourne where a hotel is booked out and you literally play board games all day for the whole weekend. I’ve been a few times and had a blast every time, but the last time I went was much more flat and less enjoyable. It was not bad, and I am glad I went, but there was something definitely missing.
That said, having not played board games for a while has now resulted me in being interested again. There has been a big enough gap that games whose enjoyment was saturated are exciting to try again. I am already booked in for the next LobsterCon in May and expect to have a good ol’ time.
Also, I am keen to introduce people who I am friends with to the board games in my collection. I know many people who say they’ve tried a couple of board games like Catan and really enjoyed it, and are surprised to hear that I think it is a bad game. Board games have improved a lot since the 90s, and I have an excellent mix of styles and complexities and genres, and though I cannot experience the joy of experiencing the amazing range and quality of modern board games for the first time, I look forward to enabling that experience for others.
Side note: I think my collection is more varied and interesting and accessible than most avid board gamers, who seem to amass large collections of generic, forgettable, unnecessarily complex, multiplayer solitaire euro games. Yes I’m an opinionated1 board game snob, but I say this because non-gamers can get a misleading impression of board gaming based on who they happen to know.
Something that helped is that I culled my collection (I have done this regularly throughout my boardgaming hobby, but this time I let go of games that I actually like a good amount but which just do not get played) so that now every game is a game I am particularly excited to play.
Another side note: This culling is a small part of a host of various life improvements that I underwent as part of the unusual start to 2026, that I have alluded to in an earlier blogpost.
If you’re interested at all in trying a varied mix of board games (and live in London) let me know! Alternatively, I actually wrote up a list of games I recommend to newcomers few years ago, which I still stand by. I do not own many of these games, but strongly endorse them all. And of course, I think this list is better than lists created by other gamers. :P