It wasn’t that long ago that I wrote a blog post reflecting on being the family dungeon master for the past year. So I’m going to try and avoid repeating too much of what I wrote there. At the time that I wrote it, I wasn’t considering making tabletop gaming one of the topics I reflect on at the end of the year. However, it has become a pretty large part of my leisure and it may continue to grow in the amount of my free time that it takes up. I think, for this year, I will divide my post according to campaign. We’ll see what makes sense next year.

Unlike last year I didn’t play any of my narrative games, despite my best intentions. Unlike with my end of the year music post I don’t usually make graphs for my end of the year video game posts, but if I did you would see that games 1-3 were played WAY more than any other other games I played this year. It was truly the year of Against the Storm, Cities: Skylines II, and Balatro. I don’t know too much about what 2025 will bring, but I am sure it’ll at least have a bit more of each of those three games. I would like to actually make a bigger effort to get through my narrative games this year, but I’m not sure how much that desire is worth when I consider that I didn’t play any at all in 2024. As usual, you can enjoy the YouTube video below that will have highlights of the games I played this year along with narration that matches the text below. After that are the images of my Steam Year in Review and, finally, my Top 20 overall games since 2011.

Trends

Overall, this year I listened to tons of Chillhop while at work. Since 99% of Chillhop doesn’t have lyrics, this would allow me to have some background music that wasn’t distracting. As each new Chillhop album was released for the current season, I would listen to it on loop for a while. I also made playlists of all the albums per season that I would listen to as well. Every once in a while I would listen to all my music on random (as I usually do), but this was a year in which I was more focused on listening to newly acquired albums when I wasn’t listening to Chillhop.

At the end of 2023 I had 3283 ebooks and magazines (a change of 234 - a similar gain to last year’s 256). Of those, 2636 were unread (an increase of about 200). I continued to get free issues of The MagPi (Raspberry Pi official magazine) and Hackspace Magazine. Tor.com pulled back on their free ebooks this year. However, Scarlett bought lots of books and I keep all the family’s books together in the same library. At the end of 2024 I had 222 audiobooks (an increase of 25 from last year).