Hey friends — if you’ve been following my blog, you’ve probably noticed that I took a hiatus from posting for a while. For those who don’t know me personally, you may have been wondering where I’d gone! I apologize for ghosting without so much as an explanatory post. So here’s why:

My wife and I recently had a baby, and leading up to that time I took some time away from blogging to focus on preparing for that major life change, and then adjusting to the new normal. The sleep schedule has been the biggest adjustment, but it has been such a joy to get to know the newest little member of our family. Things are going well, and as we’ve settled in we have been able to carve out a little bit of free time here and there.

Having a baby definitely changes your perspective on a lot of things, and my gaming preferences have been no exception. A lot of the games I’ve played in the last few months have been lighter-to-medium two player games with my wife.

We played through a campaign of Charterstone together, which we both absolutely loved. We could play each game in less than an hour, and we didn’t have to spend much time learning the rules since we unlocked new rules bit by bit. It also felt very balanced – the winning points were ultimately scored on the last turn of the entire campaign. (Of course, your mileage may vary in that regard, especially as player count increases.) If anyone has recommendations of other mid-weight campaigns well suited for two players, we’d love to hear them!

We’ve also really been enjoying the deck-building word game Paperback. This game somehow manages to feel like a good word game and a good Euro game at the same time. Of course, like with any word game, there’s a fair amount of luck involved with the letters you draw. However, at least in this case you’re building your own deck of letters, so you can improve your chances by drafting letters that tend to go together well.

In addition to Paperback, we’ve also been enjoying Steamrollers and Codenames: Duet. One thing all of these games have in common is they’re not ranked in the BGG Top 100. The BoardGameGeek ratings notoriously skew heavy, so with a lot of lighter games making it to the table these days,

I do still have some opportunities to play heavier games, from time to time. I host a monthly game group, where we’ve recently played games such as Agricola and Vast. I also meet about once a month with some friends to play a campaign game – we just finished Pandemic Legacy Season 2, and Scythe’s “The Rise of Fenris” expansion is up next. I even got a chance to get The War of The Ring back to the table a few weeks ago with my friend Chris from the excellent The Tolkien Heads podcast. (My wife is a saint for allowing me enough free time to play WotR.)

So, you might be seeing fewer reviews than I was cranking out pre-baby, and some may be about lighter games outside the BGG Top 100. Nonetheless, I’ll still be putting the same level of care into my posts and only writing about the games that I feel I have something interesting to say about. Thanks for reading!