Looking Back on 2021

Posted 22 Dec 2021 to Musings

I kept a spreadsheet log of all the sessions I played this year.

I kept a spreadsheet log of all the sessions I played this year. I've never done that before and it revealed some interesting things.

I played 125 sessions this year. I counted Session Zero's in this tally, but there were only 4 of those. Our Legend of the Five Rings campaign was the clear leader, with 35 sessions. That was not the full length of the campaign, as the first few sessions took place in 2020. I was a player in that very evocative campaign. Delta Green and Sigil & Shadows were the other two entries in the top 3 games of the year. I expect to clock up more Sigil & Shadows sessions next year because I am pretty enamoured with that system right now.

For genres, I seem to have played mostly Fantasy in 2021 (73 sessions, 58%). Then Urban Fantasy (34 sessions, 27%) and Sci Fi was quite minor (13 sessions, 10%). In my mind I imagined the balance of genres to be more even, but the stats don't lie. I didn't know how to classify Broken Compass (adventure?), Alice is Missing (horror?), or Twilight 2000 (post-apocalyptic?) and lumped them together as "Other".

Most of my campaigns seem to be 7 to 11 sessions long. That is to be expected, because that is a comfortable length to try out a system. I think my own attention span begins to wane around that time, as there is inevitably some new game that I am itching to try out.

What the hell is Star Squad?! Oh that's my own system. I managed to convince a few friends to play a 7 session campaign of that one and 2 one-shots, and it was great fun! I hate the name now. The game needs some tweaking before I'm ready to share it with you.

What does 2022 look like? I expect I might need to play a lot less. I am anticipating a busy year for real-life with some big changes that will eat into my play time. I expect to play more Urban Fantasy, using Sigil & Shadow. I am looking forward to the possible release of Shadow of the Weird Wizard, which if it is similar to Shadow of the Demon Lord, could become my new go-to game for Fantasy. And I'm developing an itch to play more Sci Fi particularly Cyberpunk. That could be using Starforged, or perhaps Technoir. We will have to see!