Indeed. I don’t always comment, but love the reviews. Please keep up the great work!

Fantastic. That’s one of our main motivations for publishing a review: could this convince you to buy (or not buy) a game.

For Northwood! is an absolutely lovely design, I agree! Trying to do something as inherently social and reactive as a trick-taking game with only one player is a great design challenge, and For Northwood! managed to pull it off. I didn’t include it on this list because I was imagining this as a consumer guide for someone staring at a shelf full of trick-taking options, and I don’t think For Northwood! would generally come up under those circumstances.

I think Golden Age of Boardgames hit somewhere in the 2000’s and continued through sometime in the 2010’s. I got into it in 2013, but I think there was a greater awareness of boardgames and what they could be designed to do in the 2000’s sometime. I like that you differentiate our current times as golden in terms of production and as mentioned, resulted from crowdfunding and the initial boom/golden age of board games. Perhaps we’re in the gilded age of board games instead? Success coming from combinations of tried and true stuff more than unique and new ideas that were like those of yesteryear.

My collection is mostly concentrated in 2014-2019 published years (per BGG), but I have a healthy amount as well from the entire 2009-2023 range, outliers as far as 2002-2024.

I think Golden Age can sometimes seem like it depends on when one personally jumps into the hobby, but I spent quite a bit of funds these last few years going back to stuff that came out before I got into gaming (so games 2013. I like to think the new stuff has a higher bar to hit, but the bar definitely shifts as much laterally as well as vertically.

After searching BGG, I think some of these later years have waned as after the first few pages of any search by year and current BGG rankings, the games I’m interested in looking into drop off a lot. Even if we have thousands of games coming out, only about 200 are even worth being aware of, depending on one’s tastes, and even fewer get bought/tried.

Culling is more of a thing for us than other hobbies since games not only can be costly, but take up finite storage space, play time, and memory load for rules. But I don’t plan on leaving the hobby any time soon and likely will keep informed on the industry on a daily basis.