Francisco Gradaille — Blog — Stuart Ellis-Gorman

2024 in Review and My Top 7 Games of the Year*

Last year was one of meandering and trying new things to the detriment of repeat plays – my BGStats end of year report indicates that I played 48 different games, 42 for the first time. For all the new games that I played, I don’t feel like all that many really stuck with me a year later. I faced a few disappointments in terms of games I was initially excited about failing to deliver, and I played some old masterpieces which I enjoyed but maybe won’t make my favorite of all time lists. Trying so many new games also meant that I rarely spent as much time with each individual title as I would have liked. For 2025 I am hoping to spend more time with most of the games I play, digging a bit deeper into the designs rather than playing just enough for a review and then sticking it back on the shelf.

Any long running game series faces the risk of stagnation. While Levy and Campaign is only on its fourth volume, there are near countless future volumes in the works and it could easily expand to equal it’s predecessor COIN in terms of size, and so naturally we begin to wonder do we really need all these games? Can each new addition sufficiently differentiate itself from what came before? Plantagenet answers this question by being far more than a simple rejigging of the core system, this is practically a ground up rebuild. It takes mechanisms designed for the thirteenth-century Baltic and reshapes them to suit fifteenth-century England, casting off several core systems in the process and adding whole new ones. The final product is, surprisingly, probably the most approachable Levy and Campaign game yet and a stunning marriage of mechanism and theme. While Plantagenet fails to top the post in terms of my own personal preference for Levy and Campaign games, it is a phenomenal design and has reinvigorated my enthusiasm for Levy and Campaign as a whole.