How are you deciding what to play next?

I find it hard to figure out what to play. Not because I can’t find anything, the contrary. I have hundreds of games and 25+ lists with anywhere from 10 to 50 games on them. The issue isn’t there isn’t enough. The issue is that there isn’t enough time to play them all and so many games to play.

The other problem is that some of the games are games that I want to play for a long time. Games that I want to tell long stories with. Others are games that are fun to dip a toe into but I don’t want to spend a ton of time there.

So this week I’m going to talk about how I determine what I’m going to play and how I cycle through games.

After some trial and error I’ve found that having two long games in different genres works best for me. Right now, I have a Star Trek Captain’s Log and an Old School Essentials game. When I get bored or stuck with one, I head over and play the other one. I’ll also stop at good stopping places in order to hold one game while I head off and play the other. So far, this has been working fairly well. But I still struggle with the time issue. I found that having two games with similar genres didn’t allow me to feel like I was moving far enough away from the genre I was bored with. But having two games in different genres and two different systems means that it really feels different when I move from one to the other.

I also try to accomplish my moon goals each month, which generally consist of playing 2-4 games a month around a specific theme or genre. When I can I try to overlap my two long-term games with this goal, but that isn’t always possible. For this I try to limit each moon goal game to about one a week. Whether I love the game or it doesn’t fit into my tastes, I try to limit the amount I play that game to one a week. This way I can get a nice little sample size of different games. But I’m not always all that good with this. Especially if it is a game that I stubble upon and really love. This is what is happening right now. I’ll talk more about this game at another time, but I started it last week and it is bleeding into this one.

Next there is the monthly solo RPG book club from the Lone Wolf Discord. I’ve mentioned it before but essentially we select a game each month and all play it, then at the end of the month we come back and report our thoughts. I’ve been slacking on this the last couple months, again not because I don’t like the games but because I just don’t have time to do everything that I want to do. So on my list of priorities this one falls fairly low some months and much higher other months.

Now when you throw in family, work, life, running, bookbinding, various game jams, and birdwatching, I really start to feel like I can’t play everything I want to play. I know that part of my problem is the need to grab the next shiny thing and take off running with it. I’m already thinking that given how frantic my goals have been this year, by trying a wide assortment of games that next year, I’ll take a different tack and look to go much deeper into fewer games.

Finally there are the lists. So many lists. Every time I hear about or read about a cool sounding game, I throw it into any number of lists. There is no rhyme or reason at this point and it is a problem. I have all of these lists and don’t know where I found them or even what the game is about. I need to spend some time organizing them but even so the lists keep growing and the amount of time that I have to play doesn’t get bigger.

So what about you? What does your gaming pipeline look like? Are you a go wide kind of person, go deep kind of person, or something else entirely? I’m curious to hear how other people are doing it, selecting games, and keeping themselves moving forward with game.