Over the last few months, we've really been trying to catch up with our board game backlog.
Not only have we been playing games that were brand new to us, but we've also gone back to a few games that we haven't played for quite a while, and thought they deserved another attempt.
As such, there's been a lot of learning and re-learning of rules over this time. I'm not sure my tiny brain can handle much more.
Perhaps we shouldn't keep buying so many new games...
Way back in December, Gareth and I went on our first little exploration of Dune: Imperium.
While there were only two of us, we threw in a third force as an extra, to give us extra turns and more opportunity to learn.
Mistakes were definitely made during the run, but as far as I remember we'd got the rules down by the end.
Not gonna lie, though. I've already forgotten pretty much everything. We really will have to try and find the time to go again.

Cat's not impressed with our Dune: Imperium skills
It was time to get our smuggle on as we played the classic game Sheriff Of Nottingham for the first time.
Thankfully, the game is so easy to play that it didn't take long for all six of us to grasp it, and really start psyching each other out.
I somehow got 2nd, though I was over 30 points behind the winner.

I just really like cheese
Not sure this game will get many more plays out of us, but at the very least, we could give There's Been A Murder its second chance on the tabletop.
We aced the first game when I (somewhat dodgily) cottoned on to who was holding the murderer, and played a card so that I could pass them the informant.
The 2nd game turned out to be our first loss of this game. This was because the murderer was forced to be put back to the bottom of the draw pile, and when it came out again it went straight into the hand of the player who was holding the witness. Oh well.

Get your magnifying glasses out
The annals of our first attempt at playing this game never made it to this 'ere blog, but after a couple of years, it was another game that deserved a second chance.
We could only squeeze in one game, and we only played on easy mode, but two people had never played before, and the other three of us had only played it once a very long time ago.
This resulted in an easy win, and we didn't take a single point of doom. There was definitely some luck involved though, as we got all of our predictions correct, even when we had a few numbers to choose from.

Not a lot of doom around here
This very fast card game was the next new game to hit the table.
In Game Of Thrones: Hand Of The King, players have to move the spy character along the columns and rows to gain the allegiance of different family members.
At the end of the game, whoever has the most influence with the most families wins.
In our case, my brother-in-law handily won both games.
I think we quite liked it for its simplicity and speed, but I'm wondering if it would play better at two players rather than four.

I will have your allegiance
Another long forgotten game got another chance on the tabletop, after we first played this thing back in September 2023.
It was a game I'd really been looking forward to playing again, as it's based on my favourite game from the Resident Evil franchise, in Resident Evil 2.
Now of course, after all this time, none of us could remember how to play. In addition, the rulebook is all over the place in how it presents its rules, so we were constantly finding new things that we were supposed to have been doing, but hadn't been.
Because of this, we made the game far easier on ourselves than it was supposed to be.
But at least by the end of it, we were able to figure it out.
Let's just hope it doesn't sit on the shelf for another 18 months until we whip it out again.

Zombies line up in Kendo's path

Leon and Ada are ambushed by zombie dogs