All this reminiscing about the past year makes me bring up my "rules" all the time. I'm not home, so making a post about it would be difficult, but I can make a chatty snippet. Maybe.
I created these "rules" just to frame what I was already doing and to put more emphasis on it. Because it's very easy to just say "oh but it doesn't matter much" whenever these habits didn't fit what I was looking at. Making them more fleshed out helped me think about them more. And I know most people don't care, but I'll share them anyway. And maybe some of you will find inspiration and make your own different rules.
No impulse purchase - which is pretty self explanatory and something that I do in all aspects of my life. Most of my purchases work in a way that I look into it, put it in a basket or in a wishlist of sorts, then do more research and let it simmer for a month. If by then I'm still interested, it gets bought. Maybe. Obviously not a month long decision making in most boardgame purchases.
Research - as mentioned above, I do tons of research. With boardgames this includes pictures, box dimensions, playtime, rulebook reading. The more that's available, the better decision I can make.
Small box - as evident by this year's backing, I'm trying to keep things small. For many reasons. Carrying around, storage, ease to get to the table. It can also lead to me discovering clever designs (do more with less). I consider small anything less than 29x29x7cm (roughly) in volume.
Short playtime - by short meaning up to 60min, better yet if it includes setup time. I have more than enough longer games I love to play, so I would have to replace those instead if I went longer.
My type of solo - generally no scoring AI (I mentioned it to death around here), otherwise it's on case-to-case basis, very specific.
Cheery theme - I have enough sadness in my life, let me enjoy something bright and fun. Or at least something that looks optimistic. No real life or real life adjacent themes.
No dice - yeah I'm in the process of reducing dice I already have and I don't plan to add more dice. It's a weird me thing.
Smaller footprint - not only box sizes are getting progressively bigger. As a hobbit sized person who plays mostly solo, my ability to reach everything the game sets on the table is getting difficult even while kneeling and playing on the floor. And I'm getting old, my knees hurt. I understand most games are aimed at multiplayer played at a pool sized table, so they want everything big, where nobody feels excluded. But as a solo player, I don't appreciate this sprawliness one bit.
Language independence - the most iffy one on the list, because true language independence isn't as common as it might seem. So I'm making it "loose" with as little text as possible. I've said it last year that I keep coming back to games that have little to no text, because it's so much easier for me to play than text heavy games. Those require much more effort even though I think I'm pretty fluent in english.
And that's it, those are my rules for 2024. There are actually 2 new rules, 8 and 9 that weren't present last year. After looking back at what I backed and had delivered in 2023, I've been much happier with the ones that fit into these. That's not to say I don't enjoy the others, but they aren't played as much.
I think I have broken every single one of these rules.
Here are my own:
My Golden Rule is: read the rulebook before backing. And it's a great rule. Sometimes I realize I will never have the drive to go through that rulebook, ever, and even though the game looks great, it will stay on the shelf.
My second rule is: I must picture how the game plays by reading the rules. If I don't, but it looks cool, then something is likely wrong. Games I did back anyway ALL ended up being a disappointment.
My third rule is: criticize publicly (and politely obviously!) the campaign, and see how the creators react. A creator not ready to handle and accept well-minded criticism has probably not been able to handle it during the creation process either. Which leads to a poorly developed and refined design.
My fourth rule is: if you keep forgetting you backed a game, you probably don't want it. There are games that I realize a-posteriori that I have completely forgotten about them. They were all mistakes.
My fifth rule is: if you don't have doubts, don't back. All games have flaws, all games should make you doubt. If you don't have doubts, it means you have fallen for the marketing. Be sure to pinpoint exactly why you shouldn't back before backing confidently.