2024 Games Library Report

Hello U-Con gamers and welcome to my favorite time of the year: Games Library Statistics season! We’re all snug in our beds, or at least U-Con 2024 is, and we’ve had a bit to reflect on how things went.  

The Library added 49 games since last year, bringing the grand total to 645.  We’re gonna need another rolling shelf for U-Con 2025 for sure.  U-Con attendees played 133 of those games (21% of the Library) over the course of the weekend. Of those 133 games, 13 of them were new games that had not yet appeared at a U-Con. There were 226 total checkouts over the weekend, which is lower than it has been in a while. In fact, 21% of the Library played is the lowest stat yet for that number. True, the more games the library has, the harder it will be to play a large percentage of the Library…unless everyone checks out a game to play at least once. 2025 goals?  

2024 continued to be the year of the two player game; I added 3 new Two Player proper games (Kelp, Sky Team and Paco Sako) to bring the number of Two Player games up to an even 20.  A little under half of those games were checked out (Spirits of the Wild continued its domination with one of the highest number of checkouts). 10% of the total checkouts were Two Player Games so I guess that’s a Library purchasing goal for 2025. 

The popular games this year were Azul, Calico, and Spirits of the Wild with 6 checkouts each; 7 Wonders, Boop., CuBirds, Red Rising, Set, Sky Team, Ticket to Ride, and Welcome To… with 4 checkouts each; and Dice Hospital, Dice Throne (season 2), Fuse, Isle of Cats, King Domino, Matcha, Patchwork, Root, Smash Up, Splendor, Sushi Go, and Tapestry each came in with 3 checkouts.  Open Gaming was full pretty much the whole time, but all my Library numbers were down.  I wonder if more people brought their own games to play in Open Gaming and the lack of table space discouraged people from checking out games.  

There is a dwindling handful of games that have been checked out every year since I started tracking stats: Forbidden Island, and maybe Lords of Waterdeep, remain on that list.  Lords of Waterdeep wasn’t on my signout sheet but I will swear on toast that I remember it coming back from being checked out and later a group said they had played the game.  It’s now somewhere in limbo as to the status…a Schrödinger’s checkout if you will.  Sadly, Zombie Dice got no love this year and falls off the list. 

The other, and happier, list is games that have been to at least 2 U-Cons prior and got their first ever checkout this year (number in parenthesis is the year the game was acquired for the Library):  Compounded (2020), Deadwood Studios (2020), Discworld: Ankh-Morpork (2020), Fish Frenzy (2018), Gobblestones (2018), Horrified (2022), King Up (2022), Martian Rails (2022), Near and Far (2018), Spirit Island (2020), Star Realms (2020) Takamachi (2020), and Ticket to Ride: Germany (2020). There are still 28 games out there that have never been checked out since I started tracking stats in 2014.  Maybe 2025 will be the year all the games get their first play.

This year did have an unwelcome first: I lost a game.  Not in the ‘I came in last while playing’ kind of lost but rather ‘the game disappeared into the ether’ kind of lost.  Scout was checked back in on Friday, and then Saturday morning we couldn’t find it.  We thought, since it is a really wee game, that it might have gotten wedged behind or between some of the other games but no. Come Sunday when we did tear down and loaded the buckets alphabetically, there was no Scout to be seen. One of the carts threw a wheel while rolling out the library on Friday night so I’m guessing the jostling probably launched Scout off the cart and it skittered under something.  Shout out to the closing crew though; none of the other games fell off the cart and they were able to change out the bad wheel on the fly.  

For people who like numbers:

	# Games In Library	Unique Games Played	% Library Played	Total Checkouts
2017	237	83	35	167
2018	298	102	34	233
2019	372	153	41	339
2022	520	116	22	178
2023	596	167	28	285
2024	645	133	21	226

If you are looking for games to gift, Spirit of the Wild remains the popular Two Player game.  Calico and Azul got a lot of love this year and the Ticket to Rides faired well (6 checkouts across the lot of them). Patchwork, Splendor, Sushi Go and Ticket to Ride are all games that have been checked out every year they have been at U-Con and they have been coming since around 2016 so there’s something to say for replayability even if they weren’t the hot game this year.

And as always, I conclude this report with my least favorite Games Library Task: Resetting the parts counted dates to zero and starting all over again. Until next year, keep playing, stay safe, and if you see Scout could you point it back home? Much obliged. 

-Your Friendly Neighborhood Games Library Wrangler 

JQ