There’s a recurring series I write on Space-Biff! called New Year, Old Year, which looks back on the games highlighted in Best Weeks past and evaluates them from a more updated vantage. When I began writing it back in 2017, there were two purposes behind the series. The immediate function was prophylactic. I’m often asked whether this or that game has held up since its release. New Year, Old Year could function as a repository for keeping my readers updated. Also, sure, so I had something to link to instead of answering those questions over and over again.

On a more personal level, New Year, Old Year also functioned as a form of accountability. A gut-check on my own tastes and attitudes. It was valuable to look back on the lists I’d written years before. With the benefit of hindsight, it was easier to see where I’d steered wrong, the gaps in my recommendations, or where my initial enthusiasm had been misplaced. The series was a corrective. It helped me not only reevaluate previous titles, but approach the games I was playing and reviewing right now with some additional perspective.

But something happened last year. When the appointed time came around to write about Best Week 2021, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Something I’d left sitting on the windowsill for far too long had finally curdled.

The problem began the year before. According to tradition, I spent a few hours reading and thinking about my picks for Best Week 2020. And then, one by one, I wrote my updated impressions. The result was New Year, Old Year: 2020 Revisited.

But something nettled at me. The satisfaction and self-appraisal I’d gleaned from previous installments was gone. Instead, I found myself wishing I hadn’t written the piece at all.

Worst of all, it wasn’t even a mystery. I can handle a mystery. There’s something thrilling about untangling a problem, even if it’s a therapeutic issue that requires awkward self-examination. But that wasn’t it. The problem was staring me in the face.

2020 was the COVID year. Like everybody else, we had buttoned up. But there were still plenty of games to play. Solitaire games, games with family, eventually games in masked company. Very few of these, however, were games I wanted to revisit. They wore the black mark of that festering year. The background apprehensions. The riddled anxiety.

To be clear, I had returned to some of these games. But others didn’t lend themselves to further examination. Some weren’t good enough to risk invoking the specter of that year’s benighted memories. Others had served as comfort food, empty calories for fattening me up, only I now found that I no longer needed to prepare for hibernation. And others still simply weren’t suited for the sort of update that marked the series. The central question, “How have these games held up?” was nonsensical. They didn’t hold up. Not because they weren’t good games. Because they hadn’t really gotten a chance the first time around. It was like asking how Port Royale held up in 1694, only a couple years after an earthquake sent it to the bottom of the Caribbean.

The crux of the question was replayability. Was I still playing these games in 2022? Never mind that it’s rare for me to replay any game. As I’ve noted before, my hobby is writing about games; playing them is only a facet of that. Could I really assess the replayability of a game I hadn’t been played much the first time around, or perhaps only played in sub-prime settings, or — and this is the important part — that shouldn’t be replayed anyway?

Because not every game is meant to be replayed. The timing of New Year, Old Year 2020 brought that into focus. Here I was writing about games as things that should be reassessed years later when some of them were perfect for their time and place. Perhaps they had influenced later titles and deserved recognition even as they were outpaced. Perhaps they had served as emollients during that difficult year. Perhaps, even, they had only been intended to be played once or twice.

Let me ask a question: How many art forms are gauged via replayability?

Not “replayability,” strictly speaking. We need to phrase the question via each medium’s proper mode of interaction. Repeat viewings, then. Repeat experiences. Repeatability. Yes, that seems right. Repeatability.

Some things certainly benefit from repeatability. I’ve watched Sneakers literally every year of my life since I was ten, sometimes more than once, and fully intend for that tradition to continue. Last year, my most viewed movie was Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. Fat dragon! The same goes for some books. I’ve reread my favorite novel, John Crowley’s Little, Big three times. Albums and individual songs become prized if we don’t find ourselves hitting next when they appear on shuffle. My first car had a tape player, but I used an adapter cassette to play CDs. I burnt it out on August and Everything After. Video games, too. The original Deus Ex and the too-few imitators it inspired — these are the things I inevitably replay, and they’re exemplars. It almost goes without saying that many works of art are appealing precisely because they’re repeatable.

At the same time, most of us wouldn’t go so far as to say that repeatability is the preeminent criterion upon which we judge any given work of art. It matters, maybe even a lot, but there isn’t a strict correspondence between quality and repeatability. Just because I’ve watched more Sneakers than any other movie doesn’t mean it’s my favorite. It’s comfort food. Excellent comfort food, but still comfort food. The same goes for Honor Among Thieves. It was one of my favorite movies of the year, but my top picks were more singular. While Little, Big is indeed my favorite novel, it’s hardly my most reread book. That honor probably goes to something embarrassing like Ender’s Game. Maybe Dune. Okay, Dune Messiah. Hey, I was once a young idiot too.

Moreover, many of my favorites in each medium are things I won’t experience again. Never. Not once. Because as important as they are to me, and as important as “repeat experience” might be as a criterion of quality, it isn’t the only criterion.

In fact, the inverse can be true. Rather than signifying that something is good, repeatability is often a sign that something is easy. I’ve played hundreds of hours of Skyrim, but I can’t say I’ve been particularly edified by even one of those hours. Wandering around those level-scaled landscapes never changed my life or left me feeling enriched. Not like, say, Planescape: Torment, a game that spawned my interest in philosophy and ethics, but which is also so challenging and dense that my attempts to replay it have been abortive. In my personal calculus, it’s infinitely more impactful and valuable than Skyrim, yet it’s only occupied a fraction of my time. The same is true in other mediums. I’ve read every Cormac McCarthy book exactly once. Last week I watched The Zone of Interest in theaters. It was breathtaking. I hope every human being on this planet watches it. I plan to never do so again.

The same can be true of board games.

Not all the time. And perhaps, at an intrinsic level, it isn’t true as often. For the most part, board games are designed with repeatability in mind — at least that’s the case when they aren’t built to catch our attention during crowdfunding without ever being playable in the first place. I value a repeatable game. Whether it’s because the game is pleasant or because it rewards mastery, there are plenty of ways board games can lean into the virtue of repeatability.

At the same time, there have always been games that aren’t repeatable to the same degree. Historical games, for instance, are often so complex and time-consuming that they become events in their own right, suitable for occasional sessions, perhaps only appearing during conventions when like-minded players can come together to experience them.

Meanwhile, the medium continues to mature. New modes of expression are being unveiled regularly. Sometimes these experiments are flubs, but they can also result in one-of-a-kind experiences. In one unexpected turn, last year’s Endurance by Amabel Holland refused to name any victory or failure thresholds. Far from coming across as an eccentric quirk, this was a serious and important aspect of the game, asking the player to reckon with the outcome of their version of Shackleton’s imperiled voyage and the assumptions game designers make when they bend an in-game model to fit a topic’s historical outcome.

According to some definitions, a game isn’t a game unless it offers a way to win. With Endurance, Holland defenestrated that assumption altogether. In the process, she created a game that was considerably more thoughtful than it might have been.

Another title, this one designed by Dan Bullock, was one of my favorite gaming experiences of the past year, yet its atypical nature proved divisive upon release and, were I to reassess the game solely via the criterion of repeatability, there wouldn’t be much positive to say about it. That game was The Gods Will Have Blood, a twenty-minute solitaire game that casts the player as a magistrate overseeing executions during the Reign of Terror. In crafting The Gods Will Have Blood, Bullock makes a number of decisions that are nearly iconoclastic in their irreverence for the received wisdom of good game design. Player agency is strictly limited, and in some cases is overturned by the whims of the court they ostensibly oversee. Meanwhile, the guilt or innocence of the accused is assessed based on a snippet of text printed on the front of their card, while the consequences for their execution or exoneration is printed on the back. This adds an inverted system of memory to the game. The better one recalls the outcome of any given sentence, the more predictable the game becomes. This could be considered a weakness, as predictability dulls the feverous uncertainty of your actions.

As “good” games go, The Gods Will Have Blood is troublesome. It doesn’t cast the player as an agent whose actions are inviolable. Nor is it repeatable in the slightest, at least until one’s memory of the experience wears away. But it still produces something rare: a genuine ethical conundrum that left me unsettled.

In this hobby, that’s downright singular. Plenty of board games have tried to evoke emotional considerations only to discover that the medium is uniquely unsuited to the task. Because everything (or nearly everything) in a board game needs to be modeled via counters and other components, without even the advantage of the linear narratives favored by our sister genre the video game, the ineffable must necessarily be, um, effed.

Imagine playing Baldur’s Gate III, except rather than speaking with characters face-to-face and therefore forging an empathetic connection with them, we’re asked to directly manipulate the numbers that dictate their simulated approval, friendship, and romantic interest. Lae’zel calls you a worthless istik, but a bracketed note informs you that she seems impressed by your actions despite her hurtful words. You can reply in six ways, and each response corresponds to you sliding a wooden piece up or down a track. What do you do? Well, it’s unlikely that you go with the answer that feels most genuine in the moment. You probably check those numbers against what you want to accomplish. Now turn to paragraph 556.3 to see how Lae’zel responds — and keep a thumb in the book in case you decide to change your mind.

Those numbers and sliders exist in the video game, of course, but they’re obfuscated behind layers of text, visual modeling, and voice acting. And to some degree, video games also permit players to “keep their thumbs in the book,” so to speak. I’m as guilty of this as anyone. I tried to break up with Karlach so I could date Shadowheart, but Karlach was so devastated that I reloaded the game. But where video games thrive on this obfuscation, board games thrive on laying it all bare. Board games are about seeing the numbers, the mathematics, the tracks that dictate affection or dislike, population booms or the threat of an uprising, resources and incomes and all the rest. As a medium, board games are about seeing and manipulating the models behind the artifice. This suits the medium well to examinations of those models, but puts designers at a disadvantage when trying to foster emotional connections with in-game characters and situations or persuade the player that they’re engaging in life-altering ethical decisions. The result is the awkwardness of sanity trackers or other moral “hit points” that resemble combat by another name.

By contrast, Bullock presents the board game equivalent of a Sophie’s Choice, and does so in a way that appears almost effortless on the player’s end. To be sure, this requires the player to meet the game halfway. I expect there’s some element of culture we’re still working past. Rewind a few decades and people scoffed at the idea of players fostering an emotional attachment to that little red plumber running from left to right across the screen. Or maybe The Gods Will Have Blood simply doesn’t land for others the way it landed for me. Fair enough.

But it was meaningful to me in part because it wasn’t repeatable. Oh, sure, I still played it a few times. Yet nothing came close to that first full session. Bullock had carved something wet and cold into the hollow behind my breastbone. Even though I won’t likely play it again, it had left its mark on me.

This presents a problem to the way New Year, Old Year framed the games of yesteryear. It isn’t sufficient to ask whether a game has “held up.” Some games shouldn’t hold up. Sometimes they should stand as monuments to the era that produced them, or be celebrated as stepping stones that led to later iterations or innovations, or exist as artifacts of memory, pristine and unsullied by attempts to recapture that extraordinary moment.

I think I can write the next installment of the series now. I needed to say this first. To declare that there’s nothing wrong with repeatability. Only that sometimes it takes up a little too much space in our critical discourse about board games. By all means, when assessing whether a game is a worthwhile purchase, that may well be one of the best criteria. When it comes to retrospectives, though, there are other considerations that should be taken into account. I want to write about how a game holds up because of how it altered me, not only because it hits the table. That’s my plan of attack going forward.

This article was funded by the generous donors at my Patreon, who regularly receive early glimpses of difficult pieces. My next article, New Year, Old Year: 2021 Revisited, is already live there for donors.