It's that time of year again. A time to reflect on the last year and look forward to the next. In 2023, my partner and I decided to undertake a 10x10 challenge despite having two kids under 5 taking up a lot of our time.
We made some minor adjustments to the 10x10 formula to fit our situation better. Instead of a single game, we included a small games category we could check off every time we brought out a game like Fox in the Forest or something similarly light and quick. We included a family game night category so our 4 year old could mark off things every time we ~~suffered through~~ played a riveting game of Candy Land. Finally, we included "game nights" as a category in an attempt to make the time to invite friends and family over for games, or to get out and attend other friend's game nights.
To track everything I made up a chart to keep on the fridge and color in every time we played a game on the list. As you can see below, we did not finish our 10x10 challenge but we did have a good time. There was a lot more gaming than was captured on the chart due to game nights and just playing games we didn't include on the list.
My favorite games for 2023 were probably Race for the Galaxy and Heat: Pedal to the Metal. Hopefully, I catch Heat in stock soon so I can add it to my collection.
Looking forward to 2024 we again reworked the 10x10 to suit our style a bit more and encourage playing more of our collection. We chose 5 games to play 10 times and 10 games to play 5 times. This still gives us a goal of 100 games played. There is still a wild card category to catch some one off games we're itching to play.
We have also included bonus points for putting together puzzles and for hosting game nights.
Click here to see the 2023 and 2024 charts.
Is anyone else doing a challenge this year? Anything new or old you're especially excited to include?
This was the machine to count down registers at the end of every retail shift. Great little things. Training someone new on it was always a process though. A lot of people struggled with the concept of entering the sign/operation after the number.
Example 10+2-5 = 7 is entered into the machine as 10 [+] 2 [+] 5 [-] [* or T]. Of course most people treated it like a regular calculator and hit 10 [+] 2 [-] 5 and then scratched their heads to find the equals.