12 - 14 December 2025 was the BGC boardgame retreat organised by Jeff and Wai Yan of boardgamecafe.net. This is already their 13th year doing this. Although I have known Jeff and Wai Yan for many years, this was the first time I participated in their annual retreat. I did participate in a mini retreat some years ago, but this was not the main annual event. So I consider myself a newbie. 

Quantum is a game of interstellar colonisation and warfare. The spaceships in the game are dice. Different die values represent spaceships of different classes. They have different speeds, strengths and special abilities. You goal is to be able to deploy all your influence cubes. You do this by establishing colonies on planets and by accumulating battle victories.  The play area is

Ra is one of Reiner Knizia's classics, first published in 1999. This is an important game in my boardgame journey, being one of the games I played a lot of when I first got into the hobby. At the time (2003) the game was out of print. I searched for images online and hand made a copy so that I could play it. Now that I think about the time and effort required to hand make a game with 180 tiles, I

Orapa Mine is a game from Korea. You are mining specialists and your company is about to start mining a huge gemstone mine. Your job is to detect the exact positions of the gems. You do this by directing ultrasound signals into the ground and observing how these signals are reflected by the gems.  The game is for 2 to 5 players. With 2 players, each sets up a puzzle, and you

I first played Architects of the West Kingdom as a physical game. Playing online in asynchronous mode is not as good as playing face-to-face. I guess that's true for most boardgames. For strategy games like this, it is still not too bad. There is much you can plan and think about between your turns. You don't have many turns in a game, so the game doesn't go too long. Some games which