by Justin Bell

I checked my phone’s weather app for the upcoming week. The forecast showed a steady diet of inbound beauty in Chicago: lots of sunny days in the high 60s and low 70s (Fahrenheit, for my friends abroad), an outlook of blue skies, and a healthy dose of days where temperatures would rise into the 80s.

Most people in Chicago love it when the temperatures start to warm up; I still believe Chicago is the best place on Earth from Memorial Day to Labor Day. It’s just a totally different place when you add warm weather to the already solid roster of great people, great restaurants, great sports (well, maybe “good” is more appropriate for our pro teams) and great sightseeing, because we also have a beach ready to go when people don’t want to fly to places like Florida, and the summer street festival season is something else.

I, too, love warm weather. Unfortunately, when it gets warm in Chicago, every board gamer I know essentially stops playing games to take advantage of the weather. As a player, and as a game reviewer, it’s the toughest time of the year to find bodies.

***

One of my former steadies is a strategy gaming group formed during the early months of COVID. For a stretch of time, 6-8 of us would gather a few times a week and mask up to play games all over the city. The group was reliable, in part, because most of us had nothing else going on. We found each other strictly because of availability; the world had shut down, but gamers seem to always find a way to chuck those dice.

I’ve never played board games on a nearly daily basis like I did for the first two years post-COVID. I was playing games four, sometimes five days a week for stretches, especially in the dark days of winter when the best thing you could do was survive the trip from your house to a buddy’s place and find parking that wasn’t “dibbed” by some guy’s lawn chair in Avondale.

Even in that group, everyone scattered from early June through late August. It was like college let out for summer break, and you could only find your high school friends for drinks and mozzarella cheese stick specials at the local TGI Friday’s / Bennigan’s / Chili’s. (Gosh, I miss a good round of greasy cheese sticks.)

Nowadays, it sets in with my review crew right around the first week of May. I always put out the call the weekend before review crew night with the normal request: ”Games this Monday! Who’s free?” Usually, we fill seats within a few hours. But when summer approaches, the rapid response rate turns into a trickle.

“I can’t make it this week.”

“Yeah, I’m taking a vacation with the family all of next week.”

“Friends in town, we’re doing drinks on a patio in the city.”

“Out” (not even showing enough respect to end this already abbreviated sentence for formal punctuation!)

Now, some of this is the double-edged sword that I have set up for myself: I’m a nerd, but I prefer playing games with nerds who also have a pretty robust life away from the table. Part of this “mistake” is my own; I need more people in my life like me, who have kids, or are getting older, or have nothing going for themselves on Monday nights. (Like, seriously, who has hot plans on a Monday? It’s Monday, for crying out loud!)

And that’s usually in early May. By late May, it’s DEFCON 2 at my place. Review nights are so close to summer extinction that I begin refusing some review requests from publishers, because I know it’s going to be a challenge to get players often enough to get 3-4 plays of a new title in before posting a review.

***

Gaming at home is unaffected by the weather. My wife, or my two kids, or any mix of those three are around often enough on a rainy day or after Saturday morning cartoons or when I’ve tied the night’s dessert to playing a new card game. (“Yeah yeah yeah; we have ice cream coming up. But first…”)

Because I do at least one play of each review copy with the family, or we play a lot of the family classics for fun, I’m still playing games 2-3 times a week at home.

But for my other groups, those warm outdoor temperatures make it tough.

I love the Logged Plays feature on BGG. While I was drafting this article, I was curious about my recent summer activity, so I looked up my summer plays over the last five years. Each year’s lowest monthly count happens not in December for the holidays, or convention months like October where I’m out of pocket for a week or two. For me, it is ALWAYS summer.

In 2021, it was May, with 27 logged plays. 2022, it was March, with only 19, but then I went back and checked out why—I was in the final month of a job at another company, and I was out of town for almost the entire month. The second-lowest total was June, with 30 plays. In 2023, it was July, with 19.

You get the idea. Since a lot of the year’s big US releases hit at Gen Con, then the global releases hit SPIEL Essen, summer usually ends up being the time that I begin to clear the calendar for the hottest upcoming games and convention hauls. To cleanse the palate, I love to play games in my collection that don’t get enough love during other points of each year, and mix standing favorites with titles that can get a lot more love than usual, especially with the kids.

Last year, it was a solid mix. Union Stockyards hit the table, one of those fun, underappreciated one-hour Euros I love to whip out from time to time, in the family of Chicago-themed games that also happens to feature hogs, real-world businesses, and a solid, snipe-y area control battle. Stone Age came out! Rococo: Deluxe Edition was still great, and it was still ridiculously deluxe. My son fell in love with Mastermind and insisted on playing it a bunch in late June.

A few review copies got 2025 summer love as well. Since the Tiletum expansion, Prospect for Silver, arrived in July, that meant I had no choice but to get the base game out to refresh my memory. The same was true with Xylotar, an incredible trick-taking game, to prep for the Xylotar: Unhinged plays later in the month.

No matter what time of year it is, campaign game groups are really challenging for me. Still, I got in the first few chapters of Clank! Legacy 2: Acquisitions Incorporated—Darkest Magic before summer vacations killed off my campaign group.

That means the safest campaigns are with people who already live at the house…which made the first eight missions of Metal Gear Solid: The Board Game with my son a breeze. (“Snake? Snake? SNAAAAAAAAKE!!!!”)

Memories from last year are getting me hyped for the summer ahead, despite the lack of players. Fantastic Factories made its way to the table before dinner a few nights ago, after sitting quietly on a shelf for years. I mixed in a play of Brass: Lancashire with an upcoming hidden role game last week. I’m wrapping up reviews of a couple of the Pax titles from Ion Game Design, a family-weight card game called Circadia, and in the process of relearning Nippon on Board Game Arena, I’m also prepping plays of Nippon: Zaibatsu over the next few weeks. And now that Nucleum: Gibraltar has arrived, I’ll line up a few plays of that one soon.

So, I’ll still get some gaming in while the temperatures heat up. But, I won’t be sad at all when that cold air kicks up again this fall!