Board game shelves around the world #19

Analog Games aren’t just fun. They also often come in interesting boxes featuring beautiful artwork. It’s no surprise that a lot of us love to proudly showcase our board game collection on a shelf. In this series, every week one of our fellow board game enthusiasts will exhibit their board game shelves and tell us something about their favorite board and card games. Today we are going to look at the board game shelves of Tessa from Washington!

Hi Tessa, please introduce yourself.
“My name is Tessa and I’m a board game reviewer and designer in Southwest Washington. I’m a stay at home mom to a geeky 3 year old boy. My husband, James, is a programmer and helps me run our board game review website, boardgameduel.com. I’m a math teacher by trade and in recent years have taught in the local homeschool co-op. My favorite classes I taught were Board Game Design and Math in Games.”

How did you get into this world of non-digital games?
“As long as I can remember, I played board games with my family. We only had two tv channels so family night usually consisted of either movies or games. My favorite game growing up was Arch Rival, which is this awesome dexterity games from the 90s. In terms of modern games, I didn’t really get into them until I married James. His college friends played board games and I joined their group, playing Battlestar Galactica as one of my first modern games. We got Ticket To Ride the year we got married and started a board game group with one of his college friends. Now, 6 years later, our collection has grown to over 200 games, and we still play board games every week with our same friend.”

How often do you play?
“Several times a week. Both my husband and I’s families love board games, so whenever we hang with them, we are always playing games. We also have a weekly game group, as well as an every other week D&D group. My son, who is almost 4, is getting very into board games and asks to play with me everyday. Needless to say, I probably play board games more than the average gamer.”

Can you tell us something about your shelves?
“Right now we are storing our games on 5 different shelves and they are still overflowing. We have a 4×4 IKEA Kallax, Two IKEA Hemnes bookcases, 1 IKEA Ivar, and temporarily using some home depot shelves in our garage. Soon, we plan on putting our extra games on a new IKEA Billy bookcase. We recently gave about 30 games to my husband’s coworkers, and with that, we still need more shelves! Right now, three of our shelves are in our great room, displaying our awesome geekiness.”

What is your favorite game at the moment?
“That’s really hard because it honestly depends on who I am with and how many I am playing with. If it’s just with my husband, I lean toward Star Realms. If I’m with a bigger group, I love playing Codenames. If I’m playing with my parents, we’ll play Carcassonne or Qwixx. And my son just loves playing SORRY! Sliders. I don’t have just one favorite game, but I do have favorites for playing with certain people and groups!”

What is your most special or obscure game?
“I’d have to say Arch Rival, the 90s dexterity game I mentioned before. We lost it with moving over the years and I was definitely disappointed. A few months ago, I found a pristine copy at Goodwill! Arch Rival is just as good as it was 20 years ago, and I’m so happy it found its way into my collection again.”

Thank you so much for sharing your story! Something you would like to add?
“Come see our reviews and board game blog posts at boardgameduel.com. We also have Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook pages (all under “boardgameduel). We like to focus our reviews on a 2 player verses 4 player experience, as well as a full review. We also love writing about various board game topics such as solo gaming and gaming with kids.”

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