40 Years Around The Table: Because Choosing From Over 500 Games Needed Its Own Game

For D.J.’s 40th birthday, I made him a card game to help us decide which board games to play over his birthday weekend.

So, because I have all the time in the world, I made a game to choose which game we were going to play. When you own more than 550 board games, picking one can take almost as long as actually playing it.

Everyone has an opinion. Someone suggests a game that takes three hours when we have 45 minutes. One kid wants something light, another wants something that requires a spreadsheet, and D.J. is usually standing there patiently waiting to teach whatever survives the debate. So, naturally, I solved the problem by creating an entirely new game.

Where the Idea Started

A couple of years ago, I made D.J. an advent-style game calendar for Christmas. Each day, we opened a different envelope containing a game for us to play. It gave us a reason to pull games off the shelves instead of spending the evening staring at them and saying, “I don’t care. What do you want to play?” 40 Years Around the Table grew from that idea.

I started by going through our BoardGameGeek library to see exactly what we owned—which is always a humbling way to remember just how far past “a little hobby” we have traveled. From that list, I randomly selected 40 games. I also casually asked D.J. what he might want to play for his birthday without explaining that his answers were being collected for a secret project. Those two lists became the foundation of the deck.

How the Game Works

The main deck contains 100 Game Cards. Each card represents a game from our collection and includes the information we would need to decide whether it worked for the people currently around the table. The birthday player gets a little extra power because turning 40 should come with something besides back pain and unsolicited emails about retirement planning. Everyone draws a card, while the birthday player draws two. The cards are revealed, the family discusses (or loudly campaigns) for their favorites, and everyone votes. D.J. can keep one of his cards or steal a card drawn by someone else, and he breaks any ties.

Because a simple deck of 100 games apparently wasn’t enough work for me, I also created yellow Bonus Cards and a separate blue Swap-It deck. The Bonus Cards can completely change what happens next. Depending on the card, we might have to draw again, choose from the Swap-It deck, play something under 30 minutes, let the family decide, grab a game from the top shelf, or play the same game again. The Swap-It Cards contain another small group of games that only enter the running when the correct Bonus Card appears. They are basically the emergency backup games for a family that already owns hundreds of perfectly good options.

The winner of a game also gets an advantage during the next draw, which means the selection process carries from one game into the next. It turned choosing a game into part of game night instead of the annoying thing standing between us and game night.

Making the Cards Was a Whole Different Game

Coming up with the idea, planning the different cards, and writing the rulebook were easy. Actually, making the cards was not. I found a card template in Canva and started with the backs. Once I finally had those looking the way I wanted, I moved on to the fronts, and that was when I recruited the teenagers.

I had them save an image of every game box, upload it into the card template, and add the correct information to each card. We used a spreadsheet to track their progress and make sure nothing was skipped. By the end, we had 11 pages with nine cards on each page.

We color-coded everything so we could tell the decks apart without stopping to read every card:

• White: Game Cards

• Blue: Swap-It Cards

• Yellow: Bonus Cards

• Green: Games You Actually Want To Play Cards

• How To Play Cards

The boys also helped create the artwork for the Bonus Cards, and Anthony came up with several of the bonus ideas. We even made How to Play cards so everyone could have the rules in front of them without asking D.J. to explain my own game back to us.

And Then There Was the Rulebook

No birthday game for D.J. would be complete without a rulebook. That is his favorite part of opening a new game, while the rest of us are mostly interested in punching out cardboard and asking how long this is going to take.

I made a proper little rulebook with the objective, components, setup, instructions, optional ways to play, and because this had become a full family production, credits explaining who helped with each part. Was all of that strictly necessary for a homemade birthday game? Probably not. Did it make the whole thing feel like a real published game? Absolutely.

Tracking the Birthday Weekend

I also made a Google Sheets tracker so we could record every game, who played, who won, which type of card selected it, and any important notes from the table. Then I let AI turn all of that into a dashboard because apparently I cannot just make a stack of cards and call a project finished.

The tracker ended up being one of my favorite parts. We could see which cards had been used, which games were making it to the table, and exactly how badly D.J. was beating the rest of us during his birthday celebration. Over the weekend, we logged 27 plays across 25 different games, with 10 people joining us at different points. D.J. and I played all 27 sessions, while kids, family, and friends rotated in and out depending on the game and whatever else was happening in the house.

The cards did exactly what I hoped they would do. Sixteen of our plays came from the games D.J. had picked, nine came from the games the rest of us selected, and the Bonus Cards sent us in directions we probably would not have chosen on our own.

A Top Shelf Bonus Card pulled Power Grid into the celebration. A Foodie Bonus Card gave us Delicious. A Family Pick sent King of Tokyo to the table. Then Herbaceous managed to hit both the Speed Round and Rematch Bonus Cards, so we immediately played it again. That is exactly the kind of nonsense I wanted this deck to create.

The tracker also preserved the truly important historical information from the weekend, including:

• D.J. winning 14 of the 27 plays, for a completely obnoxious 52% win rate.

• Me beating him 70–46 in Sagrada, which deserves to remain in the permanent record.

• A note from Century: Golem officially stating, “D.J. is a cheater, as per the ladies.”

• Fit to Print remaining unfinished, although D.J. had the highest score when we stopped—which I am sure he believes counts as another victory.

• Hot Streak pulling a whole crowd around the table for one of the biggest games of the weekend.

The kids also had very strong opinions about which cards deserved to win each vote, because no family activity is complete until someone is campaigning like the future of the country depends on whether we play Planet Unknown or King of Tokyo.

Did It Actually Work?

Shockingly, yes.

40 Years Around the Table did exactly what I wanted it to do. It took away the endless “What should we play?” conversation, got games off our shelves, and gave everyone a reason to be involved in choosing what came next. Even when the card we expected to win was knocked out by a Bonus Card, the surprise was part of the fun. Would I have liked to squeeze in even more games? Of course. I am the person who made nearly 100 card layouts because choosing from our existing collection apparently was not complicated enough.

But between people coming and going, kids needing things, dogs being needy, food breaks, setup, cleanup, and the general chaos of our house, 27 plays was a pretty damn good birthday weekend.

[img of house]

More importantly, the gift was not just the cards, the rulebook, or the very excessive spreadsheet. It was several days of people we love coming in and out of our house, sitting down together, arguing over game choices, accusing D.J. of cheating, and making new memories around the table. For his 40th birthday, that felt exactly right.

[gallery of pics from weekend]