Last review of 2025

At our usual New Year gaming get-together yesterday, I played Zen Garden, which is exactly the kind of game I really love. You collect tiles to build a garden on your player mat, matching background surface, path type and feature in various combinations to try and obtain the most points. There's a decision point around where the tiles are in the available gallery (they cost differing amounts of money to obtain, depending on position, but they get cheaper if they are left to the next round) and there are too many scoring variables to be able to achieve everything.

It was really fun - I always love pattern matching to maximise point scoring. I didn't do fantastically well, but I really enjoyed it and would definitely like to play it again.

Final Review Stats for 2025!

Here we have the accumulated stats for all the reviews I wrote in 2024:

Books (133):
Positive – 89 (67%)
Negative – 18 (14%)
DNF - 26 (19%)

Audiobooks (49):
Positive – 43 (88%)
Negative – 1 (2%)
DNF - 5 (10%)

Comic books/series (10):
Positive – 10 (100%)
Negative – 0 (0%)
DNF - 0 (0%)

Film & TV (7):
Positive – 6 (86%)
Negative – 1 (14%)

Live Entertainment (7):
Positive – 6 (86%)
Negative – 1 (14%)

Games (video and board) (25):
Positive – 22 (88%)
Negative – 3 (12%)

Reviews total for 2025 (231):
Positive – 176 (76%)
Negative – 55 (24%)

I'm counting the DNFs as negative for the overall stats.

So, if you include each comic series as just one book, I read over 160 books last year, which is ridiculous! I didn't have much work overall in 2025 and I also started a BookTube channel and discovered reading challenges, so that probably accounts for it.

My positive rating overall has gone down a bit from last year - but I think that's because I've been reading, viewing and playing more diversely and trying to expand my horizons a bit, which is always going to be a risk, but I think is a good thing overall.

I'm going to *try* and be a bit more relaxed about my reading in 2026, but I can't imagine that will actually stop me from putting pressure on myself about it!