The 10x10 Board Game Challenge: Rules, Variants and Pacing

    The 10x10 board game challenge is a self-imposed hobby goal: pick 10 games at the start of the year and play each one 10 times before the year ends, for 100 total plays. It began as a way to fight shelf of shame collections by pushing depth over acquisition, and it runs on the honor system tracked by each player themselves.

    Updated August 4, 2026 · 7 min read

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    What the 10x10 challenge actually is

    The 10x10 challenge, sometimes written 10x10 or 10 by 10, asks you to name 10 games before the year starts and then play each one to completion 10 times before the year ends. Hit all 100 plays and you have completed the challenge. It is not run by a publisher or a sanctioning body. There is no prize and no official leaderboard. It is a personal commitment that spread through BoardGameGeek forums and later Reddit and Discord because it targets a problem almost every serious collector recognizes: a shelf full of games that get played once and then never again.

    The mechanism is simple on purpose. By committing to a fixed list in advance, you remove the temptation to always reach for whatever is newest. By requiring 10 plays of each title rather than 10 plays spread across any games, you force actual depth: you learn a game's strategy, its variability, and whether it holds up past the honeymoon period. Most games reveal their true ceiling somewhere between play 3 and play 8, which is exactly the range a casual collection rarely reaches.

    It traces back to a thread on BoardGameGeek around 2011, credited informally to a user experimenting with a New Year's resolution format borrowed from the 52-books-a-year and Whole30-style challenge culture already common online. Board gamers adapted the number to fit the size of a healthy annual rotation: 10 games is enough to keep variety, and 10 plays each is enough to actually learn a game without demanding an unrealistic total play count for people with jobs and families.

    The exact rules

    There is no official rulebook, but the community has converged on a fairly consistent set of conventions. Most people running a 10x10 log follow these:

    • Pick exactly 10 games and commit to the list before or very early in the calendar year
    • A play only counts if the game is played to its normal end condition; quitting partway or teaching a truncated version does not count
    • Plays can be solo, co-op, or competitive, and can be with any group of people, unless you set a stricter personal rule
    • Expansions count as the base game unless you decide in advance to treat a major expansion as effectively a different game
    • The same physical copy is not required; if you own two copies of a title or play a friend's copy, it still counts toward that game's ten
    • You may swap a game out of your list only if you build that flexibility in from day one, most commonly through a wildcard slot (see below); a strict 10x10 has no swaps at all
    • The challenge runs on the honor system, since there is no external verification, which means the value comes entirely from what it teaches you about your own habits

    Common variants

    The rigid version of 10x10 does not fit everyone's collection size, schedule, or risk tolerance for locking in a list they might regret by March. Several variants have become nearly as common as the original.

    • 5x10: pick 5 games and play each 10 times, for 50 total plays. This is the standard entry point for people newer to the hobby or with less table time, and it is far more achievable for a household that games once a week
    • 10x10 with wildcard slots: commit to 8 or 9 fixed games and leave one or two slots open, to be decided later or filled with whatever earns its place through spontaneous play. This solves the biggest failure mode of the strict version, which is picking a list in January that no longer reflects what you want to play by June
    • 100x1: the inverse structure, where you aim for 100 total plays across your collection with no title needing more than one play counted toward the total in a stricter reading, or more commonly, just a flat 100-plays-in-a-year goal with no per-game requirement at all. People run this when their goal is breadth rather than depth
    • 10x10 rolling or half-year: run two separate 5x10 lists, one for each half of the year, which gives you a natural reset point if your taste shifts or a game turns out to be a dud
    • Personal 10x10: some players count plays only when they personally make a meaningful decision in the game, excluding games taught to brand-new players where they are mostly guiding rather than playing
    • Family or household 10x10: one shared list tracked across everyone in the house, which counts a play if any combination of household members played it, useful for tracking a shared shelf rather than an individual's habits

    How to pick your ten

    The list is the whole game. A bad list turns the challenge into a chore by August; a good list makes it feel effortless. A few principles consistently separate lists that get finished from lists that get abandoned.

    Pick games your group already likes, not games you wish your group liked. The challenge amplifies existing enthusiasm and existing resistance equally. If nobody has asked to play a game unprompted, it is a poor 10x10 candidate no matter how good it is on paper.

    Favor shorter playtimes over longer ones when in doubt. A 100 plays across 10 games that run 45 minutes is 75 hours of total table time across the year. The same total across 10 games running 2 hours each is 200 hours, and that math is why heavy strategy games dominate people's abandoned lists more than any other category.

    Mix player counts to match your actual gaming life. If half your plays happen as a two-player couple and half happen at a five-person game night, your list needs enough two-player-capable titles that you are not stuck waiting for a full table to make progress on half your list.

    Include at least one or two games you can play solo. Solo-capable titles are the safety valve that lets you rack up plays on a weeknight when nobody else is around, and they are frequently what saves a list from falling behind.

    Leave out anything you already suspect will not hold up to repetition. Games with a strong narrative or one-time surprise, heavy legacy or campaign structures that are not designed to be replayed, and anything you only enjoyed because of novelty are all poor fits.

    Month-by-month pacing math

    The number that trips people up is not 100, it is what 100 breaks down to across a real calendar. Do the arithmetic before you commit and the challenge stops feeling abstract.

    • 100 plays across 12 months is about 8.3 plays per month, or roughly 2 plays per week
    • Split evenly across 10 games, that is 1 play of any given title every month and a bit, which sounds trivial until you remember it has to be a specific title, not just any game
    • A 5x10 list needs 50 plays a year, about 4.2 per month, which is genuinely sustainable for a weekly game night group with almost no extra effort
    • Because life is not evenly distributed, build in a lead: aim to be ahead of the flat monthly pace by the end of each quarter, since summer travel and the November-December holiday stretch reliably eat 2 to 4 weeks of table time
    • A useful checkpoint schedule is 25 plays by end of March, 50 by end of June, 75 by end of September, and 100 by early December, leaving the last few weeks as a buffer rather than a deadline
    • If any single game is under half its target by the June checkpoint, it usually needs deliberate scheduling rather than hoping it comes up naturally, because momentum tends to concentrate on 3 or 4 favorites and starve the rest

    Why people fail the challenge

    Most 10x10 attempts do not fail because people stop playing games. They fail for a small set of predictable reasons, and knowing them in advance is most of the fix.

    • Front-loading the list with heavy, long games that require a specific group size and a free evening, which shrinks the number of nights the game can even be attempted
    • Picking games to impress an imagined future self rather than games the actual group already reaches for
    • No tracking system, so plays get forgotten, undercounted, or remembered inaccurately, which erodes motivation because progress feels invisible
    • Treating the list as fixed when circumstances change, playing a game you have grown to dislike out of obligation rather than swapping it early through a wildcard rule set at the start
    • Letting one or two favorite games absorb most of the year's plays while the rest of the list stalls near zero, which is invisible without a running count per game
    • Waiting for a full group before logging any progress at all, when several of the ten could be played solo or two-player on an ordinary weeknight

    How to track it

    A 10x10 list is only as good as the record behind it, because the entire point is visibility into a pattern you cannot hold in your head. A sticky note or a spreadsheet works for the first few weeks, but both tend to fall apart by month three: the sticky note gets lost, and the spreadsheet stops getting updated because logging a play takes more effort than the play itself.

    What actually keeps a 10x10 attempt alive is a system that makes logging a play take seconds, shows your running total per game at a glance, and reminds you which titles have fallen behind before it becomes a problem in November. That is the difference between a challenge you complete and a list you rediscover, half-finished, the following January.

    If you are tracking plays anyway as part of a broader collection log, folding your 10x10 list into that same tracker means you never have two separate systems drifting out of sync with each other.

    Keep track of what you own and play

    BoardGameStash is a free collection and play tracker for board gamers.

    Frequently asked questions

    What is the 10x10 board game challenge?

    It is a personal hobby goal where you choose 10 games in advance and play each one 10 times over the course of a year, totaling 100 plays. It has no official body or prize; it is tracked and enforced by the player themselves, and its purpose is to encourage depth with a smaller set of games rather than constant acquisition of new ones.

    Do expansions count as a separate game in 10x10?

    By the most common convention, no. An expansion played with its base game still counts as a play of the base game's title. Some players choose to treat a major standalone expansion as its own entry on the list, but that decision needs to be made when the list is set, not retroactively once you realize it would help your count.

    Can I swap a game out of my 10x10 list partway through the year?

    In the strict original version, no, the list is locked once the year starts. In practice, most players build in flexibility from the outset by reserving one or two wildcard slots that can be filled or changed later. If your list does not include a wildcard rule and you decide to swap anyway, you are simply running your own variant, which is fine as long as you are honest with yourself about it.

    What is the difference between 10x10 and 5x10?

    10x10 is 10 games played 10 times each for 100 total plays. 5x10 is 5 games played 10 times each for 50 total plays. 5x10 is the more common starting point for people with less regular table time, since it needs roughly 4 plays a month instead of 8, and it is much less likely to be abandoned partway through.

    How do I pick which 10 games to use?

    Choose games your group already enjoys and asks to play, favor shorter playtimes since they multiply into a large time commitment across 10 plays, include something playable solo or at two players so you are not dependent on a full table, and avoid anything you suspect depends on novelty or a one-time story, since those rarely hold up to a tenth play.

    Why do most people fail to finish their 10x10 list?

    The usual causes are picking games too heavy or too dependent on a specific group size to actually get to the table, not tracking plays so progress feels invisible, letting a couple of favorites soak up most of the plays while other titles stall near zero, and treating a disliked pick as obligatory instead of swapping it early. Checking your per-game counts at quarterly milestones catches most of these before they become fatal to the attempt.

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