A Long & Winding Road

On August 13, 2005 I wrote my premiere article as one of the founders of a group gaming blog called “Gone Gaming”. Group blogs were all the rage at the time, because they gave the opportunity for five or seven people to each write a weekly article and so publish a blog that had notable new content every day of the week.

The downside of a group blog, as we came to learn, was that it was hard to keep everyone interested, particularly when they were publishing one article a week — a rate that I’ve come to decide is excessive if you don’t want to burn out. By the end of 2007, all of the other founders were gone and even some of their replacements had moved on as well. We were no longer managing an article a day, and thus we decided to join up with news site BoardGameNews to merge with the folks already offering analysis & editorial there.

I continued on writing these articles at BGN for three more years, but then near the end of 2010 the site dumped all of us analytical and editorial writers so that it could become the news source for BGG. After that I tried writing for a time at BoardGameInfo, but that site ended up being too small to really support regular articles (at least currently). Which finally brought me to Mechanics & Meeples.

Mechanics & Meeples is my own site for boardgaming analysis and discussion. At the time of this writing (which is actually June, 2012, though I’m backdating this to be the first article in this blog), my board game writing is really scattered. The oldest stuff is still available in the Gone Gaming blog, but it’s of course intermixed with the rest of the group. The articles I wrote for BoardGameNews are largely offline, because the old site was erased when it merged with BGG. Meanwhile, some of my newest writing appears exclusively at BGi. (Whew!) I’m going to be pulling all of that material together here, in this one blog in the months to come, where I hope you’ll find it a useful resource.

What You’ll Find Here

When I started writing these articles, way back in Gone Gaming days, I identified three general categories that I’d be writing about:

• Complaints, criticisms, and other rants  — which I presented with humor when possible. I called these “Don’t Get Me Started!”
• Mini-reviews of games, where I tended to talk about lots of different products with a few sentences or a paragraph on each. Sometimes this extended into previews as well. I cleverly called these “Views & Reviews”.
• Analyses of game design, game development, and even game production. This was my “Game Design with Appelcline” category.

Over the next year, I added on two more categories of discussion:

• Looks at specific designers, often highlighting what type of games they made, and sometimes presenting interviews. This was my “Designer Spotlight”.
• Strategy articles for specific games. This has probably been the most uncommon sort of article for me, but I still write them from time to time. I innanely called these articles “Whose Strategy? Shannon’s Strategy” mainly because I had a font that showed two talk balloons.

Years later, these five categories still do a pretty good job of defining what makes up “Mechanics & Meeples” — though the game design category has become predominent.

Generally, I like to analyze games. I like to see how they’re put together. I’m also very intrigued by seeing how new mechanics appear in the industry and how they evolve over time. So that’s a lot of what I’ve talked about over the years.

Since the death of BGN in 2010, my writing has been a lot more sporadic, and it has almost all been on two topics: cooperative play games and deckbuilding games. In each case, I’ve been tracing how the subgenre has expanded over time.

Toward the Future

Now that I’ve got this new Mechanics & Meeples site, I hope to be writing on a more regular basis — with major articles somewhere between biweekly and monthly — and I hope to be writing on a broader listing of subjects (though I’ve got a few more deckbuilding articles lined up). I expect that I’ll write shorter blips too, without feeling the need to expand them into “major” pieces, something that I didn’t feel like I could do when I was contributing group content to Gone Gaming, BoardGameNews, or BGi.

I hope you’ll join me as I do.

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