Happy 2nd Birthday Creaking Shelves!

Holy birthday cake, Creaking Shelves is two years old! That’s absolutely crazy! Guess that makes me one of the more mature, established institutions. God help us all!

This time last year I published an article looking at what I was thinking of doing over the next year. Seems like it may be time to take a look at how well those plans survived contact with the enemy!

It has been quite a year! For me personally, and for the blog. Running Creaking Shelves is 99% of the time a one man operation, with the exception of the occasional guest article from one of my friends. That means output, in terms of content, is very much affected by my personal circumstances. There have been quite a few changes there over the last year!

Almost a year ago to the day I moved down to London to live with my long term partner. Happily that is still the case! Moving to a new city brought with it the challenges of finding a new group to play games with and a new lifestyle to adapt to. Fortunately London is a great place to play board games and while I don’t have a close nit group of friends over every week, I could literally play board games every night of the week if I wanted to. In the mean time I wrote and defended a 50,000 word PhD thesis, found a real world job, and adjusted, again, to a working schedule with a long commute across London. That I’ve managed to keep the blog going through all that is certainly a cause for celebration! More champagne!

Some things fell by the wayside. I cut back from 3 articles a week to 2, and my regular Kickstarter round up had to be culled for the sake of my sanity: I just couldn’t keep up with the numerous hours of research necessary to find the best Kickstarters. It’s been quite liberating just dropping by as a backer from time to time! The commute is something of a blessing in disguise: I get a solid hour of writing time each morning and each evening so ‘all’ that’s left to do is play games and schedule those articles! I’ve sustained that for the last 6 months almost without deviation so that’s the plan for the future too.

Exciting steps this year included attending Essen for the first time, being on a podcast (thanks again Paul!) and getting to know a good proportion of the U.K. board game industry, both media wise and on the design/publishing side. The UK Games Expo was such a treat in no small part thanks to knowing so many people already from the previous year! I’ve also managed to do some guest reviews for other sites from time to time, and will continue to do so.

But how did I do with my plans from last year? Well…!

Kickstart Your Month

Well, as I already mentioned, Kickstarter coverage has melted away faster than a snowman in the desert. That includes Kickstarter reviews too. In fact, I’m only really covering “Indy” titles from people I have a good relationship with personally already. This was in some ways intentional (I wanted to cover more games people seem to want to read about) but also simply because I am getting sent so many titles that I don’t have time to look at games from publishers I don’t know!

Cult of the new

This is the sharp end of the reviewer competition but I’ve found over the last year that the goal posts just keep shifting. I’m extremely lucky to have a good relationship with Esdevium here in the UK who give me access to many of the latest releases, but I’m just not in a position to churn out reviews as fast as the biggest content creators who seem to be getting their games earlier and earlier ahead of general release. Not bad, but not really good enough.

Look backs

What a great idea this was! I did one. It was quite fun, but then 1) I ran into PhD chaos and never got back to them, and 2) realised I very rarely get to replay games nowadays! It’s actually something of a problem I’ve been thinking about recently. The review cycle is a little too relentless, and I don’t get much chance to play older games that I’ve already reviewed. I would love to find an excuse to replay older titles that I’ve covered before, if anyone has ideas for a cool format for an article that would let me do that, send me your ideas!

Interviews

I tried. I really thought about these. I almost succeeded once but I got stood up. However. Good news is around the corner. At the UK games expo I recorded an interview with David Mortimer, a U.K. based games designer, that I am in the process of editing. Hopefully that will encourage me to do some more interviews, maybe even a regular article!

Game Design

Success! I have written a few articles on the subject of game design, which have been pretty well received from what I’ve seen. They have tended to be quite time consuming to write so I’ve not been able to post as regularly as I might like but I’ve enjoyed doing them and plan to continue doing them. The one point I’m less happy about is they’ve generally been more high level thought experiments, primarily because I’m still not finding time to get deep into the nitty gritty of game design. I really want to change that this year.

Videos

This comment last year was little more than a tease that hasn’t come to full fruition… Yet!

That’s right! Creaking Shelves will be entering the brave new world of moving pictures soon. A friend and I are half way through filming a 6 episode season that, if successful, will be the launch pad for even more in the future. I’m hoping to be ready to release the first episodes in a couple of months (we are still ironing out the kinks and polishing off the details) so stay tuned! (You do still have to tune into YouTube right…?)

 

More plans?

 

LCG coverage

As you may have gathered from my recent reviews, I’m a big fan of the new Arkham Horror LCG. I plan to publish regular articles looking at the releases for this game, and I’m only being held up at the moment by certain scenarios not being available! As soon as they come back into print, I will be catching up at full speed.

A new series of articles that are about to begin will be providing in depth coverage of the latest Netrunner releases! Two good friends have fallen deep into Netrunner over the last couple of years and will be providing their thoughts on each datapack that comes from FFG’s growth chambers. Even better, I’ll only have to edit these, giving me more time to work on the other projects!

Fun stuff

Some lighter fair to mix up the usual stream of reviews. Got a few ideas for articles looking behind the curtain at Creaking Shelves, maybe some top 10 style articles (I know everyone does them but, I have to admit, I really enjoy looking through them!) As an intentionally broad category, this gives me plenty of room to play around. Any ideas for things you’d like to see?

Podcasts

While I do think I have a pretty cool idea for a podcast format, I think the Creaking Shelves podcast will have to wait a little while! It’s not like I don’t have plenty of work to be getting on with! Hopefully, I will be appearing on the Gaming Rules podcast again in the near future and, I have to admit, I really enjoyed my first taste of podcasting. So, if any of you reading this has a podcast and is looking for a guest to chat to, let me know!

More importantly, I’d love to hear what you want to see! How can I make my reviews and other articles better? All feedback is appreciated!

Competition!

What is a birthday without presents? But these ones are for you! To celebrate 2 years of Creaking Shelves, I thought it was high time I did a little giveaway! Or actually, a fairly big giveaway! Each of 6 winners will win one of the games in the pile above, and all you have to do to gain some entries is work your way through as many of the tasks below as you can be bothered to do!

 

Creaking Shelves Birthday Giveaway

 

For shipping reasons, the competition is open only to entries from inside the EU.

Note that these are all old review copies, so they have been opened and played but are still in very good condition. A free game is a free game right! As the terms and conditions explain, 6 people will each win one game, with the first drawn getting first pick of the prizes. If you’re lucky enough to be a winner, I’ll get in contact to ask for your choice of game, and your address. Good luck everyone!

And with that, let’s toast to another year of slightly silly board game reviews! Thanks so much for continuing to read them!