I Will Write One Thousand Blogs and I Will Write One Thousand More
One thousand blog posts. Board Game Gumbo celebrated the 1000th post this week by scarfing down a pepper jack boudin ball and reading old reviews from Rosemary, Sagan, Jay Bell, and many more. I thought this 1000th post would be a good opportunity to review the history of the blog.
Way, way back in January of 2016, I wanted a creative outlet to write about games. For about ten years, we had been hosting a New Year’s Eve family night filled with food and fireworks as counter programming to the wild parties we had been to as a younger couple. We had kids now, who wanted to cut loose and pop some fireworks. But my family had re-discovered hobby board games about ten years earlier, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to introduce gaming to other families.
So, we started cooking a big gumbo, and invited a bunch of families to pop and play. I remember those early NYE game parties well — there was lots of One Night Ultimate Werewolf and RoboRally and Cosmic Encounter and No Thanks! Mostly we played games that had quick rules teaches and could play a lot of people, but we also snuck in some euros here and there like Ticket to Ride.
One of those early games was New York 1901, and I fell hard for that game. It was everything I loved about the hobby — extremely competitive, gorgeous on the table, and a cool theme. So, I wrote about it. Around the same time, Tom Vasel of the Dice Tower put out a call for new contributors to the Dice Tower Podcast. So, I did a Cajun flavored entry and he put it on the show.
And then I went to Dice Tower Con that summer. One night, while my son Jack was playing a long dudes-on-a-map game, I had already finished our game and was chatting about games with two friends we had met at the con. That discussion lasted until midnight, and I kept thinking — I like talking bout games as much as I like playing them! So, Gumbo Live! was born!
So what have we done here on Board Game Gumbo? How about some stats up until this point.
- We’ve published almost 400 reviews of board games (and a few board game adjacent things like dice towers and wall art)
- We’ve published 139 different convention and travel reports — we’ve written about travel to conventions like BGG CON to GEN CON to PAX SOUTH to DICE TOWER CON and CHUCK CON and of course, our very own Southern Board Game Fest, but we have also written about trips to various game stores around the country. I am especially proud of our early coverage of things like UnPub 7 and HeavyCon
- We’ve run dozens of news pieces, mostly about things we like to read about like Restoration Games‘ announcements of new Unmatched characters or Essen Spiel previews
- We’ve published 87 different Kickstarter previews — these aren’t reviews, mostly because we do not always get the finished product or finished rules, so it’s tough to judge how the final product will be — that run the gamut of types of games and size of companies
- We’ve featured around 20 different writers on the blog site, from game designers like Jay Bell and Jason Dinger to content creators like Nick Shipley and Jeremy Dobler to new voices in game like Rosemary and Allison
- We’ve covered awards from every corner of the globe, including our annual pre-and-post Spiel des Jahres coverage and our annual look at the winners of the Summit SDHistiCon awards
- Finally, we have awarded our annual Fleur de Ludo awards for our top games of the year every year since 2016!
Whew, that’s a lot of writing and a lot of talking about board games. But, it’s all been worth it. Because of the blog, we’ve gotten to meet so many cool gamers, played so many innovative games (and a few clunkers, too), and shared so many convention experiences with so many awesome people.
Thanks for reading Board Game Gumbo when we post. Thanks for chatting in the Chat Krewe when we (sporadically now) go live on Facebook and YouTube. Thanks for hanging out with us on Tuesdays when we play games on Twitch. And thanks for supporting Southern Board Game Fest and our efforts to raise money for New Hope Foundation.
Until next time…or our next blog post…Laissez les bon temps rouler!
— BJ from Board Game Gumbo