Well. What a long, strange trip it’s been.
With Gen Con 2024 on the horizon – and we will have a presence there per usual – we thought it was probably long overdue for a status update. So much so that some may be surprised there’s an update coming at all.
Yet here we are.
The most important piece of news to share is that while we’ve been gone a lot longer than we intended, we’re going to be slowly easing our way back into things in a manner that hopefully allows us to interact with people within the board game space again and captures the fun of the early days while avoiding the burnout and stress of it all that came later.
Starting with Gen Con this year, we’ll be taking to operating a bit once more on our social media, namely Instagram, Facebook, and coming soon, on Bluesky as @CardboardRepublic. We’ve also been toying with whether to dive into Threads in the near future as well, but that’s still TBD. One can only manage so many platforms. By contrast, please note that we are no longer active on Twitter.
The website itself will be a longer, more arduous process to reconstitute. We’re not quite sure what the new form will take in the current media ecosystem, or when it’ll happen, but once we have something to share about it, we will!
We wanted to share this now, mostly as a means of being transparent both to our audience and to publishers who may have questions heading into a major convention. We’ve never hidden our status from anyone, and publishers large and small have been incredibly understanding over the last couple years about it all – which frankly has been one of the reasons we haven’t just up and packed it in entirely. But should there be anyone who was curious who wasn’t aware, well…now you know.
From an operational standpoint, that’s really all the news-worthy stuff for the moment. But if you’re curious on why now and not, like, last year, then by all means read on.
For those who may have been checking periodically since our last posted update (other than the Google web crawlers of course – hello bots!), you may recall that after a decade of operation, coupled with numerous personal factors, The CR crew opted to take a well-deserved 4 month break. Which actually extended into a necessary 10 month break. Which in turn became well over a year. For a content site, that’s an eternity. We might as well be relics from another era.
And in all honesty, in some ways that’s how it started to feel when we were doing periodic site planning and budgeting throughout 2023. Although it was never our intent to simply drop off the map entirely, getting the engines moving again had us running into one hurdle after another, leaving the entire endeavor feeling a lot like Schrödinger’s Website: not quite alive, but not entirely dead either.
The reasons for this are numerous, but the delayed restart ultimately boils down to three factors: time, social factors, and money.
The last few years around CR HQ have seen extensive upheaval, which was part of what compounded the initial burnout in the first place. Since the start I’ve always felt we had an excellent core team, and although we’ve never been a particularly large group (despite ambitions to the contrary), even modest disruptions over the years had a tendency to cause ripple effects that we were able to weather only with additional effort on our parts. Yet our recent past has seen anything but modest changes.
Just prior to the pandemic Erin and I had our first child, and the thrills of parenthood rightfully commanded significant time and attention, which ate up much of our free time. As had increased real-world job responsibilities the following year. At roughly the same time, David, our chief RPG writer, announced he was entering a doctoral program and moving 6,000 miles away. This all came on the heels of attrition by other members in the year or so prior, making the status quo barely tenable.
Then, of course, came the maelstrom that was the pandemic itself.
Although thankfully everyone within our close personal orbits largely got through it unscathed in terms of health and well-being, further life changes were inevitable as a result. The most pertinent for the vantage of the site was a near complete disintegration of our long-established gaming circles, a cornerstone of our review capabilities. While there’s no ill-will for Life Happening with those folks, to this day we have not yet reconstituted the critical mass of weekly gamers we once had. A combination of not living in a large urban area and a mild recalcitrance among the populace against venturing out socially due to its inherent inconvenience has made the rebuild that much more challenging. Anecdotally, it’s an issue we hear is quite common among gamers, but it was definitely unforeseen when we were factoring out our timetables and remains arguably the chief obstacle towards full restoration.
Finally, there was the glaring matter of what to do with the website proper. We’re acutely aware that running a primarily written-form gaming site in the YouTube and TikTok era is already something close to a fool’s errand – though there’s certainly some excellent sites and writers out there getting by and are well worth your readership! This is doubly true, however, when operating a site that’s long overdue for a refit. We actually started preliminary development work on what the new CR 2.0 platform would look like, and were pretty excited about it. Until we saw the price tag.
Needless to say, it was an amount of disposable income we simply couldn’t justify dumping into a hobby site that we operated in our free time, particularly one that has never had a solid revenue stream. And so we had to table that for the time being. We’re still very positive on what we came up with, but we haven’t been able to quite figure out how to get that price down to a more manageable number to make it a reality.
Yet. But we’re still working on it.
In fact, that’s probably the best way to sum up where we are in its entirety at the moment: we’re still working on it. And if you’re curious to follow along our journey with us, please do watch our various spaces.
In the meantime, per usual, we’re still reachable via email or on social media for questions and inquiries.
Game On!
-Ryan & Erin
