Sold out Spiel Essen reaches record 220,000 attendance, new ticketing strategy boosts Sunday footfall
The world’s biggest board game fair, Spiel Essen, secured a record-breaking 220,000 attendance this year after expanding into a seventh massive hall – while the decision to scrap four-day passes secured a hefty boost to visitor numbers on its often quieter…
Want More Sales or Signups? I Tried 11 Best Conversion Optimization Tools
“Why aren’t people buying?” That’s the question that kept me up at night when I first started my online business. My WordPress website looked good, traffic was coming in, but I wasn’t getting a lot of conversions. It wasn’t until…
Got Five? I’ll Give You a Clue about Blue Orange’s 2026 Games
by W. Eric Martin At SPIEL Essen 25, the European branch of Blue Orange Games gave me an overview of recent and upcoming game releases, with Got Five! — due out in March 2026 — being a Yoann Levet deduction…
Matt: Chop Wood, Carry Water
Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. Kyle Kowalski has an amazing blog post exploring many aspects of this Zen Kōan, including some diversions into David Foster Wallace’s legendary commencement speech, This is Water. Sorry,…
Designer Diary: First-Class Letters, or Alphabetical Challenge, Finding Game’s Home, Minimal Rules
by Peter Hayward The more I design, the fewer rules I put into my games. Every time I playtest a game (mine or someone else’s), the first instinct is to solve a problem (any problem!) by adding a rule. If…
Matt: Creed Update
This week, the Automattic Creed received its first-ever update, which I’ll describe as a minor point upgrade. This is the sentence before and after. I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal…
Matt: Wayback Machine Joint
Automattic has been working with the Internet Archive to develop a plugin to combat link rot, and it’s a plugin I’d encourage you to install. As the plugin says: When a linked page disappears, the plugin helps preserve your user…
Gutenberg Times: Plugin Security, Divi to Gutenberg, Internet Archive, Gutenberg 21.9 and 22 — Weekend Edition 347
Hi there, On All Saints Day, November 1st, we honor dear people who passed. I wanted to take the occasion and point you to the WordPress Remembers page where accomplished contributors who passed have a permanent home. Their work lives…
