by W. Eric Martin

On January 27, 2011, I published my first posts on BGG News, including a welcome message that laid out what I intended to publish in this space: “game announcements, industry news, previews of upcoming games, game design diaries from the designers themselves, and interviews with folks from around the game world”.

Other than the last category, which has been minimal, I feel I’ve done a decent job of publishing all of this material over the past fifteen years, not to mention all of the convention previews, which have blown up from a few hundred listings in 2011 to more than 1,300 for the SPIEL Essen 25 Preview. Craziness.

I’m assessing past promises because this will be my final post on BGG News, fifteen years to the day from that debut. I greatly appreciate BGG’s Scott Alden and Derk Solko giving me a space here after the site I had been running, BoardgameNews.com, imploded due to runaway server needs that threatened to consume every bank account it touched. I reached out to Scott and Derk for advice as I had met them at conventions in the late 2000s and they were running a much larger website far more sophisticated than BGN, and they asked whether I wanted to start posting news on BGG instead. I wouldn’t have to sell ads and figure out how to write my own HTML code and could instead focus on nothing but writing? Gee whiz, sign me up!

One last time…Over the years, BGG News has evolved somewhat, and I’ve had the good fortune to attend conventions in Germany, France, Japan, and the U.S. in a continuing effort to cover the (increasingly large) world of games. Thanks to conversations with folks in various aspects of the game industry, I’ve tried to present an overview of how the industry functions, while also talking about games on the individual level, often just in passing but sometimes doing them justice in deep dives that surprise me when I look back at them. That’s one of the magic elements of games, right? The ability to discover new aspects in them when you revisit them year after year.

In any case, over the past 6-12 months, I’ve been feeling what I guess is a mid-life crisis, feeling like I need to do something else. By chance, I’ve found myself talking to other men in their mid-50s, men who retired from one career and started another, men who upset their stable life to discover the joy of creating another one — and I’ve decided to do the same thing. As of today, I’m launching Board Game Beat, an independent game news site where I will post, yes, game announcements, industry news, and previews of upcoming games, but I also plan to run deep-dive articles on various game-related topics, explore aspects of the board game world I’ve yet to cover, and create videos that do more than review a single game…although I’ll surely do that as well.

Many thanks to Scott and my BGG colleagues — folks I interact with mostly online and see only a couple of times a year at conventions — for keeping me company all these years, and many thanks to you, dear reader, for your comments, your suggestions, and your time. I look forward to continuing to explore this fascinating artform and sharing what I learn with others because I want to help you and everyone else find games that they’ll love.

(P.S. I might not respond to comments quickly as I’m heading to Germany the week of Jan. 26, 2026 to cover the Spielwarenmesse toy and game fair for Board Game Beat.)