On October 4, 2010, I published my first post here on Boards and Bees – my overview of a then-upcoming game I was excited about, 7 Wonders. Now, 15 years and over 1200 posts later, here we are.

Seems about as good a time as any to announce my retirement. Effective immediately, Boards and Bees is done.

This blog was actually my third. The first two were OK, but I eventually found myself needing to hit the reset button and try again. This is the one that finally stuck, and it grew out of my desire to talk about board games when there weren’t many people around to talk about them with. I was still relatively new to the world of board games, having only been really interested in hobby games for about three years (my BGG birthday is August 30, 2007). I found myself fascinated by what was coming out, and found that a good way to really decide if something needed to be on my personal radar was to write about it.

I started out just writing about games I was interested in. That grew into writing reviews, and later into making lists, looking at Kickstarter, and other things. And I had a lot of fun doing it. I got overwhelmed a few times and needed a small reset to get myself going again.

And then came COVID. A lot of things changed in 2020. One big thing for me was that we had our second baby, but even before that happened, I found myself pulling back from the blog. Burnout was starting to affect me, and I started giving myself permission to take breaks. Those breaks have come more and more frequently. Eventually, I stopped taking on reviews. It was just something I wasn’t feeling passionate about anymore. I still love playing games, and playing new ones, but I’ve found myself less excited about trying to wade through the onslaught of new stuff every year, and have mostly been just enjoying playing the stuff I have.

Around mid-August of this year, I realized that I hadn’t posted in over a month. And I also realized that I didn’t really miss it. Which then led to the realization that it was probably time to hang up my spurs and ride off into the sunset on whatever metaphorical form of conveyance might apply here.

Back when I first started, video wasn’t nearly as big as it is now. YouTube itself had only been around for five years, but there were really only a few people doing videos. There was of course the godfather, Scott Nicholson and his groundbreaking series Board Games With Scott, and Tom Vasel had been transitioning out of doing written reviews into his more well-known video format for the Dice Tower (which wasn’t nearly the empire it is now). There were a few others, but now it is not only the most common format, it seems like it is the most preferred. And I understand it – videos are a great way to convey visual information about games, and see the games in action rather than just play them.

With the rise of video came the decline in readership. It used to stress me out – at my height, I was getting 100-200 views a day, and now it’s a good day if I can break 20. And I know there are other blogs out there with higher readership – I just don’t have the time or resources to make this into a destination site. It has always been a one-man operation on a free site I opened. I did eventually stop caring about it – I’m just putting my voice out there into cyberspace, and whoever stumbles upon it is welcome to peruse my content.

I have experimented with some video content in the past (in particular for Argent: The Consortium and Impulse). They were hard to do, even in the rough format that I was attempting, so I have a lot of respect for the people that can take the time to put together video content and make it look good. I’ve thought about trying some more in my retirement, possibly in a TikTok format, but who knows. I may just rest on my laurels for a while.

OK, let’s wrap this up. It’s been a genuine pleasure to write this blog for the last 15 years. I’m not removing it – it will stay here as long as WordPress leaves it up. I may even drop in every now and then to do a post. I’d still like to do my annual best new-to-me games, and I don’t think I can just quite on an 0-3 year with Kinder-Kenner-Spiel des Jahres predictions, so I may be back for that. But I wouldn’t expect much else.

If you’re interested in contacting me for whatever reason, I’ll leave the contact form open at the top of the page. Otherwise, my username is asutbone on BGG, and you’re welcome to reach out to me there. I welcome all comments, unless you’re a robot. You know who you are.

Hey, thanks so much for being there for me over the last 15 years. And I think I’ll close this out with my traditional closer from the very early years of the blog…

Insert clever tagline here.