State of BSC

Here's what's been going on this year at Brett Spiel Cafe. I originally built this site for three basic reasons: 1. To provide a place for friends to gather and discuss boardgaming. 2. Provide a central location for game news that I uncovered during my routine surfing and scouring the web. 3. Provide an outlet for my creative writing "itch", and exercise my web skills.

In the last several years, there has been a huge increase in the amount of material available on the web about boardgaming. A google search today nets 214,000 hits just on the word "boardgaming", and 89,000 on Klaus Teuber (of Settlers of Catan fame). NOTE: I used the "10-year anniversary" google search on 10/08/08, and 10 years ago, there were only 1,080 hits on "boardgaming" and 3,590 for Klaus! Boardgamegeek.com has improved tremendously as a resource for gamers, and has had some major technological improvements that make it not just the best boardgame site on the 'net, but one of the best catalog/archive/information/community sites on the internet.

Boardgamenews.com is another fantastic site that has had a major facelift, and now supported by advertising and a large list of news contributors has done a fantastic job on highlight what's new and upcoming in the hobby.

During the last few years before these sites really took off, I would use them and others as a place to find news and nuggets of gaming info, linking to them from Brettspielcafe. Eventually their content grew to a point where I could not keep up with them, and it seemed they were a better source of regular direct news for myself and our readers here.

I made a decision to close Brettspeilcafe.net to outsiders for a while in 2006, and it seemed that this eliminated several regular readers, and comments on my posts began to disasppear even after I reopened the site as an open one a month later.

Time has limited my "creative writing" this year significantly, and has even cut my actual boardgaming down one session perhaps once a month now.

What's the future hold for Brettspeilcafe.net?

I hope to keep the site open as an archive for our past events, and some opinion pieces and post-mortems I am proud of and would like to stay up. I suspect that in the next year or so there will be a resurgence of "Euro" or "German" style gaming in my home and in my group of friends. This might give me the "boost" that I need to start writing again.

In the meantime, please check us out at least once a month. Feel free to comment on any posts you enjoy. Create a profile on boardgamegeek.com and join me there for a game of Tigris and Euphrates!