More...
This is Picklemoose's Blog. A small section of Pixelated Cardboard dedicated to topics outside of digital board game ports. Posts here will be less formal & cover a range of topics.
Up until now, everything we have ever posted on this site were labeled as one of three categories: News, Reviews, or Features. You may or may not have ever noticed the distinction, but they exist. Starting with this post, we are adding a fourth category: Picklemoose’s Blog. Yup.
Picklemoose’s Blog will be a catch-all for posts not directly related to digital board games. Don’t worry, we’re not swimming too far out of our lane here, the first few posts will cover video games, physical board games, and Board Game Geek. So apologies if anybody was hoping we’d begin writing reviews of local gas station hot dogs. Picklemoose is a vegetarian, so she won't be weighing in on hot dogs.
We’ll dive into the details of why below, but the short version is that we want to be able to provide quality content on a more frequent basis for our readers. It’s as simple as that. We will likely never be a news-breaking site, there are plenty of others out there who do that very well, so our options were limited as to how we could get more routine and frequent content published. This is what we’ve landed on. It won’t be perfect, it might be terrible, but we will give it a shot and see how it goes. Please provide feedback in the form of comments or social media messages, we will always try to get better for our readers. Or don't. Picklemoose doesn't care either way.
What is a Picklemoose?
Well, nothing as far as we know anyway. She was a silly placeholder name that we let stick around too long and never found a meaningful replacement for, so it’s staying. Picklemoose is also a shining beacon of hope in this otherwise oh so serious world.
Why?
We want to get more sweet sweet content out & we want you, the reader, to check back in with us more frequently. Our options on that front are limited with the existing scope of our niche site (more on that later), so we needed something different. We think more content is important because we are fans of websites and understand what a lull in content can do to our interest, so the more we thought about having our site sit idle for two weeks at a time, the less we liked that reality.
What Do You Mean Options Are Limited? You Still Haven’t Reviewed Any of the Knizia Ports!
Accepting that we won’t be in the business of full time news-breaking, we see three clear types of content we could produce on the site as-is:
- Review new releases. This moves the needle in terms of social media engagement and clicks, which are the economy of a site like ours. The problem, of course, is that games under our umbrella don’t release all that often. By our count, about 15 have been released in 2018 and two of those are digital originals, not ports. We will obviously continue to review new ports going forward; it’s the primary focus of this site and always will be, but it doesn’t make for a steady stream of content.
- Review old releases. This absolutely does not move the needle. We’ve done a fair share of these in 2018, but those reviews are regularly among our lowest clicked. We will continue to do this on the fringes as we have been, but the time investment of playing a game for hours, writing the review, and setting up the posts is huge compared to the amount of people who actually appear interested in these reviews.
- Listicles. Honestly, we started down this path about a month ago and have a few unpublished features along these lines, but we reassessed recently and decided not to go forward with them right now. Just about every website we visit, in any genre, does lists. They’re great; they are easily digestible, you can skip entire sections you don’t care about, and ranking things is inherently fun. However, after spending some time with some more targeted lists, we took a step back and realized we weren’t saying anything new, rather we were just rehashing what already existed throughout our site in reviews and the existing lists. Do we really need to tell you AGAIN how great Through the Ages is? We will keep our top 10 iOS/Android lists updated and do our Best of 2018 list, so we’re not quitting the list game, we just decided not to spend time trying to come up with a list for everybody just for the sake of keeping the content machine churning.
Okay, So What Is This Picklemoose’s Blog Thing, Exactly?
It’s going to be a catch-all for a variety of topics we feel like writing about and feel have a reasonable overlap in our audience. Everything we post here will be enjoyable for all of our existing readers, and we will occasionally hit on something outside of digital board games that you can appreciate. The three articles we are working on now involve Nintendo Switch, a physical board game review, and dissecting a BGG Math Trade. We already Tweet about these things, we just wanted a little more space to air our thoughts, hopefully you don’t mind. If you do, just remember that Picklemoose doesn't care.
Can I Avoid This Stuff?
Absolutely, all Picklemoose’s Blog posts will be tagged as such so they can be safely ignored by anybody just here for digital board games. Should you choose to avoid her, Picklemoose will find you and trample on your soul.
How Will This Change The Current Site?
It won’t. Really! We are going to use Picklemoose’s Blog to fill in gaps of our normal content, that’s all. We will still get reviews of new digital ports games out quickly, within a week usually, and handle everything else as we have been for the past 18 months, including slowly adding reviews of older titles. Nothing we’ve been doing will go away, we just want to shorten the downtime the site goes between content, so Picklemoose’s Blog was created. Now she is self aware and understands love.
This Doesn’t Sound Like A Big Deal At All, Why Does This Long Explanation Post Exist?
We like transparency. If you follow us on Twitter you should know that about us. We didn’t want to publish an article reviewing a physical game or discussing Switch games without any kind of heads-up to our readers. We realize this is complete overkill, but the great thing about the internet is that if you don’t care, you could have clicked the back button 700 words ago!
That’s all we’ve got. We hope you like what we have in store. The first Picklemoose’s Blog post will be arriving soon, please leave comments if you have feelings on this one way or another!
