You may have noticed that shiny blue box on the front page on your way to this article and wondered what was going on. Well, BoardGaming.com is proud to introduce our new Featured Publisher program! Featured Publishers will receive a one-month spotlight on the site… but let’s focus on what this means for users!
Some of the things you can expect to see when we have a Featured Publisher:
- Publisher Explorables: publishers will be able to select five games they would like to increase awareness of via exploration. These Explorables will stay live for the entire month! We should expect that many of these may be under-explorable at first – after all, if a game is already so popular that it has 40 reviews, publishers probably don’t need to go to lengths to promote it. But users will have a month to get content up for the games in order to finish exploration. There will be lots of extra eyeballs on these reviews and tips! (and don’t worry… the Explorable Favorites will continue weekly!)
- BoardGaming.com Reviews: Featured Publishers will get extra attention from us in the official review department. They will be able to dictate to us which games they feel could use an official site review, and we will get those reviews up during the month. If a given Publisher is not your favorite, know that we won’t be exclusively reviewing their games for the entire month, just making sure we get to one of their games each week.
- Free Publisher Badges: any badges associated with the Featured Publisher will only cost 1 BG Gold (almost free!) for BoardGaming.com users for the entire month! Show your support for your favorites by displaying them proudly!
- Featured Article: we will work with the Publisher on a Featured Article to be published during the month. This could be a feature about a game they have coming up in the near future… or an article about their entire pipeline for the year… or a designer’s journal of his/her experiences while crafting a classic…
- More to come… we don’t want to spill all of our beans here! Stay tuned!
Featured Publisher for March 2015
And with that, we’re excited to announce our first Featured Publisher –
Smirk & Dagger Games!
Known for the “take that” nature of titles such as Cutthroat Caverns and Student Bodies, games by Smirk & Dagger are the antithesis of cooperative. For the next month you’ll get to delve into some of the best backstabbing games available. We hope you enjoy learning about their games, and are as excited as we are about this new feature!
Smirk & Dagger Reviews, Explorables and more >
(updated throughout the month)
See all Smirk & Dagger games >
So what’s the plan if these don’t get any more reviews? Will they remain explorable or do they expire March 31?
Great new feature! I’m looking forward to exploring some new games.
@Everybody – I want to thank you all for the enthusiastic response! This has been a ton of work on Jim and I the last two months, and you all make it worth it!
I also love all of the suggestions in here, but there are a few I want to talk about real quick since they’re not likely to happen any time soon, but I don’t want you to think we’re ignoring the ideas:
As for the designers idea, I love this! But… Featured Publishers are not the work of BoardGaming.com alone – there’s a lot that goes into this from the publisher’s side as well. It’s easier to work with (most) publishers because they have a marketing person whose job it is to do stuff like this. A designer may not have time for marketing. All that said… this month’s Featured Publisher basically serves as a Featured Designer as well. Curt Covert designed (or co-designed) 5 of the 7 Smirk & Dagger games himself – so you’re looking at his library! And by the way, he’s been cranking out the tips for these games (and who better?), so you should all try to give him some thumbs and follows!
As for @Lord_Quinn’s suggestions, I want to enlighten everybody on how all of this will come together. Featured Publishers will be publisher-driven, not driven by us. What I mean by that is they will have to come to us. This takes a LOT of time on our part to be ready by the first of the month – I would estimate a good 40 hours of our team’s time, and that’s not including time for Unboxing Videos. And there’s a significant time investment from the publisher – they have to work with us on which games they want to feature, work with us on the Featured Article, send us all of the games they want reviewed or filmed.
The publishers who are going to be willing to do this are the ones with a recent product to promote and some time budgeted for it. All of that said, I will certainly show our Featured Publisher program to all of @Lord_Quinn’s suggestions and see if we have any takers.
Thanks again everybody!
I would like to see you feature the following publishers:
1: Steve Jackson Games
2: Days of Wonder
3: Mayfair Games
4: Fireside Games
5: Avalon Hill
Among others.
This is a short list of Publishers who’s games I own and I think other players would enjoy their games. I am not recommending all the games by these publishers because I don’t know them all, but what I have seen and played I like.
@inmarg Haha! Asmodee:The One Logo To Rule Them All
Great idea, maybe next we could see a featured designer too!
Brilliant idea for putting lesser known publishers in the spotlight before everyone is part of Asmodee 🙂
This is a great idea! looking forward to this.
Wow- what a great new feature! I love all this new stuff! 🙂
Looks awesome, I’m excited to see everything come together with the new feature!
Exciting! I’m looking forward to exploring some lesser know games and publishers.
Woah, I love this idea! The more ways to explore new board games the better! Do you think there will ever be something similar to this but for Game Designers? I would love to compare and contrast new game designers style between their individual games.