I’ve been interested in board game and game design for years, being an active consumer of design podcasts, reading voraciously on the topic, and spending much of my free time thinking about ideas. Unfortunately, being a dad of four who works full time, does all the household cooking, does my best to do my fair share of the housework, and tries hard not to neglect his equally busy and equally exhausted wife, I’m left with very free time to actually work on board game projects. My typical day starts at 6.30 with the kids breakfast, and ends at 9pm after the younger kids have had their stories and evening chores are finally out of the way; finally, my wife and I are done and we have a little time to spend together. She goes to bed before me - usually around 10-11 - which is when in theory I could start working, but typically I’m shattered at this point.

I’ve always been good at procrastinating though.

As my board game obsession grew, ideas started coming to me, and I started jotting them down in notebooks on my phone. Never actually doing anything with them, though I always sort of told myself that one day when the kids were older and I had more free time I’d read through them and finally do something productive. As my notes app started filling with hundreds of roughly sketched out ideas it became apparent to me that it was a pointless endeavour. I needed to do something more productive.

So I made this blog. The idea was that instead of my notes sitting on my phone, I’d put them publicly online. That was better, right? Even if I didnt do anything with the ideas, at least they were out there. Perhaps someone might find use in them. It was certainly more work - instead of scribbling a note on my phone, I had to commit markdown files to a repo. It was more work, so had to be more worthwhile, right?

Nah, of course not. I wasn’t doing anything more productive. I still wasn’t making games. I wasnV’t developing ideas past the initial idea that floated into my head. Although initially I thought that there might genuinely be some value in a stream of consciousness-style flow of ideas, I quickly came to the realisation that it just wasn’t something people would even want to read. It was a lazy, low-effort, pointless endeavour: and worse, my decision to switch to a basic blog without a CMS meant that the friction of posting soon overtook any remaining shred of motivation to keep posting publicly. I drifted back into my notes app, back to jotting things down privately, but now with a gnawing sense of guilt that I was wasting this blog.

But it’s ok. I’ve made a decision, I’m officially abandoning this stage of the blog. I’m not a writer, it’s not something I have an interest in and I don’t enjoy doing it. It was a bad idea and I need to let it go. It’s easier when I look back and see that I only actually posted a handful of times, the latest being nearly a year ago lol. For the amount of anguish it’s caused me I thought I’d actually posted a lot more than I have done. I was tempted to delete it all out of embarrassment, but I’ve decided just to leave it as is, post this as a closing cheaper, and move on.

Fortunately, this year I started a new project. On that is game design related, genuinely excites me, and I’ve found a way to incorporate into my schedule. It feels good. This post has run long, so I’ll be following this up with an explainer of what’s coming next. I don’t actually expect anyone to be reading this, but if you happen to be doing so then I hope you’ll stick around and check out what’s coming next.