Hi all,

I've been mulling on an idea of creating an E-Magazine that focuses 'solely' on board games (euro games especially). It will be a free downloadable .pdf, it will be my small contribution to this community. Since I was introduced to board games, it has really brought lots of joy and fun to my family...

Since I'm fairly new to board games and BGG, I would appreciate your comments and contribution to make it happen. The E-Mag will be filled with exciting stuff (hopefully) and lots of interesting articles.

The E-Mag will have some of the following topics:
* The usual - Gaming News & Commentary
* Games Reviews
* Games 'Face Off' (something like PR vs Agricola... )
* Letters of the month
* Fan Pics (Sharing of pictures from boardgamers around the globe)
* Q & A (all questions related to board games will be answered, will need to get approval from the users here to use some of their answers or any experts here are willing to share)
* Classified
* ...Anything that you can think of, feel free to recommend.

Q&A

So what's next? Well since I'm a designer by profession, I'll do up all the design related stuff and I will need some volunteers who are willing to contribute some articles or do some research stuff (some of the geeklist here are pretty interesting)

How frequent it will be published? I guess bi-monthly or quarterly will be a good start.

How can you get a copy? It will be made available on a website (I have yet to get one). It will be free to download and free to share. The mag will be released under creative commons license, meaning you can take the articles and use it as you wish and we will not 'sue' you.

So what will I get? I guess I won't be getting anything out of this, it's purely my way of saying thank you to the community and to my gaming buddies especially this guy http://www.boardgamegeek.com/user/jack208. But if there are advertisers that are interested in placing an advert in the magazine, I'm more than happy to get some extra cash. Of course the money I get will be redistributed back to the contributors.

Am I really so 'selfless'? What is my motive? Well, to be honest my act is not entirely 'selfless'... It is partly a selfish act, I want to be remembered, I want to be honored, I want people to worship me....

If you guys are interested in this project kindly drop me an email. Tentatively by the end of the month, I'll come up with a mock up of how the e-mag will look like. Hopefully the community here will be interested in it.

cheers, Sam

I think this is a great idea! Looking forward to it.

Looking forward to reading it!

Sounds great to me! Can't wait to see the mock-up.

As I said the mock-up will be ready by month end... At the meantime I would appreciate contributors to fill up the mag.

Btw, anyone care to enlighten me whether I can use some articles in BGG for the magazine? Who do I need to get approval from? There are lots of interesting article here in BGG that I wish to use. The main purpose of this E-Mag is to serve this community as well as reaching out to the non-board gamers. I guess having interesting articles and presenting it in a nicer way (with picture & illustration), we are able to get more people interested in board games.

Getting people interested in this hobby IMHO is a win-win situation for all:

* For board gamers: Well you will have more choice in selecting your gaming group and not over reliant on the few guys who are always busy. You will have more people to play with.

* For publishers: More people = more games sold

* For board games cafe operators: More business

* For the newbies: They will have another option to spend their time, 'intellectually'

* For mom & dad: You can be rest assured that board gaming does not lead to drugs and alcohol, and don't worry about your daughter getting pregnant while playing board games...

The creators of the content.

do it.
DO it.
do IT.
DO IT!

Excellent idea ! Maybe send it as HTML inside the email, so people dont have to open the attachment.

It is a great idea, BUT I don't want to be the party pooper. It is not simple. there was this VERY nice online free gaming journal called
The Games Journal (here is a link to it) http://www.thegamesjournal.com/ and it stopped a while ago since there was not enough article submitted from fellow gamers and Greg couldn't do it by himself. Check the journal and think what you should do to avoid that faith before starting

My gaming group did this for about 4 years - producing 21 issues of INDEPTH (http://www.libogroup.com/indepth.htm). It's a LOT of work; by the time it was done, I was spending 20 man-hours doing designing; not including the writing and editing.

Last year, we decided to cease production and move to a blog; but when I decided to switch the website software, I took the blog down first. Eventually, it will return.

The most common 'complaint' I heard was "why do I need to d/l and read this, when I already have BGG?" As much as I knew (and tried to communicate) that there's a world of difference between writing for the web, and writing for print, it didn't seem to catch on -- readership was high, I think; feedback was very, very low.

I wish you luck - you have some interesting ideas (the "face-off" piece, for example).

Chris

In a lot of ways, the GJ was a lot more like a blog than a magazine; certainly less than a PDF magazine. For me, the solicitation of articles was not the time consuming part -- it was the writing, editing AND design. My goal was to make it that you could d/l and print out the magazine, and it would look like a magazine....That wasn't something GJ had to do - but he did have GREAT articles....

Hi Chris,

I understand very well some of the concerns you highlighted. The common 'complaint' you mentioned is quite valid. I'm not trying to compete with any of the websites out there especially BGG. What I want is something to complement these sites and to provide an alternative 'venue' for the users to read some articles which is being presented in a 'nicer' way.

I understand that some new users here are overwhelmed by the massive information in BGG, I was one of those when I came here... So the E-Mag will serve it's purpose by presenting bits of interesting information and if they want to know more or understand more... BGG is still the place to be. I would encourage the people who downloaded the E-Mag to circulate it around to non-gamers as well so they can at least learn something interesting about board gaming... I'll try to balance it to serve both the geeks and non geeks...

The hardest part is the designing, fortunately I'm a designer in profession so this will not be a problem to me. My only concern is whether I can get enough articles to publish, that's why I'm 'testing the water' here to see if anyone is interested in this 'project'.

Btw, I've just registered a domain and subscribe a hosting. You guys can check it out here ([url]Will repost this link once the site is up[/url]. The site is still empty but I'll do a soft launch on 30th Sept.

Will keep you guys posted. Feel free to drop me a line if you have any suggestions or you can post it here...

cheers,
Sam