Never open with a sub-optimal move

"Technically speaking, this is post number 1,720..."

Well, it looks like The Tyranny of Small Decisions is on Substack now. That was … unexpected?

To cut a long story short: at some point in the last week, the mysterious and ever-faceless moderators at Board Game Geek decided to delete a heap of content from my account. This included a couple of hundred images from various blog posts that I’ve made over the course of the last few years. No explanation given. No asking in advance. No reaching out or working with me over what I could or couldn’t change to make the content more to their tastes. I just woke up one morning… and it’s all gone. My blog is now a bit… “gappy”?

There’s been no official notification given to me yet (and yes, I’ve asked!), but I’m assuming that somebody took it upon themselves to launch a crusade against AI art … since pretty much everything deleted involved AI-generated graphics in some shape or form. Or was something which looked enough like AI graphics to be caught in the crossfire.

(I hope nobody lets that same moderator see this week’s BGG newsletter. The Video of the Week — featuring an electric-guitar-playing H.P.Lovecraft — seems to have more than a touch of ai about it!)

Have you ever had a sizeable chunk of something that you created just … blipped out of existence, by some unseen party? Some passion project that you are really, really invested in, kicked over like a sandcastle?

Trust me … it’s not a very nice thing to be on the receiving end of. And the moment when you realise exactly what might be going on — where you spot that something has disappeared (hey… where did my banner graphic go?) … and then spot another thing gone (…and the logo?…) … and another thing… and slowly put two and two together about just how much has been deleted? Well… I don’t think I’ve ever had a proper, full-on anxiety attack before, but I suspect that might have been the thing that I experienced, right there, in that moment. It certainly made the health monitoring on my smartwatch start pinging off all kind of super-scary alarms!! 🤯

The Tyranny of Small Decisions might not be the greatest literary work of our time, but I’ve invested an awful lot of work into that blog (seriously, I did the maths a little while ago … at this point — even with very conservative estimates — I’ve sunk way more than the equivalent of a year of full-time work into it). And “Tyranny” has earned itself a pretty decent following; it’s the 8th most-subscribed-to blog on the site (or 5th-most-subscribed, if you discount the ones written by BGG staff) … racking up more than 1700 posts at the time of writing. I’ll wager that’s a whole heap of click-throughs and ad revenue that I’ve generated for BGG’s coffers over the years.

But watching my archive being swiss-cheesed by an over-zealous mod is… well, it’s a bit of a wake-up call. Time to question why I pour so much free material into a place where it could all be taken away at any moment… without even the courtesy of a “Sorry Mr Shep, but…”

So here we are.

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But Mr Shep.. why Substack?

Well… I kind of started to get this idea in my head. If you’re really not in the mood to sink any more free content into BGG right now… why not use this as an opportunity to try something else? Or maybe try out a whole series of something-elses. And the idea of maybe even taking a blog “on tour” kind of took root in my brain.

I already follow quite a few non-board-gaming writers on Substack… and — as a user — I rather like the “slow internet” vibe that this place has. You can subscribe to somebody here and have all of their articles emailed directly to you if you wish. Or you can simply come to the site and read them as and when it suits you. (Or even — if you’re a time traveller from the 1990s — get content delivered as an RSS stream. WHOAHH!!!).

They seem to make a big thing about putting writers in control, and the tools that they make available to content creators — particularly around analytics and porting your data out — look pretty good. So I’m keen to find out what the site is like from a writer’s point of view… and this seems like a good opportunity to find out.

There’s not much of a board game scene here on substack yet (lots of brilliant not-board game writers to dip into though!) …but I guess there’ll never be a thriving board game scene anywhere unless a few people stick a flag in the ground and give it a go. So let’s see what happens.

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Money?

If you’ve encountered substack before, you probably know that some authors use it as a way to monetise their content. More power to them for doing so, but I don’t particularly need to make money out of my board game ramblings, so please rest assured that you won’t be seeing any paywalls here. And if anything pops up suggesting that you should pay me some $$$, please just click on the “free” option as it probably just means that I failed to click the correct setting somewhere 😄

Content?

Expect the same mixture of stuff that you’d find on my BGG blog; namely, a large portion of board-game-related material with the odd real-life adventure thrown in too (In fact, I might feel a little bit less guilty about posting the non-gaming stuff over here because … well, because it’s my substack, with my rules!).

What I think I will try to do — going forward — is make a bit better use of my time as a writer, and value your time more as a reader. Lets face it … changes in personal circumstances have led my posting frequency to slow down quite a lot in the last couple of years, and I’m nowhere near as prolific as I used to be … but I think this might also be a good opportunity to cut down on the filler material that I would’ve posted just-because-I-hadn’t-blogged-for-a-while, and aim for quality rather than quantity. So don’t worry about getting a shed-load of messages if you subscribe to the email feed. That’s very unlikely to happen 😄

As for the BGG incarnation of this blog… well… I’ll probably still post the occasional thing over there, just to keep it ticking over while I run this experiment. But — for the immediate future — please consider this place the “true” Tyranny of Small Decisions. And I’m so pleased you’re here!

Now, it really is time that I wrote the article about Eternal Decks that I’ve had brewing for a while. “The best co-op game ever created” according to some folks …and currently super-difficult to import or get hold of. Hmmm… let’s see what I think about THAT one… 🤔