So, this summer I pass a major milestone in the life of a young history scholar: I have a book to review for an academic journal. The Arkansas Historical Quarterly is sending me a copy of Yankee Warhorse, a biography of the Union General Peter Osterhaus. The book looks promising enough (he says, reading the forward), although the fact that it's written by the great man's great-great-granddaughter gives one pause. Anyway, they want it by August 15.
This reminded me that, now that the blog's open for business again, it's time to start angling for some free games from publishers that I can turn around and sell review.
DEAR PUBLISHERS:
My name is Alfred, and I am the chief cook and bottle-washer for this little blog, Musings, Ramblings, and Things Left Unsaid. This used to be a kind of popular and well-known blog, but it's been laying fallow for a while and the game blogosphere seems to have passed it by. Most of the blog's hits now come from people using international versions of Google to look for pictures of FT-17 tanks in Swiss service in the 1920s.*
This presents you with a rare opportunity: Presenting your games to a tightly-focused, discriminating audience. This is no random bunch of yahoos like the Dice Tower gets. No sir, this is an audience of fiercely loyal readers, as well as people who just never bothered to remove it from their Bloglines subscriptions. This is also possibly why Spielbox still lists it as one of the eighty top websites for games, but you don't have to know that.
Also, this reviewer can present a unique view of your game: The view of a man who has nobody to play your game with. This allows more of the review to focus on things like odor, box size, quality of wood used for pieces, the presence or absence of typos in the rulebook, and so on. The reviewer is also competent to declare that a game "looks pretty good, assuming the auction mechanic works." This can work for you. If you have a terrible game to inflict on the gaming public, but it uses simultaneous-selection to determine where the meeples go, I will have no idea that it's broken. You will thus have a review handy that focuses on the finish on the cards, how easily the Select-O-Matics are put together, and the attractiveness of the young lady on the box cover. (Grrrrowl!) In this review, the game will be very, very good indeed.
In short, I and my readers present you with an underrepresented demographic, one which can only be reached by you sending me free toys. In the meantime, I will persist with my current plan for reviewing only games that are either out-of-print, unpopular, made in somebody's basement--or all three, as is the case with tomorrow's game. And nobody wants that, in today's cutthroat gaming economy.
Sincerely,
Your friend,
Who now has lots of space on his shelves,
Alfred
*This brings in a fair number of my hits, actually.
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