Baby (Dragon) Steps

It's that time of the year again: the time for looking forward, setting goals for the next year, planning the long climb upward. It's also a great time for looking back and seeing how far we've come.

This past year has been a great year for us. If  you've been with us the whole time, you've seen graphical improvements, refinement of the ratings system, the new "stats" block at the top of each review, and the addition of weekly news tidbits. We gained ourselves a new writer, and that has helped us keep up a regular schedule of posting reviews and news every single week.

Our stats have been growing as well. While numbers aren't the most important thing to us, it is nice to see those numbers grow, meaning that people are coming, reading our reviews, liking what they see, and staying around for next time. It means more comments, more interaction, and hopefully more community.

Here's to a great 2012! Now let's look forward and see where we'd like to go in 2013. Hit the jump for our plans, our goals, and how you can help.

More Reviews!
Primarily, we just want to keep adding new reviews on a regular basis. This can be tougher than it sounds. While we love playing new games and writing about them, we often like to go back and play our old favorites as well. With limited game time, we often have to make small sacrifices, but we're willing to do it to help build this community. We'd like to double the number of reviews we have on our site by the time 2014 rolls around.

More Readers!
We'd also like to grow our readership. Like I said before, we don't live and die by the numbers, but we do love to see people reading and enjoying our articles, news, and reviews. And not just more readership, but hopefully more comments, more feedback, and more interaction. It would be great if we could triple the number of followers by 2014. We pretty much did that in 2012, and I think it can happen again. If not? No big deal. We're still having fun. But you can help, by sharing posts you enjoy on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+--and if you're a Reddit user, sharing your favorites on Reddit certainly helps us as well. Leaving comments also helps encourage discussion and interaction between our readers, which is great.

Improved Site Functionality
We're always looking to improve not only the look but the function of our site. Hopefully as the number of reviews increases this year, we can work on better ways to search and sort through reviews. We'd also like it to be easier to access our other content--many of our guides stay relevant, but the blog-format tends to lose posts to the past. To that end, we've already added a new Guides tab at the top, where you can easily find our guides for Dominion strategy, teaching games, storing games, and more.

Guide to Gaming
Speaking of guides, a project we've been working on for a few months and will continue to work on through this year is our "Beginner's Guide to Gaming."  Actually, we'll probably take the "beginner's" out of the title, as this guide is meant for a general but helpful guide, especially for newbies to the gaming hobby, but also for any gamer who is jumping into something new within the hobby. We'll start with a list of common terms used in the gaming world that might be unrecognizable to someone outside and move from there. Planned "chapters" include guides on math trades, finding new games that appeal to you, finding and utilizing friendly local gaming stores, the differences between Ameritrash and Eurogames, and much much more.

Update Existing Content
We'd also like to update our existing content to stay current. The blog format tends to lose things to the past, but along with new ways to make old posts easier to find (mentioned above), we'd like to keep things current. We've already gone through and updated our reviews with the current ratings system and stat blocks, as well as updated the text in them as well. We'd like to keep guides and tips, and any other posts that have long-term value, updated and accessible.

Looking for Another Writer
We're still looking for another writer. Adding Jason to the team really helped propel us forward, and I feel that having one more player on our team will really help us to accomplish our goals and even exceed them, without overwhelming ourselves with more work than we can handle. After all, we have jobs, families, and lives outside of writing this blog. Please let us know if you or someone you know is interested in writing for us. No experience necessary!

Other Plans
We have some other plans in discussion, stuff that we're not quite ready to reveal to the world yet, but we're looking for ways that we can either provide other services to the gaming community beyond reviews and news, or partner with other websites to provide services to a larger audience. If you have a site that you think would benefit from a partnership, shoot me an e-mail at egosumlupus@gmail.com or tweet me @Futurewolfie.

So there's a lot to look forward to. Hopefully 2013 will be another great year for us, for you, and for the gaming world as a whole.

-wolfie