2025 is winding down, and like many others, I start to get a bit reflective at this time of year. I’ve been running Punchboard for over five years now, and 2025 was probably the best of the lot.
The highlights for me are always the conventions. Full Board Gaming, BayCon, UK Games Expo, and GridCon all fulfilled my need to get together with a big group of like-minded people. If you’ve never been to a convention, I heartily encourage you to try it. Find your nearest get-together, meet some people, and play some games; it’s great.
👍 Kudos to…
Whose Turn Is It Anyway, a great gaming podcast made by some lovely people. I always bump into them at conventions, and always have a good time. Go give them a listen now.
I have a bad habit for falling headlong into rabbit holes when I get into something. Whether that’s a new hobby, or a new niche within a hobby. For example, a couple of years ago I got bitten by the wargame bug and found the whole subculture bewildering, intriguing, and really enjoyable. I even wrote a piece about the moral aspect of wargaming, which got picked up and printed around the world.
This year, two of my big interests collided: indie games and Japan. Before I knew it I was playing Saashi & Saashi Games, had a copy of Eternal Decks on its way (read my review of Eternal Decks here), and had a hit-list of publishers and designers I wanted to meet at this year’s UK Games Expo. I’ve played some amazing, unique games this year and met a lot of really cool people.
It’s also inspired me to redouble my efforts to learn Japanese, and to bite the bullet and actually visit the country, which I’ll be doing to celebrate my 50th birthday in 2027. If you’d like to take some first tentative steps into Japanese games, head over to my Japanese Game Festival from this summer and see what takes your fancy.
👍 Kudos to…
Travel Games – the small independent online games store here in the UK that specialises in import games. Go buy some games from Ben and tell him Adam sent you.
Of course, Punchboard is a board game review site first and foremost, which means I’ve been concentrating on the two most important things to me in this hobby – playing games and writing about games.
I’ve had a look back through the archive, and including this post, I’ve published 55 articles here this year. That’s more than one a week, which honestly surprised me. If you ask anyone specialising in things like Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) how to make a site or channel successful, they’ll tell you how important it is to keep a regular schedule in your posting. If you’ve been around here for any length of time you’ll also know that I have absolutely no schedule to speak of.
I tend to write when inspiration strikes me, when I’m particularly enthusiastic about a game or topic, and when I have the time to be honest. This year has thrown a lot of challenges my way in my personal life, which has meant that there have been some lean weeks around here. I’d love to tell you that 2026 will be the year when I have a strict schedule, and you’ll know precisely when a new review will land, but I know I’d just be setting myself up to fail, so I won’t do that.
What I will do, however, is continue to try to make my reviews and previews as interesting, honest, and legible as possible. I don’t like sticking to a structure when it comes to writing, so don’t be surprised if my words meander and go with my thoughts sometimes, but hopefully I’ll still be able to tell you what makes a game fun – or not – in my opinion, and why.
👍 Kudos to…
Gaming Rules! Not only does Paul make the best how-to-play videos in all of board gaming, he also plays host to a wonderful, inclusive community for his Patrons, and runs GridCon every year.
I feel lucky to have landed in this hobby. Board and tabletop games have an incredibly diverse group of people playing them. Nowhere is this more obvious than at a convention, which is why they’re so important to me.
BayCon has been running for nearly 40 years now, and there are people attending who were not much older than kids the first time they came who now bring their grandchildren. GridCon has people fly in from all over the world, just to play games with friends they see once a year at most. UKGE has people of all ages, ethnicities, genders and abilities as far as the eye can see. It doesn’t matter which demographic groups you fall into; you’ll find yourself intersecting the same Venn diagram as a lot of other people, and I love it for that.
I’m lucky to have made some good local friends that I get to play games with regularly, who I never would have met were it not for piles of cardboard on tables.
And now you, reading this. For whatever reason, you’re here reading this now, and it means you made it all the way to the bottom of one of my posts, so I must be doing something right, I guess. That’s hard for me to write, as I have dizzying, chronic impostor syndrome. Still, I’ll keep trying to write interesting words about games, I’ll keep trying new things, and I’ll keep trying to give you a reason to come back.
Thanks to each and every one of you for your support this year. If you aren’t already a supporter and want to throw a few bucks my way to help keep the lights on, click one of the links below.
Adam
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