Welcome to the New Boardgamist

Boardgamist has a brand new look!

I've officially moved to Shopify and I've rebuilt the shop from the ground up to make it easier to find brilliant board games, discover something you didn't know you were looking for and, hopefully, spend a lot less time staring at hundreds of boxes wondering where to start. I hope you can already see some of the benefits as you explore the new site, but the most exciting part for me is that this gives Boardgamist a much better foundation for everything I want to build next.

One of the biggest things I wanted to improve was how you actually find games because I don't think shopping for board games should require you to arrive knowing exactly what you want. There are thousands of games competing for your attention and an endless stream of new releases, rankings and recommendations telling you what you should be playing, but none of that necessarily tells you whether a game is right for the people sitting around your table. The new site is designed to make exploring easier, whether you're looking for something competitive, cooperative, strategic or social, trying to find something perfect for two people or a big group, or simply wondering where to start.

That idea is going to become a much bigger part of Boardgamist because I think a good board game shop should do more than put products on a website and wait for somebody to search for them. I want to help you navigate a hobby that can sometimes feel unnecessarily overwhelming, introduce you to games you might otherwise have missed and make it easier to work out what will actually be fun for you, because a brilliant game with the wrong group can be a terrible recommendation while the right game, played with the right people at the right moment, can become something you talk about for years.

The move to Shopify gives me far more freedom to build that kind of shop and there is a lot more coming. I'll be improving how games are categorised and recommended, creating better ways to discover something new, adding more useful guidance throughout the site and experimenting with ideas that make Boardgamist feel less like an enormous digital warehouse and more like walking into a really good independent board game shop and asking, "Right, what should we play tonight?"

The new look is also a better reflection of what Boardgamist has gradually become. This business has always been about encouraging more people to make time to play, get away from their screens for a while and spend an evening doing something together, and as Boardgamist has grown I've become increasingly convinced that the most valuable thing I can offer isn't the biggest possible catalogue, it's helping you choose well from the incredible games that are already out there. That means continuing to be selective about what I stock, being willing to ignore games that don't deserve the hype and giving you recommendations based on the experience you're actually looking for rather than simply pointing you towards whatever happens to be selling the most copies.

There will inevitably be little things that change over the next few weeks as I see how people use the new site, and I'll keep tweaking, improving and adding to it rather than pretending a website is ever really finished. So have a poke around, try the new ways of exploring the collection and please tell me if you spot something that could be better, because this isn't the finished version of Boardgamist, it's the platform I've finally got to build the version I have in my head.

Thanks for being here for the next chapter, and for continuing to support a small independent board game shop with some very big ambitions.

Dan
Founder, Boardgamist