The “Hobby Magazine” has a long history, so perhaps it is no surprise that, over the years, there have been quite a few gaming magazines.  War-gaming magazines perhaps go back further, but one of the first general gaming magazines was the monthly Games & Puzzles, which started a little over fifty years ago, in May 1972.  Games & Puzzles was initially published by Edu-Games Ltd. before Willow House Press took over in 1978 moving to a quarterly distribution model.  Four years later AHC Publications took over moving to a bimonthly model and rebranding as The Gamer.

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This wasn’t the last of Games & Puzzles however, as it came back in 1994 for a brief last hurrah lasting sixteen issues before it was finally shelved completely in 1996.  By the time Games & Puzzles was no more, several other gaming magazines had been and gone in the UK.  These include Games Review which lasted about ten years and Games International which ultimately morphed into a computer games magazine called Strategy Plus. There were also a number less fancy, “fanzines”, mostly produced using a photocopier.  SUMO was one of the best of these and ran for almost ten years, from the pilot in October 1989 to the final one in February 1998.

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SUMO was a subscription pamphlet including adverts, postal games, and reviews, produced by Mike Siggins.  As a mark of the times it served, it also included a rules translation request list for German import games, something which is no longer necessary as most manufacturers now release their own translations online.  The name and subscription list for Sumo was bought by the now defunct commercial Games, Games, Games! magazine, but its spiritual successor was the quarterly Counter which lasted nearly twenty years and seventy-eight issues—the final issue was released in January 2018.

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Although Counter was started by people in the UK, it included contributions from gaming enthusiasts from all over the world.  Counter was succeeded by The Spirit of Games and Gamers magazine, which was started in 2018 and released with the specific mission to “continue the tradition of Sumo and Counter magazines … writing about and reviewing boardgames”.  Now known as Tabletop SPIRIT, this is an online only magazine, which highlights the reason so many of the physical magazines have been and gone.  With the ready availability of blogging and vlogging, pretty much anyone can publish their own online magazine now.

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Mobile electronic devices also mean these can be read anywhere and are easily transportable as well as being relatively cheap to produce and therefore cheap (often free) to the subscriber.  Although most of these are amateur, many are very professionally produced.  One such recent online production, designed to raise the profile of older games and counter the so-called “Cult of the New”, is called The Cult of the Old.  The first edition of this e-magazine was published in February 2023 and included articles on Princes of Florence, Medici, Puerto Rico, Scotland Yard and Modern Art.

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And yet, despite the advantages of the internet, there are still gaming magazines that publish physical copies and there are even new physical magazines coming out.  One of the longest running games magazine is Spielbox—although German in origin, since 2010 it has also had an English release.   Spielbox’s origins were in the earlier 1980s in Die Pöppel-Revue and its success (and also that of Spielerei) probably reflects the origin, history and cultural popularity of “Euro-style” games in Germany.  More remarkable than the success of Spielbox then, is that of the UK’s two commercially produced publications, Tabletop Gaming and the more recent release, Senet, the first edition of which came out in the troublesome spring of 2020.

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The pilot release for Tabletop Gaming came out in summer 2015 with, regular, quarterly releases starting a year later.  Its remit is, “every type of analogue gaming, from board games and RPGs to miniatures and wargames, with everything in-between.”  This makes it quite different in flavour from Spielbox and Senet, which focus almost exclusively on modern “Euro-style” games.  What makes Senet a little different to the likes of Tabletop Gaming and Spielbox is its focus on the craft, creativity and artistry of board games as well as on the games and gaming themselves.  While Spielbox and Tabletop Gaming are fairly typical, A4-sized, hobby-magazines, Senet is something of a throwback being A5-sized, with a matt finish and a quality, almost book-like feel; as such, it seems to have carved a bit of a niche for itself.

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While publishing a professional games magazine in the UK has been historically difficult due to the size of the market, it seems times may be changing.  Through crowdfunding, small enterprises now have an efficient way of both advancing funds and gauging interest levels prior to production.  During the relatively uncertain times of the last few years, Spielbox have used Kickstarter to finance their English Edition and in the coming months, there are plans to produce physical editions of Tabletop SPIRIT using the same means.  Together with the success of Senet and Tabletop Gaming, this suggests that our enjoyment of board games as a physical experience is mirrored in reading physical magazines about analogue games and gaming.  Whether there is enough ongoing demand to sustain all these publications remains to be seen.

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