Editorial
One thing that has always been true about the PnP community in the many years that I have been involved with it (9 years and counting!) is how spread out and siloed the community is. We are already a super small niche of PnP hobbyists within a slightly larger niche of modern board game hobbyists. But we do seem to live in separate neighborhoods that do not always talk to each other or interact with each other very much. You have people on Facebook in the PnP Hideaway and various other FB groups, people on Reddit in r/printandplay, and people on BoardGameGeek posting in the monthly "What print and play games are you crafting or planning on crafting this month?" and "PnP Games on Your Table" geeklists. All of those are active, useful places with their rotating casts of regulars and occasional visitors. All of them have wonderful PnPers in them. But most of the time, despite our shared common interests, each of these still feels like separate silos.
That is not meant as a knock on any of those communities. I love all of them, I am in all of them. Heck, I am an admin of two of them (PnP Hideaway and r/printandplay), and a sort of supervisory mentor to a third (we have monthly rotating guest hosts for the BGG PnP crafting geeklist, and honestly, it's been really great to be exposed to a different guest host with a different monthly theme and different point of view each month). From each of these places I get useful ideas, inspiration, tips, info about new and older PnP games, and just good conversation and interaction from all three of them. But because I move around between those different corners of the PnP hobby, it seems to me that there does not seem to be a lot of cross-pollination between them.
Hence, the idea for PnPDaily.
I wanted a site that could pull together bite-size bits of useful, interesting, current PnP content from each of these different centers of PnP gravity and put them in one place. Not a giant all-purpose PnP portal for everyone. And not just a handy list or directory of PnP games (I've already done that, with PnPFinder), because it can be challenging and fragmented to find PnP games as well). I just wanted a clean, crisp page with small widgets that update dynamically and give you a quick sense of what is going on in the wider PnP world beyond your usual hangout.
At heart, that is what this site is supposed to be: a compact daily check-in for people who love print and play games, whether they spend most of their time on Facebook, Reddit, BGG, or some combination of the three.
Right now the site is still young, but even in this early form it is already doing a few things I wanted.
The Tip of the Day widget pulls in useful tips from members of the Hideaway Facebook group (for now). This matters to me because the Hideaway is full of practical PnP knowledge, and a lot of that knowledge tends to disappear into the scrolling of the endless social feed. Somebody drops a genuinely useful crafting or printing tip, people react to it for a day or two, and then it gets buried under the next wave of posts. Pulling some of that into a rotating tip widget seemed like a good way to keep those useful tips visible.
The PnP Crowdfunding Roundup widget highlights some print and play projects that are on crowdfunding right now. That is another area where it is easy for people to miss things. If you are not plugged into the right feed, group, or thread at the right moment, a perfectly interesting project can slide right past you.
The PnP Community Poll widget gives me a place to share results from polls we run in the Hideaway from time to time. I like polls because they are a quick way to take the temperature of the community on various relevant topics, such as preferred PnP file format in the current poll. Polls can be useful little snapshots of what PnPers prefer, argue about, or keep coming back to. Polls like these have helped me decide what formats I should provide when I make the PnP files for my various PnP game designs or retheme projects.
The Current BGG Contests widget is there for a very practical reason: if you are not already a regular BGG user, it can be incredibly difficult to find out what print and play contests are currently running over on BGG. That information exists, but it is not always obvious to outsiders where to look, because it feels like it's locked inside a black box of a website that despite all of its updates over the years, still feels trapped in web 1.0 in the 1990's. I wanted one easy and handy place where non-BGGers could glance over and immediately see what PnP contests are active. Some of my best experiences as a PnPer and PnP game designer have come via those contests, so I'm a huge fan, and I want more people to know about them.
The Work-in-Progress Thread widget might be the one I am most excited about, because there are so many wonderful and creative PnP designs in development on BGG that never seem to get much visibility outside of that ecosystem. There are many talented indie designers over there quietly building really interesting stuff, posting playable files, getting feedback, iterating, improving. If you never browse WIP threads, you may not realize how much cool, playable material is sitting there right now, completely free for you to PnP and enjoy.
And that gets to a larger reason why I made PnPDaily. I do not think the PnP community is actually as fragmented in spirit as it looks from the outside. I think we are fragmented in location, that's all. People in these different silos are often interested in the same things: useful crafting advice, hidden PnP gems, work-in-progress PnP games, PnP contests, how to print and craft better, how to store our PnP games better, what printer should I buy for PnP, and how to make the hobby easier and more fun. It's not that we have nothing in common. It's that we are often having parallel conversations in different places.
My hope is that PnPDaily can become a site that PnPers from any one of those silos can check on a daily basis, get a small glimpse of what fellow PnPers elsewhere are talking about, and feel a little more connected to the wider hobby. Maybe a Reddit regular discovers a BGG contest they would never have heard about otherwise. Maybe a BGG denizen sees a useful crafting tip that started in the Hideaway. Maybe someone from Facebook notices a work-in-progress thread and jumps in with playtest feedback that helps a designer improve their game.
That would be a win.
I also have plans to expand the site over time. I want to add more widgets that surface the latest topics, questions, and conversations happening across these different PnP centers. The goal is not to replace those communities, but to create a small, hopefully useful bridge between them.
So that is why I built this site.
If it works, it should help the hobby feel a little smaller in the good way; more connected, more accessible, easier to keep up with, and above all, easier to bump into PnPers and ideas you might otherwise miss.
And as always, I am very open to feedback and suggestions from you all. If there is something you would like to see on PnPDaily that would make it more useful, more relevant, or just plain better, I want to hear it. This site is designed and built for the PnP community. It should be shaped by what the PnP community actually wants and needs, not just by whatever I happen to think looks cool on a web page.