eXplorminate has unfortunately whittled down to a skeleton crew over the past year or so. Nate, Troy, Mark, Joshua, Micah, Kearon, and others have all, unfortunately, had to take a step back (or two or three). At this point, it’s just me, Rob, and Oliver, when he can contribute, and a few guys like Kaur and Benji that are getting their feet wet, along with a few others that are working towards contributing to eXplorminate.
So that means that in order for us to keep up with the content that we’d like, and to remain as the most relevant 4X voice on the internet, we’re going to restructure our article series a bit to better facilitate changing activity and passion levels and to be more clear.
The “Let’s eXplore” Series
This series of articles and videos will feature Early Access titles in development. Whether they be 4X, strategy, tactics, or even some strategy RPGs, this is the series that will focus on getting an early look at these games and “exploring” them.
The introductory article will feature about 500 words to introduce the game and to explain why it may be relevant or of interest to our readership.
The “Less eXplored” Series
This series of articles will focus on games that have subverted our attention when they originally came out or are games that too few people are talking about among our community. This series is meant to shine a light on games worthy of your attention, despite the lack of watercooler talk or press about them.
These articles will probably feature a video, but not always, and will be published on an unset schedule.
The “Systems Scan” Series
Think of these as mini-reviews. They won’t be nearly as long as our fully featured reviews (between 500 and 1000 words, maximum) and will be an objective overview of mechanics with a subjective conclusion of how well they mesh. They will generally be for strategy and tactics games, but never for 4X games. Our main focus here is on 4X games, which will result in longer, more thorough 4X reviews in line with what you’d expect from us.
This series won’t have a score at the bottom, but will instead feature a conclusion at the bottom in the form of “You May Like This Game If, You May Not Like This Game If”, as our full reviews do. Speaking of full reviews…
The eXplorminate Review
Nothing changes here. When any of the authors dive deep into any game of any genre, we’ll consider it a full eXplorminate review. Every 4X game that we review will get the full eXplorminate treatment, however, not every strategy and tactics game will get this treatment. It simply matters what the author wants and has the time for.
As we’re strictly volunteers here, the idea is to provide many ways for authors to contribute through the written word. We don’t want to pigeonhole contributors into needing to write 4,000-word novels every time they create content at eXplorminate.
The other series, i.e. eXcursions, Mechanical Wonders, Mobile eXperiences, will all stay the same. The eXcursions are meant to be a platform for our authors to venture outside our chosen focuses and write about other games if they so choose.
The Mechanical Wonders series is a platform for us to wax poetic about particularly good gameplay mechanics from the 4X genre. One day we hope to add a Mechanical Disasters series, too. One day…
And the Mobile eXperiences feature will be our way to review mobile 4X games, like Battle for Polytopia or our upcoming review for Uciana, just like it has always been.
I’ll keep this article pinned for a few weeks and then prominently display it on our About Us page so that future readers can see it. If you have any questions, I’m always happy to answer them.
As a quick digression, I’m still actively trying to find the time to fix our old articles. With said staffing shortages, it’s hard to create content AND get our old stuff fixed from the big migration. I promise it’ll happen one day.
Finally, we’re always looking for contributors. We have little to offer in the way of repayment but free games and expansions. We usually get them much earlier than the public, too. Just a thought.
