Eighteen Years of Dice Monkey

Dice Monkey is eighteen years old.

That feels wild to type.

When I started this blog back in 2008, the tabletop world looked very different. Blogs were a bigger part of the conversation, social media hadn’t swallowed everything yet, and a lot of us were just throwing thoughts out into the void because we loved games and wanted to talk about them. Dice Monkey came out of that era, when the RPG Blogger Network felt like this big, loose tavern full of people shouting across tables about character builds, campaign ideas, industry news, and whatever weird game we had just discovered.

The funny thing is, this year has felt different. For the last few years, Dice Monkey has still existed, but it wasn’t always getting the kind of attention I wanted to give it. Life gets busy. Work happens. Family happens. Creative energy comes and goes. Sometimes a blog becomes something you keep meaning to get back to, then suddenly months have slipped by.

This year, though, I’ve written more than I have in a long time. A lot more. I’ve been writing reviews, revisiting older games, digging into Star Wars D6 again, thinking about Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, talking about wargames, RPG design, campaign ideas, and all the little bits of tabletop gaming that still get me excited after all these years. It’s reminded me why I started doing this in the first place. I like talking about games. I like breaking them apart, poking at the pieces, seeing what works, seeing what still feels exciting years later, and finding ways to bring those ideas back to the table.

There’s also something satisfying about returning to a blog with this much history behind it. Dice Monkey has been around long enough to have seen whole waves of the hobby come and go. Editions have risen and fallen. Companies have changed. Games that once felt new are now nostalgia pieces. Games that didn’t exist when this blog started are now major parts of the hobby. Through all of that, the heart of it has stayed the same: people gathering around a table, physical or virtual, and making something together.

So this anniversary feels less like looking backward and more like getting the engine running again. I’m proud of the work I’ve done this year, and I’m excited about what’s coming next. I want to keep writing more often. I want to cover more old games, more new games, more odd corners of the hobby, more mechanics that deserve attention, more campaign ideas, more reviews, more half-formed thoughts that turn into something useful once they hit the page.

Eighteen years is a long time for a blog to exist. It’s old enough to vote now, which is a very strange thing to say about a tabletop gaming site named Dice Monkey.

Thanks to everyone who has read, shared, commented, followed along, or wandered in from some forgotten search result over the years. Dice Monkey is still here, still rolling, and somehow I’m more excited about it now than I’ve been in a long time.

Here’s to the next year.