Reviewn June: A Brief Retrospective

A month ago I had the idea that I should spend my free time in June reading and publicly reviewing various things languishing in my TTRPG library. The precommitment was meant to spur me to read more of these resources than I would normally have, and that certainly worked.

I reviewed fourteen works, which was about what I had placed as a pessimistic estimate of one every other day, and somewhat short of what I'd hoped. It's, at a guess, five to ten percent of the unread part of my library; continuing to read at the same rate might take more than a year to get fully caught up.

My approach to Reviewn June was “if you don’t have something nice to say then don’t say anything”. There were a couple of resources I read which didn't make the cut, so I didn't review them. I also read one game which got me fired up on a specific game design question, and the review I was writing quickly turned into an essay that was only referring back to the game as a running example, so I ended up cutting that too (and might come back to it).

Personal lessons learned

1. I've worked professionally and semi-professionally as a couple of types of editor, and it was impossible for my eye not to catch on what seemed like obvious fixes, usually a few times on every page, for almost everything I read. This was more frustrating than I expected it to be, and including a 'minor text quibbles' part in each review was a useful outlet for that.
2. At a rough estimate, I invested 30 hours in Reviewn June. It was usually 2 or 3 hours every 2 or 3 days. At least half of that time was writing! My main take-home is, if I do this again (Octobereview? Febreviewary?), I should place considerably less focus on the actual review part. A fixed formal four-paragraph structure might help: introductory paragraph, discussion paragraph, quibbles paragraph, my-favourite-bit paragraph.
3. It was gruelling, but overall rewarding, to do. I picked up a few specific inspirations. I'm hoping it's building towards a habit of more reading. This blog doesn't have many readers, but the reviews did see some traffic, so some people wanted to see them. And in the end, writing practise is writing practise.

Finally, it's already borne some fruit: my gaming group ended up filling in a last-minute cancellation with a free-form riff on Coincackler Well, which wouldn't have happened without Reviewn June.

Thanks for reading!