November 11, 2018: Ten Awesome Things About SJ Games

This is not a humblebrag. This is an actual brag. We have our good years and our bad years around here, but occasionally we get things right, and I made a list of things to be thankful for.

• We are the second oldest game publisher still under its original management, the first being the venerable Flying Buffalo.

• We are now truly a generational company. Our CEO played Car Wars in high school.

• The Daily Illuminator is the oldest blog on the whole Internet. It started November 16, 1994, and has been updated daily since then. No blog that's still maintained even comes close to that age. We have had a counter on the page since August 1995 and have recorded almost 25 million visits.

• I will be a Guest of Honour at the World Science Fiction Convention in Dublin in 2019. And I hope to see a lot of you there, talk about games, maybe even (gasp!) play something!

• The Kickstarter for the Designer's Edition of Ogre raised almost a million dollars. At the time, that was a record for boardgames. It's still the biggest box ever for a boardgame in commercial distribution (a Guinness application is in progress). It was packaged one (1) to a shipping carton.

• We are wired. We produce most of our own electrical power through solar panels on our buildings, and sell a significant excess back to the City of Austin. We also have electric-car charging at our carport (with several people taking advantage of it).

• We were paying for our staff's health insurance a long time before it became a political football. And we still do.

• At least twice a year we hold a Game Day where our staff can, on the clock, play whatever games they want.

• One of our illustrators won the Pulitzer Prize! Ben Sargent (Coup, Murphy's Rules) won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1982.