Happy Thanksgiving From the Couch Bandits!

Every year in the United States, Thanksgiving Day provides a time to reflect on the past and count your blessings. Beyond that, it gives many of us the opportunity to return “home” and spend time with those we care about most.

We here at Couch Bandits particularly love this time of year, as we have much to be thankful for. We’re lucky to be surrounded by loving and supportive family, friends, and partners—and we’ve also been incredibly lucky to have the time to dedicate to a passion project like Couch Bandits.

Three months ago, we launched the site and haven’t looked back. Today, we have officially published 100 posts, and that is something worth celebrating! And there is definitely no stopping in sight—we are dedicated to keep producing quality content and working together with all the amazing bloggers and streamers we’ve had the pleasure of connecting with so far.

That said, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on our favorite moments from the past few months and also share some plans we have for the future.

Our Top 5 Favorite Posts

1. The Best Halloween Board Games to Play This October: While we love video games at Couch Bandits, we also love board games—and want to celebrate them as much as possible! Nick Snow wrote this fantastic piece for Halloween, and it perfectly captured the spirit of gaming with friends, while covering some of our favorite board games, from the classic Clue to the spooky Betrayal at House on the Hill.
2. Indie Game Dev Spotlight: Fenreliania Transforms Heart Into Experimental Game Design: One of our proudest moments at Couch Bandits was when we were given the opportunity to talk with the inspiring Fenreliania, an indie game developer with a fascinating perspective on game design. Don’t miss this interview!
3. Dark Souls Trilogy: A Retrospective of Swords and Souls: Working with guest contributors has proven to be one of the most fulfilling aspects of this site, and no contributor has been a bigger pleasure to work with than Ben Gogel. His magnum opus has to be this retrospective on the Dark Souls series—a fascinating account of why these games are so incredible and why he can’t resist coming back to them time and time again.
4. A RuneScape Story: An Innocent Stroll Through the Wilderness: This piece stands out as a favorite for Jake and Connor, as it recalls one of their funniest moments playing the MMORPG RuneScape. The trolls get trolled, and even though it ended up not-so-nice, it’s a great read. Better yet, this was the first post on Couch Bandits to use original artwork throughout!
5. Indie Board Game Spotlight: Dreams of Tomorrow: Celebrating indie developers and helping spread the word about amazing games are two of the most satisfying parts of Couch Bandits. We essentially created the site to accomplish those two goals, and our interview with Carla of Weird Giraffe Games really captured this spirit—while showing off this excellent new title coming soon.

Our Plans for the Future

It’s easy to get swept up in the day-to-day of running a blog, but when you look back at all you’ve accomplished, it feels good to have built something—regardless of “success.” More than that, this isn’t a project we could do without help, and we’re incredibly grateful for all our readers, contributors, and anyone else who’s helped in some capacity.

Moving forward, we have a few short-term goals we’d like to achieve. For one, streaming on Twitch has been an absolute blast, and we’d love to improve the quality of our streams with better audio and video quality. On top of that, we’d like to emphasize engaging with chat more often during stream. Stay tuned for more updates there—it will be a process, for sure, but Rome wasn’t built in a day!

Our latest project, We Need Your Help: What’s Your Favorite Gaming Memory?, also represents something we’d like to continue doing on Couch Bandits: collaborating with other passionate gamers. We’re about halfway there in collecting memories for that project (see the original post for more details), but that is only the start—we have more ideas involving guest posts and community engagement that we can’t wait to pursue. If you’re interested in teaming up in any capacity, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

That brings us to our final short-term plan: live streaming Game-A-Thon Part 1 and 2. If you don’t know what Game-A-Thon is, check out our original post here: Game-A-Thon: An Annual Board Game Celebration. In short, it’s an annual two-part event where we play board games for (nearly) 24 hours straight—and we’re happy to say we’ll be teaming up with Extra Life to host a charity stream for Part 2, which you can expect at the end of 2018.

Game-A-Thon Part 1 will be hosted on November 24, so make sure to check in and see what we’re up to! Since this is our first attempt at streaming an event like this, we expect some technical difficulties, so please bear with us. For Part 2, we plan to have a Pizza Cam…in other words, get HYPED!

That’s all for today. To everyone reading, have a Happy Thanksgiving! And thank you so much for the support. Here’s to an exciting future!