One Last Post: Saying Goodbye to the GTG Forums

There has been a Greater Than Games forum since 2011, when we first started the company.

The first iteration, built into our original website, was pretty janky. But it existed! And as people discovered Sentinels of the Multiverse, many of them found their way there. The forums grew rapidly alongside our website, our games, our fandom, and the company itself.

A lot happened in those digital halls.

There were rules questions and strategy discussions, wild speculation and elaborate theories, running jokes and ridiculous goofs. Friendships formed. Games got organized. People who might never otherwise have met found each other because they all cared about the same weird little card game.

And, behind the scenes, an enormous amount of playtesting happened there, too. Sentinels of the Multiverse and many other Greater Than Games projects were developed with the help of our playtesting community in a super-secret Playtester Only section of the forums. That functionality — and, much more importantly, the people using it — was genuinely important to the success of GTG.

Then the 2020s brought a lot of changes.

First, we rebuilt our website because the old backend was… NOT good. That meant changing the forum software as well. There were ups and downs. The transition wasn’t perfectly executed. But the community persevered, and the forums continued to be a gathering place for GTG fans.

Then, as the company itself changed, GTG staff became less and less present on the forums, and eventually our ability to administer them became extremely limited. Over the last couple years, the forums have become much quieter than they once were.

Which brings us to today.

The Greater Than Games community is still strong. At every convention we attend, we meet dedicated, enthusiastic people who have been playing our games for years alongside people who are discovering them for the first time. There are active communities gathering online around The Letters Page, the Order of the Standard Table, and elsewhere. We even have a new secret playtesting area, carrying on one of the oldest traditions of the GTG forums.

But these forums themselves are now a shadow of the bustling place they once were.

We have finally regained enough access to them to make this post, but restoring and maintaining the forums properly would require substantial expense and ongoing resources that simply don’t make sense for what they have become.

And so, with a heavy heart, it is time to close the doors.

Farewell, ye faithful halls of olden times!

You were always greater than the sum of your software. You gave thousands of conversations a home. You helped people meet one another, share ideas, make friends, build games, tell stories, argue about card interactions, concoct increasingly improbable Multiverse theories, and have a tremendous amount of fun together.

The forums are going away.

The community they helped create isn’t.

We’ll remember the good times had here for a long, long time.

Thank you for being here.

Thank you for playing greater.

And thank you for being part of the Multiverse.

(The GTG forums will be deleted on Monday, September 14th. We wish we could keep them around longer, but unfortunately, that just isn’t possible. We look forward to seeing and interacting with all of you elsewhere as we continue to play greater together throughout the wide GTG Multiverse!)

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It’ll be sad to make it go, but happy y’all at least get one more hurrah on it prior to it closing. Funnily enough I believe my first post on the forms is going to be my last.

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Well, this makes 9/11 just that little bit worse. Not even three full days to make sure everything I might want in the future is safely on the Wayback Machine. Great.

Sad to see the forums fully go away.

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This is the worst news I’ve gotten all month.