Get your Likes ready, because it’s picture time! Today we’re excited to be rolling out the site’s new Instagram account, complete with all sorts of cardboard goodness straight from our gaming tables.

Beyond posting the pictures themselves, though, we’re going to be trying something different over there: including up-to-date gaming feedback of our playthroughs.

See, here’s the thing about reviewing games: it takes time. Crafting and publishing a game review takes substantially more effort than the final product you read/see/hear will lead you to believe. Reviewing games can be also particularly tricky if you’re a) insistent on playing them with different groups and player sizes to get a well-rounded view of the game, and b) insistent on playing the game more than once before reviewing it. For us, both of those are non-negotiable parts of our archetype-based review process. However, as a result of all the extra logistics, it can take months to get a game reviewed.

The simple reality is that with such a small crew running all the different facets of the site – and doing it all in our free time – it’s incredibly difficult to do more than one comprehensive written review per week and an occasional monthly audio review on the Vox Republica podcast.

Yet we play far more than five games a month, including old favorites and brand new releases. This has led to a long-standing issue where we want to convey our thoughts on new and recently played games but haven’t had a vehicle to do so without adding even more to the workload.

We’ve been meaning to set up an Instragram for a while anyway, but then we realized it may be a fun way to solve that problem. It’s a win-win, really.

Over there, expect to see a percentage of our images contain snap-reactions to newly played games – like this:

T.I.M.E. Stories ⌚ is a 2-4 player narrative game put out by Asmodee. You all play agents traveling around to prevent temporal anomalies. The catch is that there's no way to investigate everything you need in one play, so you have to run through each scenario 4-5 times to win … which is good because the base game is about $50 and only comes with one scenario (which isn't replayable). It's a lot of fun if you like narrative games as much as I do, but a big portion of it is trying to work together and remember things from previous games so it can also be frustrating. Don't want to say much more because of spoilers, though. -Erin #boardgames #timestories #games

A photo posted by Cardboard Republic (@cardboardrepublic) on May 29, 2016 at 6:19pm PDT

Other CR members will likely give their thoughts as comments too (as you see above), thereby giving individually-tailored reactions to the games we’re playing. And we’re calling the whole thing Insta-Impressions. Because we’re clever like that.

Insta-Impressions aren’t meant to be highly complex, nor are they meant to replace our standard in-depth written reviews. Rather, the goal is to provide timely initial thoughts of the games hitting our table. This way we can offer up feedback on games that otherwise may take a long time to get reviewed – if ever.

Expect this all to be a little more off-the-cuff and personalized than our full reviews, but we hope that this way we’ll at least be able to share new games observations without making even more work for ourselves.

Plus, taking pictures of games are fun! So come check it out!