ICv2.com reports that Scyre, the last remaining magazine devoted to collectible games, is ending its run in April. By my count, Scrye was also the last adventure game magazine of any stripe left in wide circulation, joining Dragon, Dungeon, InQuest, Games Quarterly, and several others in the periodicals graveyard.
I used to love reading gaming magazines, but with the rise of the internet, there’s clearly not much space for them any more. Any news articles they run are out of date before they even go to press much less by the time they hit stands. The same goes for their price guides. Chewy, well-written content still has a place of course, but it’s hard to appeal to a broad audience if you focus on just one game. If you spread your wings a bit wider, you find that most players only play a handful of games and don’t care for omnivorous coverage instead.
The only magazines I know of that are left are Polymancer and Kobold Quarterly. I’ve never seen an actual copy of Polymancer, so I can’t comment on its quality.
Kobold Quarterly, which is edited and published by my fellow Alliterate Wolfgang Baur, rocks, but it’s focused exclusively on D&D material. At that, it does a wonderful job. It leapfrogs backward over the wide-ranging magazines of the ’90s and lands squarely in the days when D&D was all that most gamers cared about.
If that suits you, go for it. I read KQ–in PDF form rather than print–but I still have to mourn the loss of a wider-ranged print magazine. Of course, I have the massive resources of the internet to console me, so I can’t feel all that bad.
ETA: I forgot to mention, of course, the various gaming comics books like Knights of the Dinner Table, which features a lot of game content too. With Nodwick cancelled and (I believe) Dork Tower and PvP on print hiatus, that seem to make KoDT the last book standing.
