The Future of Game Night with the Saints

by Mrs. Saint

Sixteen months ago, Brad and I (Jess) published our tenth episode of our podcast: Game Night with the Saints. If you had told us then that we wouldn’t have had our next episode out for you on track two weeks later, I would have laughed. Then life happened. And now, here we are almost a year and a half later and our podcast hasn’t seen a new episode and our website and social channels have practically been graveyards for lack of activity. However, we are not done creating content, which is why our podcast is still available and our website still active. 

Brad and I first want to apologize and then offer an explanation. We’re sorry to those of you who had started following our social channels, website, and our podcast and enjoyed our content, that we have not provided you with content consistently. We do want to give everyone an explanation of where we’ve been as well as highlight our plans for the future. 

In February of last year, several things happened all at once. Brad was offered a new job with a new company. The new company would not promise him completely remote work and the commute was too long to not to move. So, we had to start house hunting which took up one full day every weekend for about six weeks and was very stressful and exhausting.

 In addition to Brad getting a new job and us having to move, I was dealing with an ear infection that became severe. I won’t go into a ton of details but we were concerned enough about my ear health that we held off on recording because of how bad the pain was and how sensitive my ear was, and we were worried our recording headphones would further irritate the condition. 

During the illness and house hunting, our current house had a leak that caused our entire kitchen floor to need to be replaced. Sounds too crazy to be true…I wish it was. We found a house where we were moving (NJ) but then had to wait to list our old house in PA because the insurance work to replace the kitchen floor and parts of the basement insulation had to happen first. We were lucky though when we listed the house sold pretty quickly. We are so grateful to Brad’s parents who came down during our transition and helped us move and clean and prepare the PA house. 

At the end of May we ended up moving to NJ. We loved our neighborhood but the house needed a lot of work, so much so that we didn’t move into our bedrooms until five months after our move. I did surprise Brad in June when he was in the office one day by unpacking most of our board game collection. 

However, life was just crazy and we weren’t finding time to play. We weren’t sleeping well because we weren’t sleeping in our own bed, as we waited for the house work to be complete. We just had no physical or mental energy to game. 

Jaina (our little girl) started daycare for the first time in June. In September, she brought home Covid and while we all recovered,  the cold and flu season has hit us hard. One of us has been sick since then. Brad has been dealing with a new health condition since January that took a couple months to diagnose and we are now working on adjusting our lifestyle to make sure he’s healing and doing better. 

Jaina has also been very sick and it’s looking like, at only four years old, she may need to have her tonsils removed later this year. 

Until recently, our family was in survival mode. At one point, Brad and I had a sit down about the future of Saint Gaming and our podcast and website. We finally both agreed, we didn’t want to give it up. We always said this was a passion project for us and we both agreed the passion and love for board games and creating content around our favorite hobby was still there. We had a long talk about what came next for us. 

We are still in semi-survival mode so our plan is to continue to prioritize finding balance and getting everyone healthy. Our target goal for the return of our podcast is this fall. We plan on ramping up slowly by putting out one podcast a month starting in September. And then at the start of 2024, we will hopefully be able to resume our every other week schedule for podcast episode releases. In the meanwhile, we will try to get back into a more regular habit of updating our social channels and engaging with the board game community.