Six Years In, and I Still Keep the Receipts

I got my first offer for a free review copy about eight months after I started actually writing these up seriously, a small publisher reaching out about a game that hadn’t released yet, free copy, no strings they said, just genuinely wanted my honest take. I said no, and I’ve said no to every offer since, and I keep the receipts, literally, filed by year, specifically so I can point to them if anyone ever asks whether that’s actually true.

The reasoning isn’t complicated and it’s the same reasoning that runs my actual job. Nobody pays me to find problems with their house and then trusts my report if they know I’m also getting paid by someone with a stake in the outcome. That’s not a hypothetical ethics seminar point, it’s the entire foundation of why an inspection means anything at all. The value of my signature on a report is that nobody else has a thumb on the scale, and the day that stops being true, the report stops being worth the paper it’s printed on.

I don’t think a free board game creates the same conflict of interest as a paid inspection, to be clear, nobody’s life savings are riding on whether I like a new deckbuilder. But I noticed something in myself the one time I almost said yes to that first offer, a small flicker of wanting to be a little more generous in the review than I might have been otherwise, purely because someone had been nice enough to send me something for free before I’d even played it. That flicker is the whole problem, right there, and it doesn’t need a big financial incentive behind it to work on a person. It just needs the free thing and the tiny social debt that comes attached to it.

So I keep buying everything myself, full price, same as anyone reading this would, and I keep the receipts filed away by year mostly out of habit at this point, the same instinct that makes me keep every inspection report I’ve ever written even after the file’s technically closed. Maren thinks it’s a little compulsive. I think it’s the cheapest insurance policy I own against becoming the kind of reviewer who can’t quite remember why their opinions started drifting soft.

Six years in, the answer’s still no, and I don’t expect that to change. The one thing worth more than a free copy of anything is being able to say, honestly, that nothing I’ve ever rated on this site owed anyone anything.