About Us – After the Boss
I spent more than a decade inside the machine that produces day-one reviews. First as a staff editor, later as the reviews editor who had to decide whether a piece was saying anything real or simply arranging adjectives around a release date. I assigned the coverage, cut the copy, and watched how easily a polished but empty game could pass through the week unchallenged. Eventually I walked away from the churn. I did not walk away from the craft.
What I kept was a stubborn set of questions I still ask every time I finish a game: What does this game want? What does it refuse? What does it waste? What remains? Those four prompts live in a notebook I open before I draft anything. They are not a scoring system. They are a way of refusing to confuse novelty with importance, or length with depth, or budget with conviction.
The work that taught me the difference
Editing launch reviews under deadline teaches you how often certainty is performed rather than earned. You learn to spot the sentence that sounds authoritative while carefully avoiding the harder claim. You learn that “polished” has become one of the least useful compliments in the medium—a word that often means the game never risked anything strong enough to leave a mark. I still respect craftsmanship. I simply no longer mistake it for artistic force.
I live in Madison, Wisconsin, with my wife and no children. On weekends I play low-stakes strategy board games. At night I take long walks with film scores or game podcasts in my ears, then come home and try to write the kind of criticism I used to wish more of our pieces had been. I collect old strategy guides, preview magazines, and the discontinued print ephemera that once tried to pin games down before they shipped. The physical objects remind me that most of what we said in the moment did not survive contact with time.
What this site is for
After the Boss exists because I wanted fewer scores and better judgments. The name is deliberate. The real evaluation begins after the boss fight, after the marketing cycle, after the first wave of takes has already moved on. I write for adult players in their late twenties to forties who still care deeply about games but no longer have infinite hours or patience. They do not need another voice telling them a game is “huge.” They need someone willing to say whether it is worth living with.
I cover both AAA and indie releases. Every piece is filtered through the same lens: editorial judgment, artistic merit, design coherence, and long-term memorability. I will not chase launch-week hyperbole. I will not mock anyone for liking mainstream games. I will not pretend that difficulty, length, or production values automatically equal importance. The signature line I keep returning to is simple: not every good game is worth your time.
How the writing works
The site has four homes for different kinds of attention. The Verdict Window is the front door—new-release criticism that tries to answer whether the work actually lands. Form & Friction digs into systems, pacing, and the friction that accumulates over hours. The Editor’s Margin is where the more personal and medium-level arguments live. Shelf Life is the room for what remains after the noise fades: the thirty-days-later notes, the reappraisals, the quiet observations about which ideas survive the patch notes.
I still love games. I simply refuse to confuse the feeling of novelty with the rarer feeling that something has earned a permanent place in the memory. If a review or essay here helps you decide more clearly what deserves your limited attention, then the work is doing what I left the old job to do.
— Nolan Pierce
After the Boss
Madison, Wisconsin