Blog in Review – 2023

It’s Monday and 2024 is upon us, almost sneaking up on us like a wily coyote hunting a roadrunner.

As is my tradition over the past 4 years or so, I wanted to do an update on how this blog, and my gaming, is doing each year. A retrospective of the previous year is a great way to do that!

I’m not going to go into a great deal about the year itself, other than to say that if you’re going to be voting for Donald Trump in this year’s election, I don’t really want to know you (I’ve already nuked family members because of that).

At least no beloved icon died on New Year’s Eve like happened a couple of years ago.

I do value all of my readers and friends so much, you don’t even know. I hope you are having a wonderful new year and I wish you every success and accomplishment in this new year.

However, let’s talk about 2023 a little, because while there were plenty of dumpster fires in general, personally it actually was my best year in a while.

My mental health has never been the greatest, but compared to the last couple of years, it actually has been pretty good.

While there have still been ups and downs where that is concerned, they haven’t affected my blogging as they have in the past.

Ultimately, while I’m not in a “good” place, I am in a “better” place, which makes me happy.

With that all being said, let’s take a look at my gaming stats before talking about the blog itself.

While last year’s post mentioned that 2022 was a banner year for gaming, 2023 far surpassed that!

We had a full year of Sundays, I had some lunchtime games at work, and a bunch of conventions (including Dragonflight in August which is a new one because I haven’t gone since 2018).

All of that added up to 127 unique games played as opposed to 111 games played in 2022. I did try to make a point of not only playing “new to me” games (59 in 2023 vs 60 in 2022) but also games that I have played before but hadn’t played in 2023.

I love doing that, because I like playing games I’m already familiar with but yet haven’t been played in a while.

Since 2022 was a new record, 2023 is not only a new record, but blasting through the previous number.

Sundays have been good because quite a few times we play 3-4 games because some of them are shorter games, card games or things like that. It depends on whether Abi games to our Sundays or not, as he has a ton of interesting short games.

It also helped that we had no snow days! Our Sundays were stopped by a couple of holidays, but overall we had a Sunday game day every day that we wanted one.

Four conventions also contributed to that (OrcaCon, Terminal City Tabletop Convention, Dragonflight and Bottoscon).

2024 should be a banner year because there could be 6!

I don’t think I played any live games on Boardgame Arena, so all 127 games were face to face, which also makes me happy.

While there were fewer “new to me” games, the cult was still pretty happy with 59 games. Many of them were older too, which made them ecstatic.

As for blogging all of that, I’m still happy to report that I’ve never missed a “New to Me” games post since I started this blog in March 2017. That’s almost 7 years!

My most played game in 2023 was Combat Commander: Europe, which is not only because of my 10 games for the monthly ladder (two games are Combat Commander: Pacific, so not counting) but also the monthly games with Ted and a couple of other ladder members bringing me up to 16 plays.

Last year, Jump Drive was the most-played game, and this year it was the second-most, but only with 11 plays. We haven’t played as many times prior to eating on Sundays.

It’s still our go-to “we have a few minutes? Let’s play” game, though.

Third in plays was Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition, mainly again because it plays fairly quickly. You can’t play it prior to eating (it does take about an hour), but it’s a perfect “we have about 90 minutes left before we have to go, what do we want to play?” game.

This one was played 10 times.

Those were the only “dimes” this year (games played 10 or more times), but that’s because I played so many different games.

In January-February 2024, I’ll be doing my “Top 50 games played of all time” list (since I’ve now played way over 500 games, it will be 50 instead of 25), so I won’t be doing a Top 10 played in 2023, but I’ll be mentioning those games when I do those posts.

What were some other highlights of the year?

One of them has to be playing a couple of games with not only Michal (from the Boardgames Chronicle) but also Alex and Grant from The Players’ Aid on Rally the Troops.

We started with Time of Crisis, a couple of asynchronous games (after playing a few with Michal and some of his friends). This is a game I’ve been wanting to get back to the table for a while and I finally did in 2023! But I also got many async games in on Rally the Troops, which is a great site for playing some of your favourite wargames online.

After those, though, we ended up playing my second COIN game, Andean Abyss, a game about insurgency and counterinsurgency in Colombia.

We are currently in our third asynchronous game and while I haven’t done well at all, I have really enjoyed it. Not just learning a new game, but also playing with this great group of guys.

And it’s a COIN game!

That’s a first for me (almost).

In 2024, Michal and I will be playing some asynchronous Last Hundred Yards, which will be cool because I can build on my learning the game at Bottoscon in November.

Maybe I’ll learn it well enough to take part in the monthly ladder?

We’ll see!

I really love the gaming communities that I’ve joined. There’s the Combat Commander ladder, led by the illustrious Patrick Pence. What a great group of guys. We do need more women to join, and I would love if that happened.

But the people there are wonderful. You can almost always get a game going at any time you would want to.

That, and my blog followers and Twitter followers, but more about those later (I’m getting ahead of myself…must be the New Year’s champagne).

That was the year in gaming.

How about blogging?

I am so amazed, but this was a banner year for the blog.

I didn’t have any super-long lulls where I just couldn’t bring myself to post anything.

I’ve gone a week without a post, but my regular Friday Night Shots posts have come out since March 17, 2023 (with a couple of weeks missed here and there). These have greatly helped my output because even when I didn’t feel like posting a review or some other post, I wanted to make sure these Friday posts went out.

And I was successful!

Thus, I’ve never gone more than a week without a post.

The Friday Night Shots posts started when I spent many a Friday having a couple of drinks and just unwinding from the week.

Nowadays, I’ve been writing them ahead of time, but it’s still a cool way to do a weekly post.

I’m always open to suggestions for topics, because sometimes that’s the hardest part of these posts.

But I’m proud that I’ve been able to do them.

Let’s talk numbers.

I finished the year with 160 posts, which is so much above my previous high that I can’t even see the previous one behind me (117 in 2019). This is all because I never took a 2-3 week break like I have in previous years.

That’s a sign that my mental health was a bit on the upswing.

As for stats, mainly views and visitors, I’m once again seeing a huge boost this last week due to the holidays. Are people looking for reviews of games that they might want to buy for friends and family?

I don’t know!

I do know that there have been a ton (relatively speaking, of course) of new views on my Smash Up expansion posts, for no clear reason that I can see.

I had 47,163 views in 2022. I barely managed to break 50,000 this year (51,059), which is again a banner year! I don’t count 2020 (64,349 views) because that was skewed by two huge Terraforming Mars posts.

Visitors were also up, from 31,747 to 35,963, which is a pretty good increase for me.

This makes me happy because that means that many more people checked out my blog. And I hope some of them actually stuck around as well.

How about my output on the blog?

I mentioned earlier that I did 160 posts, which is so much higher than previous years.

How many words did I write?

First, I’m really happy that I broke the 1 million words written since I started in 2017.

This year, I wrote 221,386 words, way up from 169,502 words last year. Again, that’s a product of how many more posts I’ve done.

Everything goes together!

This was an average word count of 1,384, which was down from last year. But that’s because the Friday Night Shots posts are shorter than average. Which is what I like.

Friday posts should be shorter!

As for individual posts, my biggest post from 2023 is the news post about the Terraforming Mars: Prelude 2 upcoming Kickstarter (3806). A couple of my friends ordered it, so I’m hoping to play it sometime in 2024 when it finally arrives!

The second highest, spurred partly because apparently a ton of people were searching for it during the holiday season, is my review of the wonderful card game Earth, with 1984 views.

Seriously, this review has been getting a ton of hits this last week or two.

Finally, there is the 2023 version of the Marvel Legendary update, with 1530 views.

I’ve been doing these posts for 3 years now and they are always consistent performers. I update them as new Upper Deck blog posts come out, and people seem to be looking for news.

There hasn’t been a lot of news lately, so I’m not sure how 2024 will do.

I still only have one post that’s broken 7000 views (again, not counting the two Terraforming Mars announcements from 2020) and that’s the Wingspan app review.

It’s currently at 8284 views.

Will the European expansion and Oceania expansion match those?

They have a long way to go, but maybe?

I now have 33 posts that have crossed the 1000 view barrier (23 last year), so that is also a milestone for me that I’m very proud of. I have a couple of posts that are only a few views away from it, so it could be 35 soon!

Eight posts are above 2000 views (only three last year), which really heartens me some.

I’m happy that the Ark Nova review is one of them (2694 views) because I’m kind of proud of that one.

I talk about post views and visitors, and I know that these number pale in comparison to many other blogs.

I keep having to remind myself that while I do want to engage with as many people as possible, this is a hobby blog for me.

I’m not making any money on it.

I’m only spending the WordPress account and domain name money for it. I’m otherwise not putting any money into it (maybe I’ll put in some money for an actual logo soon, as Michal suggested many months ago?).

This is a hobby. I’m not going to be as successful as those other blogs.

And that’s ok.

I have to keep reminding myself of that, and I think I did a good job of that this year. I think that’s one reason I didn’t have so many lulls. Because I was more laid back than I have been before.

The main thing I want to get out of this blog is the community that I’ve formed, and there are so many people I’m thankful for, both on the blog on and Twitter/Blue Sky (because Twitter is a cesspool that one day I will leave, but not yet).

Others I’ve mentioned in previous years (like Zilla Blitz), so I’ll just mention Dave from Roll to Review, a long-time supporter of this blog.

I’ve supported him too, but for some reason I’m not able to leave comments on his blog anymore. But I hope he realizes just how much I love it and that at least one hit for every post is mine.

Then there is the community I’ve formed on other social media, largely due to this blog.

I know I’m not “friends” with those at GMT Games, but the fact that they retweet and like every post I do that involves them has been very helpful. I think that’s a large part of why so many of my GMT posts have more views than they normally would.

I’m honoured that the wonderful designer Brian Train actually seems to read at least some of these posts (and some of my Friday Night Shots posts, the main reason I mention non-alcoholic drinks in those posts). And I got to meet him at Bottoscon last year!

Next year, I plan on actually spending some time with him, which will be very cool.

The usual suspects are also much-treasured friends. Michal, Clio (from Clio’s Board Games), Alex and Grant, and Zilla. I’ve greatly enjoyed keeping up with the Players’ Aid and Zilla Blitz Youtube channels as a nice way to spend time while working (mainly when doing the tedious parts of the job).

And of course Patrick and the Combat Commander ladder. Not just a great way to play my favourite game monthly, but also a great group of guys to hang out on Discord with.

As for subscribers, those did boost somewhat in 2023.

I’m currently at 221 subscribers (208 WordPress subscribers and 13 email) plus all of the social media ones. There were 191 subscribers last year, so that’s a pretty good bump!

With Twitter becoming a garbage fire, I’ve also joined Blue Sky and we have a vibrant board game community there where I also post my links.

How about visitors that don’t involved these people?

Once again (and this will never change), the US was the dominant country in terms of visitors, with 22,215. Second place, as it should be since I’m Canadian, was Canada with 6506.

The United Kingdom was third with 3699 visitors. Germany was fourth but closely followed by Australia (1733 vs 1639). Is that all because of Dave at Roll for Review in Australia?

Those two countries always seem to be very close each year.

As always, there are a few countries where I get one hit from them.

I’d love to know what post they found and looked at.

I wish they’d leave a comment!

Anyway, I’m going to highlight Kosovo, Qatar, and the Bahamas.

Even though you’ve only come here once, I appreciate you!

Overall, I just want to say that this has been a good year for Dude Take Your Turn, and I love every one of you who comes and visits me and reads my words.

Even as a hobby blog, this all means nothing if nobody is reading it.

I do plan on playing video games as I have been this year. I haven’t been doing that as much as I did last year (which was part of the problem with me posting last year), but I think I’ve found a happy medium.

I hope I can maintain all of this in 2024. I’ve been a bit concerned that I’ve reached heights that I can’t maintain over the years in 2023.

But my plan is to try!

I love you all and I hope you continue to return and read my stuff over the next year and even more.

Here’s to a better 2024, wishing you all the best in the new year.