Blog in Review – 2024

Happy New Year, everybody!

I hope you had a safe and happy New Year’s Eve celebration last night, or at least just spent the changeover with your loved ones.

Some of you may even have been asleep!

As I did last year and for the five years previous (really, that long?), I wanted to do a bit of a retrospective for my gaming and this blog, letting you now some of the highlights, the stats, and just what stood out to me.

This won’t be a year in review in general because, well, the year wasn’t that great!

The dumpster fire in November and everything that led up to it, bringing on chaos, confusion, fear and anxiety, those have been examined elsewhere and I don’t think I could do justice to them.

Personally, however, 2024 wasn’t as good as 2023.

I had more mental health issues, mainly anxiety and self-regard issues that led to a few blog outages as well as just bad feelings in general.

Getting sick and missing my 25 year anniversary at my job celebration really hit me hard because I’d been looking forward to it all year, but at least we had an office party for me the week before which was very nice, including a speech from a man I consider a mentor and good friend who I have worked with for 18 years now.

But yeah, missing the actual celebration sucked.

However, upwards and onwards and I’ve been feeling better the last couple of months, or at least I’ve been dealing with the anxiety better and not letting it overwhelm me.

Which has resulted in a great two months of blog posting recovery, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

First, as always, I wanted to let those of you who regularly check out this blog (as well as if this is your first post!) that I love you immensely and I am really glad that you’ve decided to check out this really secluded corner of the boardgame Internet, at least for a bit.

How about the gaming? That’s what you’re here for, right?

Last year actually outmatched the “banner” year of 2022, and I was wondering if I was going to be able to do better.

And I did!

Kind of.

I ended up playing 136 unique games (2023 had 127), which totally floored me! Especially since we were missing a few Sundays for various reasons and vacations seemed to hamper lunch-time gaming some at work.

Overall plays were at 256, which is one short of last year’s 257, but had a wider spread of games.

Of those 136 games, 69 were new to me (so just over half, not bad!) as opposed to 59 last year.

I think part of all this was the conventions, where I had four of them: Orcacon in January, Terminal City in March, Dragonflight in August and Bottoscon in November.

There were a lot of games played at those.

Last year I mentioned there could be 6 conventions. I know one of them I didn’t go to, but I can’t for the life of me think of what the other one was (we decided two years ago to never go to CascadeCon again, so that wasn’t it).

Anyway!

My most-played game of 2024 was Oh My Goods, the push your luck, produce resources and building your buildings card game, with 18 plays.

The only reason we played it that much was because both expansions were purchased and we decided we wanted to push through both “campaigns”. That’s at least 12 plays right there!

The next highest, of course, was Combat Commander Europe, due to the monthly ladder (10 plays, because the other 2 are in the Pacific) and then four non-ladder games as well.

I’m proud I managed to get four of those done, though two of them were in the last week due to me being off of work.

Third in number of plays was a bit of a cheat.

I Found Bigfoot was played at OrcaCon in January 8 times, mainly because I helping my friend Sean, the publisher, demo it to a bunch of convention-goers (including Mik & Starla from Our Family Plays Games, and it was so cool to meet them both!)

It was a nice mix of “new to me” and older games that I’ve already played in 2024, which was also nice. I managed to play every Garphill game I have except Raiders of the North Sea. I really want to get that one to the table again with the expansions that I’ve bought but never played.

Maybe one day. That’s a 2025 goal!

(That’s not Raiders, obviously. It’s their newest game, Inventors of the South Tigris).

I only had two “Dimes” last year (that’s games played 10 times or more), which was too bad. That does explain the higher number of games but fewer number of plays, though.

Meeting Mik & Starla were obviously one of the highlights of my year, but I did have a few others as well.

My friends Clio and Michal and I continued to play some games on Rally the Troops, introducing me to a Plantagenet and Friedrich (both of which I’m not sure I was in the best mental place to learn, but they were still both amazingly fun) as well as continuing our Time of Crisis games with Alex and Grant from the Players’ Aid.

It was also really cool to spend two conventions with my Seattle friends: Sean (from Thing12 Games) and Josh and the rest of their friends and family who joined us.

They made both conventions really fun and enjoyable, and they were also quite welcoming at Dragonflight to a couple of my Vancouver friends who needed a space to hang out occasionally as well.

Many thanks to them. They are wonderful people. I will miss them at OrcaCon this year, but I will see them at Dragonflight again!

Which leads me to once again say how much I value the gaming communities I’ve joined.

From Sean’s group, to Clio, Michal, Grant and Alex and my other blogging friends, to the Combat Commander group who have been wonderful to me (thanks, Patrick!), those are the mainstays from previoius years.

But I also joined up with the Heavy Cardboard patrons when I rejoined Edward’s Patreon.

I haven’t spoken to Edward personally like the others, but it’s very cool to hang out with the patrons, see the patron-only streams (sadly I am rarely able to see them live) and I thank him for forming such a welcoming community.

And then my good friend Zilla!

I joined his Patreon at the beginning of the year but have been watching his videos for a while now and he’s recently started up a Discord channel for his patrons.

The community that’s been formed there has been stellar as well.

I have to also shout out the people on the Pixelated Cardboard Discord. I’ve been on there a while (I should have shouted them out a long time ago) and they’ve become friends as well, and are also very supportive of this blog.

Much online gaming is being done!

That’s quite the year in gaming.

How did the blogging go?

It was up and down, as I said, regarding posting frequency, but I did manage to even things out a bit.

There was no way I was going to match last year’s 160 posts, though part of that was because I didn’t review every game insert I bought or created and I didn’t do a lot of “news” posts compared to previous years.

I’m not sure why that is. I will do a couple of Folded Space insert reviews this month, though, and sometimes the news is just not that interesting to me.

There’s a lot of news, but since you can get that elsewhere, I really don’t want to post about it unless it’s something huge or something that I’m really looking forward to.

I also really slacked off on the Friday Night Shots posts. I wasn’t able to maintain my weekly frequency, and sometimes it was a month or 6 weeks in between them.

That accounted for the lack of posts as well.

I just was having trouble finding topics that really engaged me enough to write.

But I would like to get back to them more this year.

There were too many months of single-digit posting (only six posts in September!) for my preference. I want to do better than that.

Let’s get to the numbers, though.

I finished the year with 112 posts, which matches 2021 and is the third-highest number of posts in my blogging career, which I am proud of.

That’s mainly because I worked hard in November and December, though, as well as the Top 50 games of all time that I posted in January (that’s 5 posts right there).

Once again there was a big uptick of visitors and views in the weeks before and after Christmas, which helped because views were kind of down throughout the year.

When you don’t post new stuff, people stop coming.

Who knew?

Even with that, though, my total views went down a bit this year, to 44,122 (down from 51,145). That was actually my worst year for views since 2019.

Let’s not allow that to happen again this year!

(I don’t count 2020 because two massively popular Terraforming Mars news posts really skewed the stats that year).

I had 30,008 visitors this year, way down from last year’s 35,963, but again when you don’t post, people don’t come.

How about blog output?

Not coming close to 160 posts, the number of words I wrote obviously went down, but I ended up with 196,790, mainly due to some really long posts!

I don’t know if I got more long-winded or what, but I’m kind of proud of that (I hope I’m not rambling, though).

This averaged out to 1757 words per post which is a record, and that’s with some very short Friday Night Shots posts! Though there weren’t as many of them as last year.

Maybe I am bloviating…

As for individual posts, my biggest post in hits for 2024 was my review of Earth, a fantastic tableau-building card game which obviously remains popular.

It had 1228 hits.

The second highest was my Early Access review of the Dune: Imperium app (it came out in December last year, so most of its hits are this year anyway).

That came in at 1110 hits.

Hopefully my review of the Rise of Ix expansion that just came out will reach those heights next year!

(It only has 87 views right now).

My third highest, trailing far behind at 591 hits, is my review of the Wingspan app, which is still going strong considering how old it is.

Of my 2024 posts, what’s really surprising me is how many hits my First Impressions – Harmonies post is receiving, especially since it only came out a few months ago.

It’s been killing it in the last couple of months, ending the year at 558 hits (323 of those hits in December!).

I guess that’s an indication of how much the public has really enjoyed this game.

My second highest 2024 post is my review of Ark Nova: Marine Worlds, the excellent expansion to my favourite game.

That had 535 hits.

That brings me to lifetime hits, which Wingspan is clearly at the top with 8884 hits, far surpassing the second highest, the Terraforming Mars – Prelude 2 expansion news post from 2023 (4147 hits).

That’s not getting many hits now, but it had tons last year.

With Wingspan breaking 8000 hits, it’s still my only one that’s even close.

I do, however, have 10 posts over 2000 views (only 8 last year) and 44 posts over 1000 views (33 last year).

So things are getting up there!

Four are over 3000 views, with my Ark Nova review very close at 2996.

There were none last year.

One thing that really was disappointing, however, was the 482 comments this year, which is the lowest ever. Likes were also down.

Oh well, hopefully that will improve with more actual production.

As I said last year, and as I have to say to myself a lot, this is a hobby for me.

These views are nothing compared to some of the other blogs out there (like the Players’ Aid!) and even people who find the blog will check it out and maybe read the page, or maybe just bounce off of it and find some other thing.

I don’t put any money into the blog except the annual domain name and WordPress payment. I don’t monetize it at all, I don’t even have a logo (maybe one day, Michal! Sorry I haven’t followed your suggestion, but I would like to eventually).

This is a hobby, and I should treat it like a hobby and not let it get me down when things aren’t happening.

I should write because I want to write and not because I want prestige or recognition.

I write because it makes me feel good when I have finished a post (though getting started can be very hard sometimes).

I still often feel like “what’s the point? Nobody’s reading this anyway” and suffer from true Imposter Syndrome.

But I’m fighting it.

That leads to one suggestion for everybody out there, including me because I don’t think I do it enough.

If you like something, tell the person who created it that you do, at least sometimes (it doesn’t have to be every time if it’s a regular thing).

One of the many times this year when I was doubting myself, Dan (from Space-Biff) made a casual mention in response to my comment on his blog that he always likes reading my stuff.

Dan is my reviewing idol, and to hear somebody who I respect so much actually say that to me?

It made my day and sparked a lot of creativity over the next few days.

It made it all seem worth it.

So if you like reading or watching somebody’s stuff and you haven’t said it in a while?

Let them know you like it.

It could make a world of difference. Maybe they’re having a bad day and hearing that just made it seem that much better?

Maybe they get that all the time and it’s just another instance of it?

Doesn’t matter. You don’t know, so why not take the chance to brighten somebody’s day?

Let’s talk subscribers, those who regularly can look at the blog because they get notified of a new post. (but really, how many do? I’m not sure and I don’t want to think about it).

I currently have 231 subscribers (I can no longer figure out how to differentiate between WordPress and Email), which is up from last year’s 221. That makes me happy.

I’m also really enjoying the BlueSky community of board gamers!

So many great people over there. You can find a link to my profile on the sidebar if you are interested in following.

I only send these blog posts to Twitter now (I refuse to call it X), so all of my actual interaction is on BlueSky.

Where are all these visitors from?

No real change from last year!

Obviously the highest total is from the United States, with 18,181 views.

Second highest, as usual (and as it should be) is Canada with 5811 views.

Third is the UK, with 4253.

As always, fourth and fifth are very close between Germany (thanks, Clio!) and Australia (thanks, Dave!)

Germany has 1597 and Australia has 1632 (though last year it was the other way around).

Finally, as I always do, I want to give a shout-out to three countries where I received one hit from.

I really wish one of them would leave a comment so I know what brought them here!

I seem to get an annual visit from Qatar (there was only one last year too).

I wonder if it’s the same person?

There was also one from Bermuda and one from the Bahamas.

Whether you came just once or whether you’ve come multiple times, I really hope you know how much I appreciate you visiting.

I write this for me, but it’s always nice to know somebody else is out there.

I hope you all have a wonderful 2025 and I wish you all the best.

Hopefully I can add to that as well.