Blog in Review – 2025

Happy New Year, everybody!

I hope you had a wonderful and safe holiday season and new year’s celebration last night.

Maybe you were out celebrating, or just having drinks with friends?

Or maybe you were even asleep?

Whichever it was, I hope it was good for you.

As I did last year, and for the last 6 years as well, this is a Blog Review post for 2025, looking back at my gaming and blogging and reflecting on the changes from year to year.

It’s not a full year in review post, since that would seriously depress me.

I mean, 2025 was a real shitshow overall.

Instead, it’s just me, my personal stuff, gaming and blogging.

Which, while not a shitshow, was really up and down.

Let’s take a real look and see what’s what.

I once again had a bunch of personal issues regarding anxiety and “why am I doing this?” which led to some lack of motivation to keep the blog going.

I certainly got past some of that, which was great, and I did hit a nice milestone.

Only 6 posts in February, 7 in April, and 6 in July really was annoying (not to mention just 8 in September).

But I finished out strong and I had some really strong months outside of those.

Let’s leave the blog stuff for a moment, though I did want to take a moment to say how much I value any and all of my readers.

I’ve picked up some new regulars, from both work and also just out in the blogosphere, which has been really nice.

Whether you are just seeing this post for the first time or if you’ve been following the blog for years, thank you.

You don’t know how much that means to me.

Now, let’s talk about the good stuff, as I had a banner year in gaming.

And I’m not sure why!

Well, I know part of it…

Anyway, I ended up playing 165 unique games (up from 136 last year) which just completely blew my mind.

That is by far the best I’ve ever done.

And it would be enough to do a Top 10 games played list if 2026 wasn’t the year to do a new Top 50 all-time games countdown.

Look for that throughout January, because there are some surprises!

Overall, the number of plays were at 351, which again is just miles above the previous 256.

This one is due to a combination of factors: Final Girl and a bunch of short lunchtime games (or fillers at our game days) that we were able to play multiple times in one sitting.

In fact, lunchtime games added a whole bunch, with 11 plays of Cover Your Assets, 9 plays of Doomlings (reviewing the new expansion bolster packs), 6 plays of Bomb Busters, 7 plays of Cascadia plus multiple games of Forest Shuffle and Vale of Eternity.

Of those 165 unique games, 83 were new to me, so just over half.

Not bad!

In fact, the proportion was almost exactly the same as last year (136 with 69 new ones).

There were certainly conventions involved in the number of games played, with Terminal City in March, Bottoscon in November, and the new Bottoscon Spring in June.

Sadly, though, due to the situation in the United States, we will not be going there anytime soon.

Thus, I missed seeing my Seattle contingent of friends and also missed OrcaCon (though that was more the change in venue since Trump hadn’t been inaugurated yet) and Dragonflight in August.

Still, at the three conventions I did get to, there were a lot of games played.

The game that was most played is probably not a surprise, given the number of reviews I’ve written this year for it.

Final Girl was played 26 times!

The next highest was Cover Your Assets, with 13 plays (not all were at lunch at work).

This game gets to the table so much that I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s high on my played list in 2026.

It plays 6 and plays really fast, though we are now playing it the “right” way where you either play 3 rounds or you play until somebody hits $1 million.

I think the first 4-5 recorded plays of this in 2025 were individual plays rather than that way.

So maybe the number of plays won’t be quite as high.

Third on my list is, of course, Combat Commander: Europe.

There were 10 ladder games of that (the other two ladder games are Combat Commander: Pacific) but there was also one game (incomplete) with my good friend Zilla Blitz!

I was teaching him the game and we have a fun post/video combination coming out in January sometime.

I’m really looking forward to that.

There was a nice mix of new and old, with some oddities if you know me and my Garphill Games madness.

First, I only got one play in of their two newest games: Assyria: 2nd Edition and Skara Brae (“newest” being newest that I bought, as they did come out with others).

I just couldn’t get them to the table again to play enough to write a review.

That’s a goal for 2026.

One of my goals for 2025 was to get Raiders of the North Sea played (the only Garphill game I own that I hadn’t played in 2024), but sadly that didn’t happen.

Not only that, though, I played neither Paladins of the West Kingdom nor Architects of the West Kingdom!

I think I may have to turn in my fanboy card.

There were some other highlights of my gaming year, in addition to just the wide range of games that I played.

I continued to play online games on Boardgame Arena, Yucata, and Rally the Troops.

I had some really fun games of Time of Crisis and 1989: Dawn of Freedom with my good friends Michal and Clio, along with Grant from the Players’ Aid.

I would love to play 1989 live, but unfortunately asynchronously it can be a bit of a pain due to the Power Struggle mechanic, where you are just playing one card and then the other player has to respond.

It is a really fun variation on Twilight Struggle, though.

I also own it, so an in-person real-time play would be awesome!

Also on Rally the Troops, I learned from Michal a really great “Irregular Conflicts” series game called Vijayanagara, which is a COIN-like game that plays three players and takes place in India from 1290-1398.

It’s a power struggle between two rebellious factions and the government, with the government also having to fend off the Mongol hordes periodically.

Surprisingly, it’s a game that I “got” pretty quickly, which is a change from most complicated games that I try to learn online.

I don’t always do well, but I’ve actually won a couple!

We played it with Clio as well.

Anyway, that was great fun, and also brings me to the other blogging friend I made this year: Nate from the Breakup Gaming Society podcast.

He also played some Vijayanagara games with Michal and I, as well as some Faraway games (many many many of them) on Boardgame Arena with me.

He’s a great guy, very supportive and also entertaining and interesting in his own right.

I value all of the supporters and friends that I’ve made in the blogging and online game content sphere, from Michal, Clio, Grant & Alex, Nate, and I have to also mention my good friend Zilla Blitz!

Zilla has been very supportive of this blog, even posting a link to one of my Combat Commander AARs in the notes to one of his videos (or maybe it was to his Youtube page itself? I forget) that caused my hits to skyrocket for a couple of days.

As I mentioned above, we’re doing a collaboration that will go live sometime in January that I’m really looking forward to.

I enjoyed my part of it!

Also, I can’t really talk about my online gaming without mentioning the wonderful people on the Pixelated Cardboard Discord channel.

I have played many, many games with them on Boardgame Arena or on some boardgame apps (like Ark Nova!), along with tournaments on BGA.

Also, two others from the Discord and myself are in an ongoing game of Grand Austria Hotel that is going to have some implications in my Top 50 that you will see in the next month or so.

We’ve also had some great discussions in the Discord chat.

I value all of you!

So, with all of that gaming, how did the blogging go?

Hit or miss, though the year ended really well and I had one of my best years total (though not the best, because I don’t think I’ll ever be able to top 2023’s 160 posts).

As I said, there were a few months where my mental health just kept me from writing much.

But I made up for that in some of the other months.

13 posts in May! 15 in October!

In fact, I finished out the year doing almost a post every other day.

There was a catalyst to that, though.

I finally found my spark when I hit my 1000 post mark.

Not only was it a great milestone, but I told my work friends about it and got a lot of encouragement from them.

After that I felt like I just wanted to post things, even if they wouldn’t be reading them.

And I did.

Their encouragement was enough, even though I knew only one or maybe two of them would be subscribing to the blog.

Sadly, not that many Friday Night Shots posts, as I still found those really hard to find topics for.

And the “bar” joke was starting to wear thin for me.

I would like to do more opinion (not just review) posts in 2026, but we’ll see.

Let’s do numbers.

I finished the year with 123 posts, much better than last year’s 112. I know in October, I was seriously doubting that I would hit 100, much less 112 or 123.

So yay me!

That is the second-highest number of posts, after the already-mentioned 160 in 2023.

Once again this year, there was a large uptick in visits and hits in the weeks before and after Christmas, though part of that (and it happened a few times this year too) was caused by what I think are bots of some kind.

On Christmas Day, I got a huge 369 hits, but only 131 visitors.

On the 24th, it was 210 hits from 89 visitors.

Maybe a few people found the blog and just liked exploring it?

The timing was quite suspicious, though, and I have a feeling that it was bots.

So the overall numbers are a bit skewed, but I’ll take them.

Because of these surges, my total hits were up this year compared to last, but not at record levels.

I rediscovered that whole “if you don’t post, people will stop coming” thing during those off times.

I did end up with 45,700 hits (up!) this year with 28,682 visitors (down!).

Last year was 44,122 hits and 30,008 visitors.

As I mentioned, there were 123 posts this year. The wordcount was pretty hefty because of that.

I wrote 215,543 words in those 123 posts, for an average of 1744 words per post (down only slightly from last year’s 1760).

I think part of that word count, because there were some very short posts this year, was due to my Final Girl reviews.

Those can get upwards of 3000 words because I’m detailing both the location and the killer, plus the Final Girls themselves.

Plus I have a new series of “looking at Boardgame Geek century” boardgame rankings that are over 2000 words each.

I hope you’re not getting tired of reading all that.

How about individual posts?

My biggest post in 2025 was about Wingspan: Asia coming to the digital app, at 958 hits.

And it was as amazing as it sounded!

Of course, after the initial rush before it actually came out, it did the best.

It’s been getting single digits each month since then.

The second highest was my review of the brilliant Ark Nova app.

That one came in at 763 hits.

This one was published late in December of 2024, so it follows that most of its hits were this year.

It did a brilliant 144 hits in December of this year!

Unlike last year, I didn’t have any 1000-hit posts, which kind of saddens me.

But upwards and onwards!

The third highest was also Ark Nova related, with my review of the Marine Worlds expansion.

This one only had 522 hits, but it’s also older (January 2024).

It’s been holding remarkably stead at 30-35 hits per month this year, with even more per month during the first part of the year.

One real surprise this year is that the book reviews (or at least some of them) are taking off higher than I would have suspected.

Hell, the Book Series recommendation of the “Berlin Wartime Thriller” series by Simon Scarrow had 314 hits this year!

Down from 388 last year, but the fact that it’s hanging around like that really surprises me, as my book reviews haven’t generally done that well.

This all brings me to lifetime hits to see how the various posts have been doing overall.

I’m not counting the two outliers that have well over 10,000 hits because they got most of them the month they were published (two Terraforming Mars announcements). These two posts skew the stats.

Not counting those, my top post is still (and probably will always be, barring some other post going viral or something) my Wingspan digital review.

It has 9380 hits, but probably won’t hit 10,000 for a couple of years (it only had 493 this year).

My second highest, way back at 4170 and probably not going to go too much higher, is the Terraforming Mars: Prelude 2 announcement.

I have to be frank, I was hoping that it would catch on like the Big Box announcements did.

Oh well.

That all being said, posts are getting higher and higher, which is good to see.

I do have 6 posts above 3000 views (only 4 last year), which is an improvement.

On the disappointing side, Likes and Comments are still going down (518 and 452, down from 534 and 489 last year).

I was hoping to get more engagement this year, but we’ll still keep at it.

Maybe avoiding posting lulls will help with that as well.

This is my annual reminder to myself (and if I did it more than annually, maybe I might not have lulls?) that this is a hobby for me.

This is not a money-maker for me. I only pay for the WordPress account and the domain name.

I post because of the satisfaction I get when I finish writing something.

I’ve always been a writer, and a blogger. I reviewed books, then I reviewed video games and talked about them, and now I review games and talk about them.

I love doing that!

I love my semi-shaky pictures because I’m trying not to delay our game too much and pissing everybody off while I’m taking a picture.

It’s always nice to hear from people who are liking what I write. It helps keep me going.

Of course, it’s always appreciated from long-time readers, but it also really gives me a shot in the arm when somebody who I had no idea even reads this blog compliments me on it.

I’ll repeat that getting the support from my work colleagues congratulating me on my 1000th post was really helpful.

And it made me feel good!

If you read (or watch) somebody’s work and you enjoy it, let them know occasionally.

It could be the encouragement they need to keep going when things are looking bleak for them.

I have to realize that I can’t compare my numbers to somebody like my friend Dan Thurot of Space-Biff.

We’re in two different worlds (both in quality as well as audience).

I do still have my mental health moments, and my “what the hell am I doing? Nobody reads this shit” times, and I am fighting them off as best I can.

Finally, speaking of potentially long-term readers, let’s talk subscribers.

I can’t break down the email versus WordPress subscribers anymore, but I’m happy with the numbers.

I have 248 subscribers, up from 231 last year, and at least two of them are friends of mine so I’m happy to have them!

Just like last year, I’m also really enjoying the BlueSky community of gamers.

I have had some wonderful interactions over there and I encourage you to come join us.

Unlike Twitter (with the algorithm that ate Morality, and I refuse to call it X), BlueSky is what you make of it.

If you don’t interact, people won’t interact with you and it will be a wasteland.

I love my boardgame peeps over there.

You can find me there via the link on the right side of this page!

One thing I would really love to find out, but I don’t think there’s an easy way of doing it other than reading a lot of posts there, is how I’m getting so many Reddit shares of my stuff.

All-time, I have 2700 Reddit shares!

I wish you could search Reddit for links so I could find out where these posts are going, but I do know I like seeing it.

Finally, let’s talk about where these visitors are coming from.

As is usual, most of the visits are from the United States, with 17,335 views this year.

Canada is second (it better be!) with 6354.

Third is the United Kingdom with 3624.

That’s all usual.

Somehow, though, Italy snuck into fourth at 2759!

What the heck is up with that?

Then, as per usual, Australia (thanks, Dave!) and Germany (thanks, Clio!) are the next two positions.

This year, Germany won with 1757 while Australia had a paltry 1466.

Come on, Dave. Step it up!

Each year, I always have to give a shoutout to those countries that I get one visitor from.

I really wish one of them would leave a comment and tell me how they found me!

Before that, though, it’s hard to believe that I actually got 4 visits from Qatar this year! It’s been one a year for the last several.

This year, I want to call out my one visitor from Nicaragua, Nepal, and Kyrgyzstan.

Represent!

And thank you for stopping by.

I hope it was a helpful visit.

Allow me to end by saying once again how much I love all of you who stop by to read even just some of these words that I’m putting out there in the Internet ether.

It’s been almost 9 years since I started this blog, and we’re at 1030 posts now.

Even if I do have my problems with motivation and getting down on myself, I couldn’t do it without you.

I do write this for me, but I might as well just keep a journal if nobody else is valuing it.

So thank you.

I hope you have a wonderful 2026 and I hope you decide to stay with me as well.

I have my biannual (is that “every other year”?) Top 50 games played of all time coming up this month, and even more good stuff I hope.

Please stick around and enjoy the ride with me.