Another year older. Another year wiser. Or less wise maybe. But, here we are! We have reached our 8th Anniversary as The Players’ Aid Blog (& YouTube Channel). As I sat here contemplating this over the past month, I still cannot believe it. 8 years has just flown by but it probably has moved as quickly as it has because we have had loads of fun doing it! 2023 was another great year for The Players’ Aid! We have continued playing and reviewing wargames and have hit several large milestones this past year including 2,500 posts on the blog, 4,800,000 lifetime views on the blog and recently we surpassed the 18,000 YouTube subscribers threshold. It is the 8th year of doing this thing and we are so glad that both you and we have stuck together through the journey. We are continually reenergized by our followers and your comments on our content and want to thank you all for that! Overall, the last year was a HUGE success for us as we have once again experienced good and steady growth in our written blog content as well as in our YouTube Channel. Even after all of this time doing what we do, we still have a desire to meet weekly, sometimes twice, and play new wargames to share with you. It has truly become our passion and we love doing what we do!

Happy Birthday To Us!

Before we start talking about anything, we both wanted to give a sincere thank you to everyone that has been with us on this 8-year long ride. As you know, we started the blog in 2016 with our first post being on April 17, 2016 which was a very short AAR on our first attempt at playing Empire of the Sun from GMT Games (I look at the pictures we used in that AAR and notice that the counters were not clipped! Barbarians!). We still laugh to this day about the fact that this was one of our first games that we tried to cover. I guess we both like diving into the deep end of the pool! From those meager beginnings, we have posted lots and I think have improved the quality of our content since that first try. Your readership and viewing has helped keep us inspired and motivated to put out consistent content. Its been a lot of work, and does take up quite a bit of our free time, but we do enjoy it and have no plans to slow the train down. We also have been very lucky in the support that we have received from various publishers, websites and designers as they have worked to keep us going as well. From sharing our posts on Twitter, to posting our videos and reviews on the game pages on their websites, a good portion of our views come from these sources and we truly appreciate that.

We also want to thank the host of game designers who have taken time out of their busy schedules to answer our long and sometimes deep questions about their designs in our written interviews. Our Designer Interviews Series has been a huge success and is a big part of our weekly posts generally starting each week off with a new post on Mondays. In fact, to this point in 2024, we have posted 18 interviews and that is just in a period of 16 weeks. I work hard to try and stay up on the newest games and give our readers an inside look at the mechanics, design process and game play on these in-design games. We recently have been covering more Kickstarters in this fashion and have started sometimes posting those interviews in the middle of the week near the campaign’s kickoff. I have very rarely been told no by someone when I contact them on email to discuss their game and have been able to build quite a number of what I would call friendships with several of these designers. I will not name specific individuals, as I don’t want to inadvertently leave someone out, but thanks to you all! You are simply the best!

We have continued with our monthly Wargame Watch Series, our coverage of GMT Games’ Monthly Update emails as well as Action Points, First Impressions posts and the occasional Best 3 Games with… Series and The Love/Hate Relationship Series. On our YouTube Channel, the Monthly Debrief Series is alive, our new Car Videos are a big hit, except for that damn lap blanket debacle, and Alexander has started a series called Faction Function (I am not a fan of the name but he does what he wants) that takes a deep dive into the strategy and tactics of factions in several big games such as Andean Abyss and Wilderness War from GMT Games. I have also really worked hard on my solo gaming this past year and was able to fully play 15 solitaire games along with shooting playthrough and review videos. We appreciate all of your response to these continuing series and hope to be able to continue them but also create some fresh and new ideas in the future.

The Blog By the Numbers

With those pleasantries out of the way, onto a look at the blog statistics, which is always my favorite part of writing this post! Statistics are a good indicator of how we are doing and I personally pay a lot of attention to our daily, weekly and monthly numbers. Actually, I might say that I am addicted to looking at them and check several times per day. I am a results driven person after all and have to win at everything!

Since the blog started in April 2016, we have been viewed over 4.8 million times (as compared to 4.2 million this time last year). These views have come from an astounding 1,568,851 visitors (as compared to 1,331,940 visitors as of April 2023). This means that each visitor that comes onto the blog averages 3.08 views. This number is down slightly form last year’s 3.15 views per visitor but is still very comparable. In fact, I have noticed that this views per visitor number has slightly gone down 4 out of the last 5 years. I will have to put my thinking cap on about this but am not really concerned. It is a good thing through that when people do come onto the blog they seem to spend some time viewing our current content and sometimes even diving back through our older stuff. That is one thing that I like about how our platform WordPress runs, as they will link comparable articles and posts below the new post so that when the reader is finished they can simply click a link there to take them to another similar article.

We have really been blown away by the response that we have seen in our blog over the past 8 years. While Alexander no longer writes on the blog, I have really enjoyed continuing to cover games in the written format as I know that there are people out there who prefer it to videos and our statistics prove that point. I know that I prefer written blogs over videos when consuming gaming content but everyone is different! I still marvel that we actually started this little venture but more importantly that we are still going 8 years later.

My mind is very analytical and I really like to think about and consider strategies and probabilities of outcomes during game plays. Don’t get me wrong, I am not a card counter or anything like that but I do like to consider the odds of success before taking certain actions. And I like to put those thoughts down on paper (digitally) here on the blog to share my insights with you. One of my most favorite series to write are Action Points. They give me the opportunity to create tables and graphs to look at the numbers inside of games as I analyze a game and its mechanics. These posts are not always the highest view garnering posts we do but I am not going to give up doing them as they are really for me and my enjoyment. If others read them and gain something form them, then that is great!

I also really do enjoy the process and activity of writing. It is soothing and takes my mind off of life for a while and really speaks to the creative side of my brain. I also love to consider how to introduce a subject to the reader, how to incorporate my hard drive full of nostalgia and movies into the narrative I am trying to spin. Sometimes I am more successful with this effort than others but I do enjoy doing that. I have no plans to stop writing but do have a bit of an obsession with it and spend a lot of time (really too much time) on the blog. In fact, as of the writing of this entry, I am currently on a whopping 246 day post streak! I also am going to add that I already have posts written and scheduled through to the date of this post on April 16th so that will mean the streak will be extended to an astounding 251 days! That is 68.8% of a full year. One day that streak will be broken and I will take a much needed break for a few days “but it is not this day!”

You will also notice that we have done 2,557 posts over the eight year period that our blog has existed. Remember though that 2016 only included 9 months of content while 2024 only takes into account the first three and a half months of the year, which accounts for the lower numbers for those shown years. If you look at the individual years’ numbers though you will see that we posted a lot in 2017 (432), 2018 (335), 2020 (355) and 2023 (267) while 2019 (194) and 2021 (200) were both a bit of a slow year as I had started a new job and was very busy with some travel and out of town work that kept me from my regular routine of writing. 2022 picked back up though and I made a concerted effort to get back to regular content. Also, early on, remember that there were three of us writing for the blog (remember Tim?) and over the past few years it has just been Alexander and I, although at this point as mentioned earlier I do 99.9% of the posts on the blog. Prior to this past year, one of the reasons that our statistics have continued to rise is that we posted more regular content with at least 5 posts per week, sometimes as many as 7. This consistency kept our blog fresh in our readers minds and on their timelines. Over the past few years, the number of posts has declined from previous years because I have simply become much busier in life with my work (the job that pays) and my children as they have grown and are into more activities. But we are on an upward trend at the moment and I fully expect to have over 350 posts again in 2024.

Another interesting statistical compilation that is provided by our WordPress software is a look at not only the number of posts but also the total number of comments, total post likes, total words written as well as some averages across those numbers. Interaction on posts has been much improved over the past few years as compared to previous years with more comments (1,997 for 2023 vs. 1,431 for 2022) and more likes (2,249 for 2023 vs. 1,562 for 2022). This is a very good thing and an upward trend that I would hope to see continue as I do love to hear your thoughts on my posts and about the games or subjects being covered. I consider myself to be pretty wordy in my posts and that is being proven with total word counts in 367 posts in 2023 of 660,325 and average words per post of 1,799, which are both higher than in 2022. It appears that through the first 3 1/2 months in 2024 I have become wordier but I know that I have done more lists and have started some more in-depth looks at games and also posted a lot more.

Over the past eight years, we have built quite a library of content and we still come up often in internet searches which brings a lot of visitors to our site. In fact, here is a look at some interesting data from the blog where you can see our top Referrers from 2023. These are sites that send visitors to our site as they have hosted or linked to our articles, videos or other content and people find us this way. Notice though that Search Engines sent 129,946 views our way, which is about 21.3% of our total views (Total Views for 2023 were 609,549). Social Media is also a good source for views as Facebook brought in 46,370 views (up a lot over 2022 from 26,771 views) and Twitter 19,402 (up a bit over 2022 from 13,241 views). GMT Games is a big part of our views as they have referred 14,472 views (up ever so slightly over 2022 from 14,325 views) as well as Consimworld which referred 8,529 (up quite a lot over 2022 from 5,371 views). Not shown in the graphic are the myriad of smaller referrers that send views our way. That list is really very long and I couldn’t post the whole graphic but there are about another 130+ referrers ranging from 250 views referred all the way down to just a handful of referrals. We appreciate all the views though and will never not be grateful for any help that we can get.

The following graphic shows our Monthly Views since 2016 and tells a really interesting story. As you can see, our monthly views had been steadily increasing over the years, growing from a Monthly Average Views of just 16,153 in 2016 to over 71,856 in 2021. This slowed down quite a bit though in 2022 with a Monthly Average Views number of just 43,891. We refer to this as the “Dark Times”.

Oh, how we miss the Pandemic and all the wargamers who had nothing better to do while stuck at home than to watch Netflix or read our blog! As you can see, as I started posting on the blog less starting in July 2021, our monthly views dropped off to the lowest point since 2016. But thus far in 2023 and into 2024, we are rebounding and slowly returning to a number closer to our monthly average views found in 2018 and 2019. One other point that I would like to highlight is that our Monthly Views in January (59,300), February (55,900) and March 2024 (54,600) have been our highest monthly views for those three months since the anomaly which was 2020 and 2021. This is a positive sign of some traction in our views moving forward and a look ahead to continued growth and reach.

A few years ago when we posted these stats there was a request for a map of viewers and viewership based on location. The WordPress (powered by JetPack) statistics are pretty good so here’s a look at the top country views for 2023. Obviously the US (278,262 or 45.7%) is where the majority of views come from with the UK (70,418 or 11.6%), Canada (30,338 or 5%), Germany (26,265 or 4.3%), France (24,989), Australia (21,745) and Spain (21,451) bringing up the 2nd-7th spots respectively. I am actually very pleased to see our growth in the non-English speaking (I realize some are bilingual and do speak English but not as their primary language) views from these great European nations. I am always surprised when we get a comment or interaction with fans from other countries and when I look at this graphic I realize that we are a global blog with lots of fans in lots of countries and that makes me very happy.

Top Performing Blog Posts for 2022

In the anniversary post last year, I showed you a list of our best performing posts on the blog. So I will continue that trend this year by showing our best performing posts for 2023. The same as last year, it seems that lists of games do the best, including features like Grant’s Top 10 Solitaire Wargames – 2022 Edition, *SPOILERS* Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 that has performed well for years, Grant’s Top 10 Solitaire Wargames 2022 Edition, Grant’s Top 10 Wargames of 2022!, Grant’s Most Anticipated Wargames of 2023! and so on. People really like lists as they are a quick source of lots of good games that people can investigate, purchase and play. A couple of other key performers were my Best 3 Games with…Card Driven Games!, Best 3 Games with…World War I, The COIN Series from GMT Games – 10 Reasons it is Great! and Gaming the American Revolution – 2020 Edition. Most of our blog posts get 300-700 views in the first week they are on the blog and then over the next month will get an additional 200-400 views, sometimes more depending on the topic and how often I share them on social media. We are not a high view blog, partly because we are a wargaming blog really with only ever a smattering of coverage for traditional board games, but also because we don’t pay to promote our posts on social media nor do I spend a glut of time posting our stuff on other forums. I could do that and we would get more response but I just don’t have that kind of time.

Designer Interviews

In 2023, the blog hosted 57 interviews with designers (up 2 interviews as compared to 2022 with 55 hosted), with several of those being for Kickstarters. That means that we posted more than 1 interview per week so we were busy. Thus far in 2024, we have posted 22 such interviews and seem to have no problem finding interested designers who want to share their games. I regularly scour various sources for news and anytime I find information about an upcoming game I add it to my list and try to reach out to at least 3-4 designers each month. The goal here is to have a continual pipeline of these designer interviews in the works, either having sent questions out to the designers or working to format and schedule interviews I have received back on the blog, I am always a few weeks ahead in order to make sure I have a continual flow of posts. Currently, we have interviews already scheduled to post on the blog through May 13th and I have at least 3-4 others that I need to review, edit, format and then load onto the blog. Here is a look at some of our better performing designer interview posts from 2023:

Interview with Mark Simonitch Designer of North Africa ’41: The Western Desert, March through December 1941 from GMT Games – our number 1 performing interview is an operational wargame from GMT Games and the master that is Mark Simonitch. Such a great game by the way and you can read about it in my First Impressions post.

Interview with Ted Raicer Designer of I, Napoleon from GMT Games – our number 2 performing interview is from a great designer who is trying his hand at a historical roleplaying solitaire game about the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.

Interview with Fabrizio Vianello Designer of Die Festung Hamburg from Thin Red Line Games – a real wargame on a real topic the Cold War Gone Hot in 1985.

Interview with Interview with Yves Rettel Designer of Red Strike – 1989 from VUCA Simulations – another Cold War Gone Hot wargame but this time from a new publisher VUCA Simulations who has the best production out there right now.

Interview with Francisco Gradaille Designer of Cuius Regio: The Thirty Years War from GMT Games – a very good and talented Spanish designer with some great work on this history of The Thirty Years War.

These were simply some of our best performing designer interviews on the blog throughout the year. To access our backlog of these interviews, just go to our blog and check out the Categories section located on the right side of the screen and enter Designer Interviews. To date, we have posted over 470 of these designer interviews. I really enjoy doing them, always learn something about design and get more excited about upcoming games.

Social Media/Other Platforms

One of our most important marketing efforts is our focus on various Social Media platforms with the most used platform being Twitter (although it is becoming a black hole) followed by Facebook. We share our posts from the blog on Twitter (@playersaidblog), Facebook (@theplayersaid), Mastadon (@theplayersaidgrant@wargamers.social) and Blue Sky (@playersaidblog.bsky.social) daily and have expanded into sharing in around 7 Facebook groups including Wargamers, Solitaire Wargames, Official GMT Games Group (when our posts focus on one of GMT’s games), GMT Games Fans, The Jacobin Wargamer, The Board Wargamer, THE BOARDGAME GROUP and finally our own page The Players’ Aid. I always worry about our frequency of posts and upsetting the groups but I do spend time trying to respond to comments and questions on our posts, share my gaming pictures there and read others posts and comment on them as well.

As you can see from the table above, I missed noting our stats for these Social Media platforms in 2019 but we have had a lot of growth in our Social Media reach in 2023 with an 11.4% increase in Twitter followers, 28.2% increase in our Facebook follows (the 554 new Facebook follows in 2023 is our largest numerical increase to date and is mostly due to my commitment to post game pics as well rather than just links to our content) and 6.0% increase in Instagram followers (which is a platform that we really have ignored over the past couple of years). Our Blog Follows have crept up adding 56 new follows in 2023 but that growth has slowed down considerably. You can follow the blog one of two ways, either with your own WordPress site or through email. In just over 7 1/2 years, as we didn’t use social media much the first year, we have built a network of followers on these platforms that really helps us to engage and have discussions on various topics. This year we added Blue Sky to our social media repertoire and have built a good little community there and hope to continue good growth so we can chat and connect with you.

Our biggest area of growth though has been in our YouTube Channel as we now have over 18,000 subscribers. Compared to this time last year in April 2023, we gained 2,216 subs or a 13.8% increase. This growth was a bit less than in 2022 but still really solid. We are always amazed and humbled that so many of you want to hear what we have to say and spend so much time with us watching our videos. In early 2023, Alexander upgraded the thumbnails on the videos with category specific colors and consistent wording and we feel that this was a good move on our part and makes our channel look that much more professional.

As you can see in the graphic below, we had 992,532 total views of our videos on YouTube over the past year (April 2023 through April 2024). That is a bit more than in 2022 as we had 914,600. This represents about an 8% increase in views. Those total views have added up to 145,418 hours of viewing, which is amazing to me! This is a bit higher than in 2022 as well as we had 143,000 that year. Most of our videos are around 40-60 minutes so this means a lot of viewing for a fair bit of time. Wargamers are a bit more committed than other gaming groups so watching through an entire video is not that weird for Grognards. My guess is we will reach 20,000 subscribers in early 2025 so please subscribe to our channel if you haven’t already.

Overall, since starting the channel in 2017, we have had 4.8 million views, 161,900 Likes, 23,800 Comments and 12,900 Shares. That is very pleasing to see and we are so glad that our videos are being consumed and hopefully making a difference in the wargaming community.

Monthly Debrief Videos

In 2021, we started the Monthly Debrief Series of videos where we talk about what games we played the previous month and what we plan to play in the coming month as well as what games are on Kickstarter and a protracted discussion on a chosen monthly topic. These videos have been very well received. We have done one of these videos each month since their inception in January 2021 and to date have garnered a total of 278,858 views. This equates to a total of 7,967 average views per episode, which is a number we are very pleased with! We tend to ramble on in these videos and they are over an hour each so thank you for watching and sticking with us as we go on and on! This years we have started Season 4 of these videos and I am really amazed that they still garner views and engagement. They are admittedly long, and I always find them fairly boring, but people tend to view them for sure. We still have lots of great topics that we can discuss and always seem to come up with something new to share.

Noble Knight Games Sponsorship

We also have continued our relationship with Noble Knight Games as a sponsor for our Monthly Debrief Video Series. In case you don’t know, they specialize in hard to find games but also carry all the new releases. But what makes them truly unique is that you can find some of the rarest games, out of print games, hand made games, imported games from overseas, etc. Thanks to them for their sponsorship and we hope that you will consider them first when looking for the games we cover.

We were able to make the trip to NKG HQ in Fitchburg, Wisconsin last fall and had an amazing experience touring the warehouse, meeting the great team there, playing some games and also trading in some games! Here is a link to our Debrief Video about the trip:

Patreon

We have now been on Patreon for five years and if you didn’t know you can donate a fixed dollar amount monthly ranging from $1 to $25 to help us to keep going. The added revenue from this service has allowed us to upgrade our video and audio equipment, purchase some new lighting for the bunker, get a nice video stand for when I shoot solo videos, add some soundproofing foam to the ceilings in the bunker (that really hasn’t helped all that much but you get what you pay for!) and has also allowed us to attend a few more gaming conventions than we normally could. We have also purchased our TPA banner that you see in our videos and take that with us to conventions as well so you can find us. As of now, we have 149 Patrons which is about 34.2% more than last year (111). We have quite the good discussions on our Slack Channel and have also started asking our Patrons for ideas on topics to discuss during our Monthly Debrief Video Series. We’re still a little hesitant about Patreon, it feels really weird asking for donations, but we have put those donations to good use, so thanks. Just to be clear, we started and have done most of this content creation of our own volition, so there’s no risk of us going away or having to shut up shop because of a lack of money. We just wanted a way that’s a bit more official for you to become a part of what we do and we can more easily manage a few perks for those that do donate! If you wish to become a Patron, you can do so by clicking the link imbedded into the picture below.

Spring Merch

One final thing. We have had a deal for a few years now with Spring who sells our t-shirts for a fairly reasonable price as well as a few other pieces of swag including logo stickers, blankets, mugs, sweatshirts and even face masks (we are proud of our logo as it was designed by Alexander with my input and feel it conveys a lot about who we are and what we stand for) so when we see it on a t-shirt in the wild or at a convention, it brings us great joy! If you are interested in our merchandise, you can follow the link in the below image.

To wrap this up, we simply want to say thank you for all of the support that you give us and for your interest in our content. Ultimately blogs and YouTube Channels only really continue with consistent posts if there is a response. The work involved, while it is a hobby and something that we do for the love of the games, does take us away from some of our other responsibilities at least partially and it is good to see that our content is having an impact on someone. We have made a lot of good friends through this little content creation experiment of ours and we look forward to seeing many of you this summer at great conventions like Buckeye Game Fest (May 2nd-5th) in Columbus, Ohio, Gen Con (August 1st-4th) in Indianapolis and San Diego HistoriCON in San Diego, California (sometime in early November). Please come out and say hi and maybe we can play a game together!

Please let us know what you would like to see from our blog and YouTube Channel in the future and also tell us what you enjoy about our content. Thanks and here is to another successful year in 2024!

-Grant