It is just amazing how time just flies by. I have heard that as you age, time becomes more relative and the reason that things go so quickly when you are older is that you are comparing that momentary period to all of the other moments in your life and they seem shorter in relation to the totality of the whole. I guess that maybe Einstein had something there with his E = mc² thingy!

But, here we are! We have reached our 9th Anniversary as The Players’ Aid Blog (& YouTube Channel). 2024 was another great year for The Players’ Aid and we have continued playing and reviewing wargames and have hit several large milestones this past year including 2,900+ posts on the blog, 5,400,000 lifetime views on the blog and recently we surpassed the 20,000 YouTube subscribers threshold. It is the 9th 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! I am not a person that needs praise and encouragement often, but when it comes organically it really feels good and pumps me up! 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! In fact, I am not sure that I cold see a future without us doing this in some form or fashion.

Happy Birthday To Us!

Before we start talking about the numbers and anything else that comes to mind, we both wanted to simply give a sincere and heartfelt thank you to everyone that has been with us on this 9-year long journey. 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 and other social media sites, 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 know that we cannot possibly reach all of the wargamers out there by ourselves and need the community to help in spreading our words.

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 2025, we have posted 17 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 and Alexander has continued the very interesting From Cover to Cover Series where he reads a historical book and shares his thoughts on it and pairs it with an overview of a few games on the subject. In fact, I have also joined in the fray and done 2 of these videos; one covering War Along the Wabash: The Ohio Indian Confederacy’s Destruction of the US Army, 1791 written by Stephen P. Locke and The Longest Winter written by Alex Kershaw. I have also really worked hard on my solo gaming this past year and was able to fully play 17 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 the introduction to the post and 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 5.4 million times (as compared to 4.8 million this time last year). These views have come from an astounding 1,810,122 visitors (as compared to 1,568,851 visitors as of April 2024). This means that each visitor that comes onto the blog averages 3.01 views. This number is down slightly form last year’s 3.08 views per visitor but is still very comparable. In fact, I have noticed that this views per visitor number has slightly gone down 5 out of the last 6 years. I am not sure I know why that is but it is a thing and it is good that when people do find us and 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. This type of things drives the number of views up and I am glad that it has this feature.

We have really been blown away by the response that we have seen in our blog over the past 9 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 9 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 616 day post streak! I will say that over the past few months, I have had some moments when I thought that the streak was doomed as I was either busy, had writer’s block or just didn’t feel like writing. But, I would somehow find a way to carry on and here we are.

You will also notice that we have done 2,968 posts over the 9-year period that our blog has existed. Remember though that 2016 only included 9 months of content while 2025 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), 2023 (267) and 2024 (410) 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 at least for the past year and a half. This consistency has kept our blog fresh in our readers minds and on their timelines. Over the past few years, the number of posts has has begun to increase again and we on an upswing at the moment and I fully expect to have nearly 400 posts again in 2025.

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 and more likes. 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 410 posts in 2024 of 794,416 and average words per post of 1,938, which are both higher than in 2023. It appears that through the first 3 1/2 months in 2025 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 9 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 2024. 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 144,574 views our way, which is about 22.5% of our total views (Total Views for 2024 were 643,630). Social Media is also a good source for views as Facebook brought in 41,863 views and Twitter 15,041 (down quite a lot over 2023 from 19,402 views). GMT Games is a big part of our views as they have referred 11,985 views (down over 2023 from 14,472 views) as well as Consimworld which referred 7,287 (down a bit 2023 from 8,529 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”. 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 2024 and into 2025, 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 (51,700), February (45,300) and March 2024 (51,900) have been slightly less views for those three months as compared to the first 3 months of 2024. I am not worried about this as our numbers are still strong but want to make sure that our message and content are still ringing true with our readers.

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 2024. Obviously the US (295,200 or 45.9%) is where the majority of views come from with the UK (76,800 or 11.9%), Canada (31,600 or 4.9%), Germany (27,800 or 4.3%), France (27,200) and Australia (22,800) bringing up the 2nd-6th 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 2024

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 2024. 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 (I have not updated this list since 2022 but plan to this year), Grant’s Most Anticipated Wargames of 2024!, *SPOILERS* Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 that has performed well for years, Alexander’s Top 10 Wargames, Grant’s Top 10 Solitaire Wargames of 2023!, Grant’s Top 10 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 Gaming the American Revolution – 2024 Edition, December 2024 Monthly Update from GMT Games and On Disagreeing. In Wargames. And Why It is Difficult for Some. 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 2024, the blog hosted 70 interviews with designers (up 13 interviews as compared to 2023 with 57 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 2025, we have posted 17 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 12th 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 2024:

Fabrizio Vianello Designer of The Fate of All: Alexander’s Campaign Against the Persian Empire from Thin Red Line Games – this post just far exceeded my expectations with over 2,700 views.

Mark Simonitch and Arthur Dieterly Designers of North Africa ‘40: The 1940 Expansion to North Africa ‘41 from GMT Games – A very solid interview with one of the masters (Mark Simonitch) and a newcomer with over 1,700 views.

Carl Paradis Designer of Battle Commander Volume I: Napoleon’s Italian Campaigns from Sound of Drums – I was not surprised that this one brought in about 1,500 views.

Sam London Designer of Firefight Tactical from GMT Games – a new designer with a unique and interesting gaming system did well with 1,300 views.

Volko Ruhnke Designer of Hunt for Blackbeard from Fort Circle Games – an excellent designer with a fantastic historical simulation with some interesting mechanics garnered 1,200 views.

These were simply 5 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 538 of these designer interviews. I really enjoy doing them, always learn something about design and get more excited about upcoming games. I will point out that the views on these have seemed to die down over the back half of the year. Most of the interviews are only getting 400-600 views and this is down about 20% over the past. I am unsure if there is a reason, maybe my choice of designers and games, maybe their repetitive nature in the questions, or maybe people are just fatigued with reading them. Let me know your thoughts.

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 or “X “as it is now called (although it is becoming a black hole and both interactions and views from are down) followed by Facebook. We share our posts from the blog on Twitter (@playersaidblog), Facebook (@theplayersaid), Mastadon, although this platform just hasn’t taken off yet (@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 Solo Board 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 2024 with a 1.9% increase in Twitter followers, 14.4% increase in our Facebook follows and 3.4% 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 30 new follows in 2024 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 8 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. In 2024, we added Blue Sky to our social media repertoire and have built a good little community there with our largest number of increased subs of +1,393 and the largest percentage increase of 409.7% and hope to continue good growth there 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 20,000 subscribers. Compared to this time last year in April 2024, we gained 1,886 subs or a 10.1% increase. This growth was a bit less than in 2023 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.

As you can see in the graphic below, we had 874,718 total views of our videos on YouTube over the past year (April 2024 through April 2025). That is about 118,000 less views than in 2023-2024. I am a bit disappointed in this number but feel that we are still really strong in our analytics. Sometimes people get disenfranchised with things and stop having interest. Plus there are even more content creators out there now than before and some of them are doing really well (I am looking at ZillaBlitz). Those total views have added up to 124,011 hours of viewing, which is amazing to me! This is a bit lower again than in 2023-2024 as we had 145,000 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 21,500 subscribers in late 2025 so please subscribe to our channel if you haven’t already.

Overall, since starting the channel in 2017, we have had 5.7 million views, had watch time of 797,606 hours, 198,600 Likes, 26,968 Comments and 15,600 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. One other thing, it is interesting to see what videos are getting the most views and as expected these are our lists or our Monthly Debriefs, such as the Top 10 Wargames of 2023 (12,500 views), COIN Series Ranking Monthly Debrief (10,100 views), Best Value Wargames Monthly Debrief (10,100 views) and Solitaire Wargames II Monthly Debrief (10,000 views).

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 are in Season 5 Episode 4 and these videos have garnered a total of 378,641 views. This equates to a total of 7,424 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 with some approaching 2 hours 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 are very much appreciate of their support as it allows us to purchase more games, play more games and attend more conventions. We couldn’t do nearly as much as we do without their support!

Patreon

We have now been on Patreon for 6 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 206 Patrons, which is about 38.2% more than last year (149). 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. Recently, we did a Patron only giveaway of 6 great games and I think that this was a big hit. We will probably try to do this annuallly from now on. 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 just want to express our humble gratitude and 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 1st-4th) in Columbus, Ohio, the World Boardgaming Championships (WBC) (July 29th-August 3rd) and a first for us will be a trip to Germany to attend Spiel Essen for the first time, which has always been somewhat of a bucket list item. We also are planning to be there a full 5 days prior to the convention and do some travel around Europe seeing the historical sites, such as Normandy, the Ardennes, Waterloo, Holland, etc. and would love to meet up with some of you there. 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 2025!

-Grant