A DECADE…a DECADE of content…a DECADE of wargaming…unreal! Time just flies by anymore and I am blown away to think that The Players’ Aid has existed for a FULL DAMN DECADE! That is literally 1/5th of my life! Just unbelievable but we are here and there is no going back or undoing the damage we have done over those 10 years. But we have reached our 10th Anniversary and if you told me 10 years ago that we would be around in 2026 I would have laughed at you. I thought that this was simply another experiment or hobby and that one day in a few years we would come to our senses and move on. But, that didn’t happen and frankly it was because of the fantastic support of the hobby, the strong “family” that we have built and the relationships that have been formed that has kept us fueled and going. Make no mistake, this landmark was reached by ALL of us in the hobby and we thank you all so much for the fantastic experience that we have had along with you.
2025 was another fantastic year for The Players’ Aid and we have continued playing and reviewing wargames and have hit several large milestones over the past 12 months including 3,300+ posts on the blog, nearly 6.4 million lifetime views on the blog and recently we surpassed the 21,500 YouTube subscribers threshold. It is cliche to say but what we do doesn’t feel like work, or a commitment or a chore, and we really enjoy what we do! And to have done this for 10 years is mind blowing. 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 as well as in our YouTube Channel views. Even after all of this time doing what we do, we still have a desire to meet weekly and play new wargames to share with you. It has truly become our passion and we couldn’t envision a future without this.
Happy Birthday To Us!
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 consistently 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. I know that when I reach out initially they are always gung-ho about answering the questions but then they get my email with 20+ questions and all of a sudden I am sure it feels like homework! 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. II 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. 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, Action Points, First Impressions posts and the occasional Best 3 Games with… Series and The Love/Hate Relationship Series. My newest series on the blog is the My Favorite Wargame Cards Series and we are now up to a total of 73 of these posts since May 2024. I really like revisiting some of these Card Driven Games that we have played in the past and finding those cards that are unique, interesting and that incorporate some of the historical flavor into the game through the cards. On our YouTube Channel, the Monthly Debrief Series is alive and well, although we have had a tougher time over the past 6+ months of getting them done on time mainly due to new job responsibilities and tough schedules, our Car Videos continue to do well and Alexander has continued his 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. I have continued to work hard on my solo gaming and was able to fully play 17 new solitaire games in 2025 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 nearly 6.4 million times (as compared to 5.4 million this time last year). These views have come from an astounding 2,127,173 visitors (as compared to 1,810,122 visitors as of April 2025). This means that each visitor that comes onto the blog averages 3.0 views. This number is down slightly form last year’s 3.04 views per visitor but is still very comparable. In fact, I have noticed that this views per visitor number has slightly gone down 6 out of the last 7 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 dive 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 thing 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 10 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 10 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 sometimes 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 from 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 brain’s 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. Last year, I had quite the streak going with posting something on the blog every day for nearly 2 full years! That streak came to an end on January 2, 2026 when I didn’t post for 3 full days. The holidays were fun and I was spending lots of time with my family rather than with writing. I have tried to again get back to consistency this year and have done pretty well by posting at least 4-5 times per week and currently have a modest 35 day streak as of the posting of this entry.
You will also notice that we have done 3,325 posts over the 10-year period that our blog has existed. Remember though that 2016 only included 9 months of content while 2026 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), 2024 (410) and 2025 (385) 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. Our posting consistency has kept our blog fresh in our readers minds and on their timelines. Over the past few years, the number of posts has begun to increase again but has slowed down a bit in 2025 and now in 2026. But never fear, posts will be regular. I promise!
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 saw a big drop in comments. I do love to hear your thoughts on my posts and about the games or subjects being covered so please say something if you would like. I consider myself to be pretty wordy in my posts and that is being proven with total word counts in 385 posts in 2025 of 662,977 and average words per post of 1,722, which are a bit lower than in 2024. It appears that through the first 3 1/2 months in 2026 I have become a bit wordier but I know that I have done more lists and have started some more in-depth looks at games.
Over the past 10 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 2025. 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 152,693 views our way, which is about 17.1% of our total views (Total Views for 2025 were 897,777). Social Media is also a good source for views as Facebook brought in 23,296 views and Twitter 5,450 (down quite a lot over 2024 from 15,401 views). Consimworld, which referred just 1,649 (down a bit 2023 from 7,287 views) used to be a much larger part of our referrers but has dipped and you will notice that GMT Games is not on the Top 10 list as it appears nothing has come from them. 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 in 2025 we had a banner year with a whopping 897,777 views, which was our largest annual view ever on the blog. Why was this the case? I am not sure but we did see China pop up as a country where views were coming from and that had never really been the case before so maybe the Party was monitoring my posts as a possible secret code to American operations across the globe. Thus far in 2026, we are doing solidly and have actually outpaced the views for the first 3 months of 2026 as compared to the same months in 2025; January with 57,200 views (52,700 in January 2025), February with 68,400 views (45,500 in February 2025) and March with 52,600 views (51,200 in March 2025). This is a good trend for the blog and I am happy to see it. We may not break the record for highest views this year but we are on pace for another very solid 600,000+ view year.
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 2025. Obviously the US (296,300 or 33%) is where the majority of views come from with the UK (68,100 or 7.5%), Canada (32,700 or 3.6%), Germany (28,600 or 3.2%) and France (27,800 or 3.1% ) bringing up the 3rd-6th spots respectively. But, this year we had a new entry in the views from Countries arena in China with 264,300 views or 29.4%. I am shocked. I do know that I saw where a couple of warganing focus sites had shared some posts that they translated into Chinese (without my permission I might add) but the added views has been nice. I am 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 and even from China. 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 2025
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 2025. The same as last year, it seems that lists of games do the best, such as Alexander’s Top 10 Wargames, Grant’s Most Anticipated Wargames of 2023!, Grant’s Most Anticipated Wargames of 2025! 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. Most of our blog posts get 200-700 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 2025, the blog hosted 51 interviews with designers (down 19 interviews as compared to 2024 with 70 hosted). That means that we posted almost every week (usually on Monday of each week) of that year. Thus far in 2026, we have posted 14 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. Since our inception in April 2016, we have posted a whopping 587 designer interviews and I am very proud of that accomplishment. I was once told by Ty Bomba that our blog is an indispensable resource for designers and developers to read to understand how other designers have used interesting and new mechanics and overcome design issues and challenges. I like that and it makes me smile to think about the past 10 years of these weekly interviews and that someone has read them and learned something.
Currently, we have interviews already scheduled to post on the blog through May 4th and I have at least 8 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 2025:
Interview with Volko Ruhnke Designer of Nevsky: Teutons and Rus in Collision, 1240-1242 from GMT Games (post was from 2018)
Interview with Brian Train Designer of COIN Series Volume XII China’s War: 1937-1941 from GMT Games (post was from 2019)
Interview with Fabrizio Vianello Designer of First Man in Rome – Strategikon Book II: The Civil War and the Fall of the Republic from Thin Red Line Games
These were simply a few 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.
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 and I am afraid is already dying (@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 2025 with a 4.3% increase in Twitter followers, 25.9% increase in our Facebook follows and 2.6% increase in Instagram followers (which is a platform that we really have ignored over the past couple of years). Our Blog Follows have dropped and I am not sure why. You can follow the blog one of two ways, either with your own WordPress site or through email. In just over 9 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 a large number of increased subs of +240 and hope to continue good growth there so we can chat and connect with you.
Now we come to the YouTube Channel. And normally, I get to say that we had a banner year and added lots of subscribers, etc. But, in 2025, we just didn’t have a very good growth year on the channel. We added 1,363 subscribers, which is a good healthy growth number at +6.8%, but is not as good as we had seen over the past 4 or 5 years with double digit growth percentage and well over 2,000 to 3,000 new subscribers every year. I am a worrier by nature and Alexander doesn’t share my concern with the Channel but I look at others and their growth and we are no longer the largest pure wargaming channel out there. That position is now held by ZillaBlitz, and congratulations to Mike, as he has 28,400+ subscribers. I just take pause to ask myself what has changed? Have we somehow turned people off? I know that we are a bit all over the place and unorganized in our thoughts and videos with rambling discussions and over excited takes on games, which are all genuine for us and nothing is faked or staged. But what has happened? I would also say that over the past few months our views have dropped off by about 20% or so. I think that normally within a day or 2 of posting most of our videos, we would see well over 1,000 views but now we are seeing only 600-800. I just don’t know the answer and I wanted to make that statement here so you can help me to figure it out.
As you can see in the graphic below, we had 773,139 total views of our videos on YouTube over the past year (April 2025 through April 2026). That is about 100,000 less views than in 2024-2025. 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). If I were guessing, and based on our slower growth over the past year, I would say we will reach 22,500 subscribers in late 2026 so please subscribe to our channel if you haven’t already.
Overall, since starting the channel in 2017, we have had 6.4 million views, 229,400 Likes, 29,600 Comments and 18,200 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, Convention Debriefs and my Top 10 Solitaire Games of 2024 video.
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 6 Episode 2 and these videos have garnered over 450,00 views. 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 year we have started Season 6 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.
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 the World Boardgaming Championships (WBC) (July 25th-August 2nd), Gaming the American Revolution – Camden 250 (September 24-27th) and possibly at least one more, if I can spare the time in the fall, SDHistCon (November 6-9th) in San Diego, California. 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 2026!
-Grant
The Players' Aid 