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Farewell 2024 – Best on the Blog!

Now the year truly comes to a close. The blog has weathered the seven-year itch this year. Let’s see what has been going on here this year – as the last Farewell 2024 post.

You can read all of the Farewell 2024 posts here:

Before we go into the top quality posts on the blog, let’s talk a bit about quantity. After a solid growth in views in 2023, the blog has been less popular this year (counted in blog views, which were down by around 20% just before Christmas compared to the previous year).

One of the reasons for that is the collapse of Twitter as an information and communication medium: The algorithm has been honed to favor whatever keeps users on Twitter the longest, and thus limits how much exposure tweets with links (like my announcements of blog posts) get while favoring tweets with a lot of engagement (i.e., controversial takes). On top of this in-built dysfunctionality, there has been an exodus of users from Twitter this year. All in all, my blog views which came from Twitter have dropped by around 50% this year.

The unstable situation at Twitter has led me to set up both a Mastodon (since 2022) and Bluesky (since 2023) account. While I still have nominally the most followers on Twitter, engagement there has dropped a lot for the reasons outlined above. Bluesky has thus become my “main” platform. If you haven’t already, give me a follow on Bluesky!

(Mastodon never really caught on – it is fiddlier to use than the other two, and hasn’t gained the critical mass of users in the board games niche. I still post my blog articles on Mastodon, but not much more.)

The Twitter woes do not explain the full drop in views, though. Maybe what I write has become less interesting (hard to measure that in another way than blog views!), but I suspect there are other factors at play as well: After all, posts which are pretty comparable did worse in 2024 than in the previous year: My Most Anticipated Historical Board Games post was one of the most popular posts this year (it always is), but the respective post in 2023 garnered more than five times its views.

Even most of the evergreen posts suffer from a sharp drop in views. Of those that made my most popular posts in both 2023 and 2024…

…How to Win at War of the Ring is down by a good third;

…How to Win at Twilight Struggle and Top 5 Aubrey-Maturin Novels are down by over half;

…and only How to Win as the Papacy in Here I Stand has gained a few views.

With that in mind, either people’s interest in board games is waning, or my blog is not as well-positioned in the search engines as it used to be.

At least that’s what I thought, before I somehow banged out my most popular post ever by accident on December 23. (Previously, that distinction belonged to my Twilight Struggle strategy post which amassed its views in six years, not six days.) That post has single-handedly attracted as much traffic in a few days as my entire blog normally gets in around several months. Instead of a 20% drop in views over the year, 2024 finished with 30% more views. And I don’t even know why it’s so popular – a lot of the traffic comes from the WordPress Android app, so I guess the post was suggested to other bloggers, and search engine hits followed. Yet just looking at the post itself, it’s nothing special: I’m not even catering to a bookish audience (and I’m sure others do that a lot better)! Such are the vagaries of the blogging life.

For the first time, more than 50% of my readers come from the United States (also skewed by the fact that the absurdly popular post has been viewed almost exclusively there). Almost 20% come from other English-speaking countries.

The largest crowd from outside the Anglosphere is my native Germany, ahead of Spain with its strong historical gaming community.

A notable increase in views comes from Hungary (for the second year in a row), which has brought Hungary now into the top 10 countries by views for my blog.

And now on to what I think represents the best I had to offer this year. As I’m very fond of this blog, allow me to present to you the double number of entries (six) as with the other categories in the Farewell posts. Also, as no one likes to select their favorite among their children, I will not crown a winner and rather present the posts in the sequence they were posted.

BochumCon

A board game convention in January is a great way to kick off the year. Especially if the convention is like BochumCon: Extremely well-organized, focused on just the games I happen to find most interesting (historical, mostly), and, most importantly, full of players who are willing to commit to a longer game and always in the friendliest spirit. I was thrilled to be invited to it in 2024, and I’m already excited to go back in a few days – to play some Weimar, Here I Stand, and Kingmaker, and to reconnect with friends.

The State of Blogging

The “death of blogging” has been diagnosed for years now. Not content with these hot takes, I have looked at the numbers and trends of web content and concluded that while many blogs become inactive, that’s not necessarily a new thing, and while other forms of content-creation (primarily audiovisual) and interaction (primarily on social media) have developed more dynamically than blogs, the blogosphere is not withering away – just turning into a blogosphere-plus. This article also gave me the opportunity to publish a few posts of blog recommendations with the finest offerings on history, board games, and history in board games around the web!

An Inevitable War?

War has been a pretty common subject in board games for decades, what has led to it… not so much. (That’s why there’s a genre called war games, but not before-war games.) There’s a mini-trend in recent years which seems to be rectifying this gap in our gaming, and so I had no trouble finding games to illustrate a hotly debated issue of historical scholarship (and, at times, politics): What led to World War I… and was that war inevitable?

Weimar: SPD Agenda Cards Ranked for Round 1

I like writing strategy posts – and you like reading them, judging from the numbers of views I get on them. For this one, I went outside the tried-and-true formula of Three Basic Tips and instead gave a more in-depth assessment of the starting position of the SPD (and which Agenda Cards make good or not so good tools to deal with that situation). Are there any other strategy sub-topics which you think would provide a good base for posts (on this or any other game)?

Abraham Lincoln (Leader Ratings, #10)

Is this a great article? – In the end, you decide that for yourself. Was Lincoln a great president? – Yes, absolutely. During my research for this post, I was stunned at how well Lincoln handled the double crisis of secession and slavery, adapted his strategy to the needs of the situation, and transformed the United States in a mere four years. And despite everything you may hear about “disruption” these days, Lincoln managed this huge undertaking with liberty, constitution, and law intact, and remaining a genuine and kind person himself. What a president. What a man.

The Berlin Conference, Colonialism, and Board Games

I usually do “history in board games”, but here I had the opportunity to preface it with some “history of board games” – the contemporary games which were published in the colonial powers of the late 19th and early 20th century. I find it stunning how their approach to games set in Africa (Exotic adventures! Economic exploitation!) held true way into the 21st century and has been challenged only recently. This may be the most important post I have written this year, and despite its bleak topic of exclusion and oppression, it even ends on a hopeful note… as I hope 2024 ends for you!

And thus concludes the year 2024 on this blog. I hope you had as much fun reading it as I had writing.

I wish you all an excellent year 2025, full of joy, health, and success!

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