Since our very first post, we’ve been laser focused on publishing high-quality board game related content: whether it’s written or video. We craft and discuss, parenthesize, spellcheck, and edit until we’re happy with it. And this year we published 525 pieces; it’s just crazy for an all-volunteer team like ours.
Sneak peek…not only did we publish over 500 articles. We published our 3,000th piece on New Years Eve. But more on that in a few days!
Let’s walk through the content and see what stood out.
401 Written Reviews
2024 was a great year for games, with close to 5,000 titles marked as released in 2024 (according to BoardGameGeek). And while there’s no way that any team could review all of them (or would want to), we managed to review a respectable 141 of them, along with the other 250 games we reviewed which were released in other years.
By traffic, our biggest game review hits of 2024 were Wyrmspan, SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Kraftwagen: Age of Engineering, Tales of The Arthurian Knights, Andromeda’s Edge, and unsurprisingly our reviews of Arcs and Arcs: The Blighted Reach expansion. All this just proves that even though we regularly publish reviews of lower profile games, it’s generally the most popular releases that get the bulk of the traffic. But don’t worry, we love helping out the little publishers too, so we have no intention of stopping reviews of little known games.
One thing you might notice is that all our review headers look very similar. A few years ago I decided to streamline and refine the headers for our content and did it all in Photoshop; but that still meant I had to make all of them. So this year I wrote some software for our team that allowed them to generate the headers on their own, with just a few clicks.
14 Videos
Our video output has slowed way down, and while we still value our YouTube content, it’s hard to continue releasing content when we don’t have someone committed to recording videos regularly. So if you’re reading this and you’re interested in doing your own video reviews, let me know! You can step right in to an established channel with over 3,000 subscribers and make a difference!
For the year we had 143,421 views in 2024, which was great for us, and we ended 2024 with a net positive 282 subscribers. Please make sure to check out our YouTube channel…then “like and subscribe!”
96 Articles & Interviews
Our editorial coverage has slowed down somewhat, but we’re still publishing great articles. We’ve committed to regular releases of our short format review article type Quick Peaks. Since we commit to covering everything sent to us by publishers, this is a way to get in at least something without feeling like we need to write up a full review. Many of our Quick Peaks games go on to full reviews, but not all of them.
Some of this year’s article highlights are Andrew’s Trick Taker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Justin’s all day gaming session with Mega Civilization, our all-team collaboration On Gateway Games, and our Dominion Strategy Guide.
As a team we also went to a serious number of board game conventions, and wrote about them: TantrumCon, Festival International des Jeux, GAMA Expo, Playthrough Con, Congress of Gamers, TraXX – an 18XX Convention, Gen Con, Essen SPIEL, and PAX Unplugged. This year’s Essen SPIEL also featured the first time that four members of our team were at the event at the same time (including yours truly…a bucket list item for sure).
And of course in addition to writing about the events after the fact, our “Most Anticipated” series topped the search results for most anticipated games of Gen Con and most anticipated games of Essen SPIEL.
We also launched a new series called The Dusty Euro, as a way to pay homage to those classics of the genre…the giants upon whose shoulders modern board games stand.
10 Top 6 Lists
While we only did 10 of our well-received Top 6 lists, this year they covered a disparate set of topics including Top 6 Books Every Fantasy RPG Game Master Needs, Top 6 Games to play on St. Patrick’s Day, Top 6 Tips for Pitching Your Game to Publishers, and Top 6 Completed Actual Plays.
New Feature Development
I’m a professional software engineer by trade, and WordPress development (the platform used by Meeple Mountain) is part of my core skill set. This means that if I decide I want to add a new element to the site, I can implement it myself, and make it awesome. In 2024 I continued the development of features for the Meeple Mountain site.
Board Game Reviews by Rating
Last year we added star ratings to our reviews, which is a big help to readers and for search engine results. But we have over 2,200 reviews and that can be tough to sift through. So this year we added the ability to sort our board game reviews by rating, and even jump straight to specific star ratings (all 5 star reviews, all 4 star reviews, etc.) This is great for SEO and for readers who want to see the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Newsletter Builder
One of my goals last year was to kick off our newsletter, and we finally did it! And that’s been a big hit so far. While our subscriber base is still relatively small, it’s growing rapidly as we prove to our readers that our content is worth it.
But one of the driving forces in our newsletter development was that it would be easy to collect content. And so I spent weeks and weeks writing software that would collect information from our site and collate it into an easy to publish format. This means that we have to spend less time getting all the best material to our subscribers. And major kudos go to Tom Franklin, our newsletter editor. He tirelessly manages content, collects games and contests, and writes those amazing intros. Seriously, if you’re not already subscribed to our newsletter, what are you waiting for?
Website Traffic & Social Media
In 2024 we hit some really great milestones on social media.
- 2.9k+ followers on Facebook
- 4.3k+ followers on Twitter
- 2.7k+ followers on Instagram
- 3.2k+ subs on YouTube
- 272 followers Mastodon
- 1.4k followers on BlueSky
- 700 followers on Threads.
Board Gaming in Nashville
We decided after some thought that Nashville Game Night would shutter it’s doors for good. There’s lots of other great weekly and monthly events in town now, and we don’t feel like we need to be part of that any longer.
But we will still be running Nashville Tabletop Day though, never fear. And 2024 saw us again returning to Trevecca Nazarene University’s Boone Convocation Center where we again hosted nearly 500 gamers. We also rolled our own custom QR-code based event management and notification system. This allowed us to track games and notify attendees throughout the event. And it worked amazingly well.
Here’s some relevant numbers from the event.
- 487 attendees
- 47 volunteers
- 38 sponsors
- 170 play to win titles
- 41 door prizes
- 2,473 entries for play to win games
- 117% satisfaction!
Nashville Tabletop Day 2025 is already locked in for Saturday, April 19, once again at Trevecca University. So if you’re in the area, make sure to join us!
What Does 2025 Have in Store for Meeple Mountain?
For the first time in our history Meeple Mountain is self-sufficient. That means we’re bringing in enough revenue from affiliate links, Crowdfunding Roundup featured placement, and gift guide featured placement that the site is paying for itself. That’s huge for us because it means I no longer have to pay for everything out of pocket, and I can potentially begin paying for other things that would help out our writing team.
So what about concrete goals? I’d love to find someone to join our team who is passionate about video. TikTok and YouTube content has shown huge growth over the past few years and I feel like we’re missing out on that. And while we’ll continue to publish high quality written content, I’d love to be able to reach eyeballs wherever they may be.
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Cheers
Andy Matthews
Meeple Mountain
Founder / Editor in Chief
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