The humblebrag: first post to hit 500 views

 

  

No new content today, but I just wanted to pop a post up to mention that my Commands & Colors: Napoleonics (GMT Games, 2010) review just hit 500 views! This is the first of my posts to make 500 (a couple have got around 300-350, nearly all reviews with a couple of unboxings thrown in – but no surprise there). A lot of folks visit the A Fast Game and just read whatever is current, working through from the most recent post and work down until they get through the new stuff. 

I took me a while to work out, but the analytics only count direct link views; in the case of my C&C Napoleonics review only views accessed via the direct link, https://fastgame-goodgame.blogspot.com/2024/07/this-is-review-i-never-intended-to-write.html. It also took me a while to realise that if you’re preparing a post and you save a draft without including a title, the link generated will pick up the first few words of the text instead.

Full disclosure: the review did get a leg-up after a link appeared in GMT’s monthly newsletter. Rachel Billingsley who, among her other responsibilities at GMT, puts together the Content Creator section of the newsletter (well toward the bottom of the page), has been kind enough to include GMT-related posts from A Fast Game, which usually pushes the numbers up. When that newsletter came out overnight, the review has been up for a week, and the twelve or so views I’d received was suddenly around 280.

Ultimately, this doesn’t mean much – a lot more people have probably read the review who didn’t end up visiting by the link – but my brain responds to numerical stimulus, and a pair of zeros at the end of a number will flick a switch in my brain. So, this post is the endorphins talking. 

Around the same time my C&C Napoleonics review hit 500 views, A Fast Game passed the 30,000 unique lifetime views. to put that in context, in my second anniversary post from January, I mentioned hitting 20,000 visits just before Christmas. I don't think I mentioned that I'd be very happy if I'd made 30,000 by my 2026 anniversary post, but I was thinking just that. Instead, A Fast Game reached that in about for months. So I'll keep doing what I'm doing - sporadically lately, but that should improve with my recuperating health.