Blog note: Something of a milestone

 

Earlier today, A Fast Game reached a significant milestone. Sometime after midday local time, the blog reached 50,000 views. It’s currently a week shy of its two-year, nine-month anniversary (I began the project on January 31, 2023, posting my first entry that day after spending the previous fortnight before that writing or sketching out the first half-dozen posts).

Over the last two and three-quarter years, I’ve written a variety of subjects related to specific wargames or wargaming in general. In that time, I’ve posted 220 pieces and I usually have at least three in various states of incompletion at any given moment. I used to post reviews and some unboxings to one or another relevant group on Facebook, but I haven’t bothered with that in some time (though I still link AARs of games from my Ten Wargame Challenge to idjester’s Facebook group). I usually don’t go out of my way to promote A Fast Game; the folks at GMT Games are gracious enough to link reviews and unboxing posts to the product pages, but most publishers are only interested in YouTube content, which is fair enough because, as Carboard Commander mentioned in a recent livestream, nobody reads blogs anymore.

One of the things I'm working on at the moment is an unboxing of this two-game pack,
so of course I'm going to spend a couple of paragraphs on the significance
of the cover illustration.

Except apparently, they do. Or maybe I have a core fan-base of twenty-or-so loyal folks who have each visited the blog 2,500 times. Honestly, I don’t know. A Fast Game isn’t monetised, so I don’t have access to the super-duper analytics tools that I would otherwise be able to use, just raw numbers and a national breakdown that’s pointless when maybe 80% of readers are using VPN software (apparently, we’re big in Mexico).

I don’t have sponsorship arrangements with any store or publisher. I don’t seek out or accept free review copies. I’ve paid for every game that has appeared on the blog (often bought second-hand, but I’m always up-front about that). I only write about the games I have either really enjoyed or that do something worth mentioning, and probably really well. And I try to write about games the way I want to write about them, highlighting the things that interest me. I was never certain there would be an audience for the kind of things I post, but apparently there is. To the tune of 50,000 views in less than three years.

So, to my readers – both the regulars, the less-frequent visitors, and the newcomers – I want to say a most sincere thank you. When I started A Fast Game and I was only hitting a hundred views every other month or so, I decided I was going to keep writing so long as I was enjoying the process. Being a bit of a data-wonk, numbers like this give me an endorphin hit, but it’s still true, and I'm still enjoying it.

In the time I’ve been writing A Fast Game, the one thing that gave me the biggest thrill was when I was researching the feature on publishers’ attitudes to wargame awards; a designer/publisher who had a couple of games about the French and Indian War under his belt wrote me to complain that I’d cost him money – he’d been reading through the blog, and my review of 1759: Siege of Quebec (Worthington Games, 2022) made him go and order a copy. 

For me, that alone is enough of an endorsement to keep talking up games I think are worth the trouble. Writers have to write, but it’s always nice to think we're writing for an audience.