February 15, 2025

2024 Year In Review

Armchair Dragoons PAO, 30 December 2024

2024 was a heck of a year for The Regiment of Strategy Gaming.  This was our 6th year since being mustered into service, and we had a couple of notable achievements over the past 12 months

In rough order of their occurrence last year:

  • The ACDC in January, which was out 7th digital convention
  • GAMA Expo in March, for our second time as hosted media and it’s a little weird to have publishers and GAMA staff recognize us when we walk into the meetings
  • Our reboot of the massive Hobby Gamer Motivations & Attitudes survey with Fairleigh Dickinson University, still undergoing data analysis
  • Connections Online in April, which was our 4th iteration of the professional conference we co-sponsor
  • The Wargame HQ at Origins, which was 5th one at the Armchair Dragoons, and the largest one yet
  • The second Solo Wargaming Survey, which made it onto the BGG Hotness and garnered some publisher attention
  • Our 2nd Fall Assembly, with consistent attendance from last year, but an increase in overall games played and industry attention
  • The second year-end Wargaming Survey, which wrapped up data collection on 1 January and will get released over the next few weeks

Whew!

What about our site content?  Here’s what got published this past year:

313 total articles & podcasts, broken down as follows (note, some articles fit into more than one category).  Relaunching our FL(W)GS spotlight series got us a dozen new stores we were able to highlight, and have a few more in the hopper (but need photos!)

Our stable of authors includes a couple of stalwarts, some newer contributors, and the occasional one-offs that get their name on the byline1, but are ‘officially’ published by the Armchair Dragoons PAO account, as are the news and our podcasts.

Month-over-month, our content was pretty consistent in what we’ve produced, especially when our podcasts were in season.  Also note that the first half of the year includes #UnboxingDay each month, which went on hiatus in June and has not yet come back.  While JUN–AUG does include some convention coverage, it’s usually a slower time for our content because (1) our authors are on vacation, and (2) the podcast is out of season.

Sure, but what else?

We had a major server migration, to increase the space we have for the site, and the speed at which we should be operating (we’re still optimizing some of these things).  We’ve migrated all of the articles, but are still working on some of the static pages that include things like our archives and references.  These things aren’t always visible to our audience, but do impact the overall usage of the site.

We’ve updated the look & feel of our front page with a new line art version of the logo, some typography changes, and a few color tweaks, along with some changes to our widgets on the right side of our homepage.  We also pulled together a linktree page to give people a single source to all of the different places you can find us on the web.  We’ve added most of the 2025 conventions to our event calendar, and rebuilt the convention extract below the calendar.

And on an organizational note, Brant finally got his shit together with an extended schedule and article plan that projects our content out multiple weeks / months at a time, giving us improved visibility on what’s in progress and what’s still due from our writing team.  Twice-a-month email updates to our writers help, too.  If anyone’s interested in joining our writing crew, shoot Brant a note in our forums or on our Discord server and let him know.


What to look for in the coming year?

We’ve got some big plans2 for 2025, including a return to our extended AARs on Sundays, and a new weekly column we’re planning to launch to highlight some famous battles throughout history.  We’re also hoping to ramp up our reviews; 45 isn’t bad (almost 1/week) but we’d like to get that up by at least another 50% and get closer 65-70 reviews over the course of the year.

What else is lined up for 2025?

Events:

  • The ACDC in January
  • Circle DC and Connections Online in April
  • Buckeye Game Fest in May
  • Origins in June
  • The Fall Assembly in October
Other Projects:

  • 2024 Year In Gaming Survey Results
  • Initial data analysis from our Hobby Gamer project with FDU
  • The Annual Solo Wargaming Survey
  • Figuring out a way to do our surveys without requiring BGG URLs to be pasted in
  • Regular live-streams with the Dragoons
  • Regular updates / content from the practitioner side of wargaming

Additionally, we’re working on a better schedule for our social media channels, with a goal of increasing some engagement across those various platforms.  We’ve updated our #TuesdayNewsday graphics and tweaked our weekly news layout.  And no doubt something will come up over the course of the year that we’ll change even though we’re not planning on it right now.

We also have some updates coming to our forums, combining some lower-traffic areas, and updating the permissions that users have when they first join the site vs having an elevated post count after contributing to our gaming discussions for a while.

 

How about you, the audience?  What’s been your favorite part of engaging with the Dragoons over the past year?  What were the highlights of our content for you?  Where do we still need to improve?  What’s been good and what needs work?  What would you like to see us add and/or subtract?  And which of those initiatives are you volunteering to help us with!? 🤣

 

Most of all, thank you from the bottom of our saddlebags for mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and joining us for a great year of wargaming, and many more to come.

 


Thank you for visiting the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and riding with The Armchair Dragoons.
Rather than list a bunch of social media links, the easiest thing to do is to check out our LinkTree, which connects you to all of our various locales around the web.
You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events.
Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.

Footnotes

  1. including convention coverage, unboxings, and FL(W)GS spotlights
  2. key term: “plans”

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Official Public Affairs account for The Armchair Dragoons, for official site news, and other contributors.

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