by Armchair Dragoons PAO, 1 January 2026
2025 was a great year for us, as we crossed a couple of notable milestones here at the Armchair Dragoons.
The 2024 Year-in-Review opened up with some chronological highlights, but this year, we wanted to acknowledge some of the ‘big deal’ highlights at the top instead
- A record-setting Wargame HQ at Origins, with almost 200 game events, and over 600 player-butts in seats over the course of 5-1/2 days, not including the Origins War College events, and the announcements of the CSR’s as a part of that program
- We published our 2000th article on the site. We’re now closing in on 2100, but over the 7+ years we’ve been live, we’re getting closer & closer to averaging 1 article/day over the life of the site.
- For the entire year of 2025, we cranked out over 350 articles plus another 24 podcasts, which is definitely over the 1/day target we’ve been aiming for, and hope to maintain that in 2026.
- We passed 180 total episodes of the podcast, across our 15 total seasons so far.
- As of early April, our time here with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming now exceeds any previous locations / permutations of our community.
Our year-over-year article output (not including podcasts)
What about our site content? Here’s what got published this past year:
Our Sunday AARs accounted for more than any other category, followed closely by our reviews, which averaged more than 1/week.
Our two most-consistent weekly features – #TuesdayNewsday1 and Saturday Night Fights2 are our next-most-common article categories.
Considering how focus we put on Origins and the Fall Assembly, it’s not a surprise that there is a lot of convention content, especially once you add the others — Buckeye Game Fest, Historicon, Circle DC, Compass Expo, Southern Front, etc — that we attend.
Where did we fall short? There are 3 categories we want to increase for next year: Interviews, #TBT3, and the FLGS Spotlights. We’re hoping to hit 1/month for 2026. We’re also going to rearrange our Wednesday War Stories to appear 1/month, instead of weekly. We started strong early in the year but by the Summer it was obvious that momentum was fizzling.
Once a month for each of those features seems pretty reasonable, and if we end up with an extra one here or there, then yay 😎
Our stable of authors expanded a bit this year, as we’ve welcomed folks like Bill Simoni and Scott Heenan and Ian Brown and Keith Tracton to the team, along with a few other contributors who have each tossed an article or two into the mix. As with previous years, most authors have their initial articles published under the “Dragoon Commander” / Armchair Dragoons PAO account until they’ve got a stack of articles, and then we’ll set up a separate account for them, not unlike what happened for Aaron Danis and Marc McCollough and Zachary Grant in 2025. We’re still slowly expanding the team, and the contributions from them, so look for even more bylines from fresh faces in 2026.
We started the year with a bang, largely because some of our key initiatives — two AARs every Sunday, plus weekly Wednesday War Stories — started pretty strong. By April we were through most of what was built up for those, and May, June, and July were buoyed by convention articles. As mentioned above, we’re hoping that the new focus on regular monthly features, plus an expansion of the writing team, finally gets us well over the one item per day average.
The 2025 Fall Assembly built on the shoulders of the 2 previous years to really spread its wings and pull itself up by the bootstraps and continue to mix metaphors. This was the first year that we moved out of The Gamer’s Armory. They were a fantastic host, but we wanted to leave the store before the staff wanted us to leave the store. We continue to expand between 10-15% more attendees year over year, and the new location was perfect for our purposes and the size of our group.
BBMike wants to take the Assembly on the road, so if you want a Spring Assembly out in Oklahoma City, or a Winter Assembly in Pensacola, he’s the guy to bug about them! 🤠
Sure, but what else?
We made a variety of updates to our social media presence and distribution, with some cross-platform scheduling tools. We briefly flirted with a tool that would re-share older content also, to keep the audience aware of things that are back in our archives, but it was a bit too unwieldy and we’ve unplugged it. We’re investigating a few options that’ll give us better control over the re-sharing from the archives.
There were also some updates to the site layout, with the top-level menu getting an overhaul, and the widgets on the sidebar getting renovated. Those widgets will continue to fluctuate as we need highlight different things throughout the year, such as the current focus on the upcoming ACDC. It’s unlikely we will undergo any massive overhaul in site layout and interface in 2026, but expect to see continued evolutions.
Our previous merch company was having trouble getting orders shipped on schedule. So we dropped them and relaunched our Dragoons-branded merchandise through Fourthwall, a new provider that’s used by several other content creators. There’s a basic inventory of shirts & hoodies in both black and white Dragoons logos, with plans for a handful of other limited-time specials throughout the year.
Our own internal scheduling & tracking has settled into a nice groove, with a couple of digital tools that help keep everyone in sync. We held a one-off online conference call for the staff that seemed pretty well-received and might look to make those more regular into 2026. If nothing else, we’ll all have a common calendar of targets we’re not hitting to all chuckle at.
Finally, 2025 saw a dramatic increase in our involvement in the Game Manufacturers’ Association — at GAMA Expo, Origins, the board meetings, the monthly meetups for the Media & Events Division, and more. It’s a bad year for us to not be able to attend the GAMA Expo at all, but the scheduling4 is unworkable this time. However, it’s getting to the point where the Armchair Dragoons are getting some real recognition within the organization, and at this point, we’re not re-introducing ourselves to people there over and over. We’ve got some great professional connections to work with from other media teams, and are starting to get involved in the professional development tracks to share some of our hard-earned5 knowledge with our peers.
How’d we do, compared to our plans?
Last year we announced some plans6 for 2025, and for the sake of accountability, here’s our scorecard:
- A return to our extended AARs on Sundays
As noted above: this started strong and then slowed down quite a bit. If we had spaced them out, we definitely would’ve had 1/week for the entire year, but we tried to double-up early in the year in the hopes of making it all year with at least 2/week. We’re going to try again this year and see how we do. Still, 89 AAR articles in 52 weeks isn’t bad. - A new weekly column we’re planning to launch to highlight some famous battles throughout history
We aimed for 52 and got 26. While these were largely front-loaded, we were trying to highlight famous battles from the weeks in which the articles were published. As noted above, we’re aiming for monthly articles in 2026, and 12 seems pretty do-able. - Ramp up our reviews and get closer 65-70 reviews over the course of the year
We hit 73. We’ll aim for 80 this year and see what happens. - 2024 Year In Gaming Survey Results
We got some flack for dragging this out into 6 articles last year, so in 2025, we kept it to 3 articles. This year? Aiming for the same, but might end up with four. - Initial data analysis from our Hobby Gamer project with FDU
This hasn’t happened (yet) because of some personal reasons on the FDU end of things. We’re still hoping to get to it, but no promises on the timeline. - The Annual Solo Wargaming Survey
Three years running now! We produced 3 articles with the results from the 2025 survey. - Figuring out a way to do our surveys without requiring BGG URLs to be pasted in
So we think we’ve got a solution, but didn’t get it tested in time to implement for the Solo Wargaming Survey. We’ll spend a little more time on it ahead of the Solo Wargaming Survey this year. - Regular livestreams with the Dragoons
Didn’t happen. We talked about it a bit in the AMA episode of the podcast, but really we need to figure out what would distinguish us from any other livestream out there. - Regular updates / content from the practitioner side of wargaming
Well, we’ve definitely increased out links and references in #TuesdayNewsday each week, but we’ve not yet put together a regular rotation of specific practitioner articles. This might happen in 2026, but there’s no specific plan as yet. - A better schedule for our social media channels
This mostly worked out, but as noted above, the auto-share widget didn’t really pan out, so we’ll have to do that a little more manually going forward.
What to look for in 2026?
Some of this has been mentioned above, but to sum it all up
- Monthly columns: Wednesday War Stories, #TBT, Interview, and if we can manage it, an FLGS spotlight
- Our usual Dragoons-centered events: The ACDC, Connections Online, The Wargame HQ at Origins, and The Fall Assembly
- Some changes to #TuesdayNewsday, both in content and organization
- A long-overdue migration of our forum to an updated software build, which will likely necessitate some changes to the forum look & feel, as well.
- Better integration, including event summaries/wrap-ups, with our live games crew
- Convention coverage of Buckeye Game Fest, Circle DC, Origins, The Fall Assembly, and Southern Front for sure.
Likely coverage of Winterfest, Historicon, Adepticon, and at least one Compass Expo, and probably at least one other event that we haven’t ID’ed yet. - Regular specials in our merchandise shop that’ll come & go with the seasons.
- An increase in online events for our Patreon supporters, and a return to some bonus content for them, as well.
- Some new contributors to the Armchair Dragoons, and an increase on contributions from some of our new-in-2025 crew
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 our caps to our spurs for mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and riding with us for another great year of wargaming. Lets make it the best one ever.
Thank you for visiting the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and riding with The Armchair Dragoons.
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