Meeple Mountain is one year old!!
I thought I’d take some time to recap the amazing year that we had, and perhaps look forward to what 2017 might have to offer.
Meeple Mountain was founded with the intention of publishing written content that had a positive attitude, high resolution photos, and a quality writing style. We want to be a positive force in board gaming. Throughout 2016 our commitment to these principles helped us draw in readers from around the globe, scale the rankings at BoardGameLinks.com (currently #14 out of almost 450 sites), and garner front page status on the Reddit boardgames sub over a dozen times.
Compelling Content
If you asked me in January 2016 if I’d have 6 people writing for the site who have collectively produced over 120 quality articles I might have laughed. But it’s all true. Here’s some highlights:
44 Reviews
Our reviews covered games of all genres, from meaty games like A Feast for Odin and Cry Havoc to silly games like Go Cuckoo and Moustache Smash. We even detoured from the standard review format and veered into narrative territory with story-like reviews for Daxu and Holmes: Sherlock and Mycroft.
19 Top Six lists
What can we say, people love lists, and we love writing them. We compiled our Top Six Euro games, our Top Six dexterity games, and Top Six dice rolling games. We asked the community to get involved in creating a Top Six list of “perfect game night games”. We even took our Top Six list on an imaginary date!
9 Interviews
Because we’re curious folk, we did interviews with notable board game publishers, designers, and industry people. We asked Dan King (the Gameboygeek) about his Kickstarter campaign, we asked Alexander Pfister (winner of back to back Kennerspiel des Jahres awards) about the SdJ and KSdJ nomination process, and we talked to Scott Gaeta of Renegade Games about diversity in board gaming.
Traffic
Thanks to all of that content your visits just kept coming. Our website averages almost 6000 views a month, our Instagram account has over 220 followers, our Facebook page has almost 250 followers, and we have nearly 1400 followers on Twitter.
All that and more!
Meeple Mountain isn’t just written content though. We also run local gaming events in Nashville including our monthly Nashville Game Night, and a highly successful Tabletop Day event in April which brought in over 160 gamers. More than 700 people have attended one our events throughout the year. But we couldn’t have done it without our sponsors.
In 2016 Meeple Mountain started a publisher sponsor program for our gaming events. We hand pick a single publisher with a new, or recently released game, and work with them to promote both our event, and their game. We feature their game on social media, in emails to our attendees, we review their game, and we run demos for that game at our events. Finally, we give away one or more copies of their game at our event. Gamers love this, and publishers love the immediate feedback they get from our attendees.
So what’s in store for 2017?
That’s a good question. Currently we publish articles on Monday and Wednesday. I’d like for us to move to a 3 day a week schedule. To do that I’d also like to grow our roster of writers to 10 or more this year. I’d also like Meeple Mountain to expand into video content. We published our first official video, our Top Games of 2016, at the end of last year. That’s a great start, but video content is a more compelling format for board gaming.
If you’re interested in contributing to Meeple Mountain in any way, shoot us an email, or ping us on Twitter!
Meeple Mountain is here to stay. Here’s to 2017!
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What do you think about Meeple Mountain Year in Review – 2016? Give us your opinions in the comments below!
