Since our very first post, we’ve been focused on publishing high-quality board game related content, whether it’s written or video. We craft and discuss, parenthesize, spellcheck, and edit until we’re happy with it. And this year we smashed last year’s record for our biggest year ever, with 580 published pieces—more than 10 per week; that’s crazy for an all-volunteer team like ours.
Let’s walk through the content and see what stood out.
444 Written Reviews
We reviewed even more games this year than we did last year: 444 compared to 410; over 180 of which were released this year! And we continue to review games far ahead of most other review sites thanks to our team’s traveling to Essen SPIEL to pick up European releases early.
By traffic, our biggest game review hits of 2025 were Slay the Spire: The Board Game, Feya’s Swamp, Gloomhaven Second Edition, Purple Haze (which generated quite a kerfluffle), and Earthborne Rangers. In 2025 our One Shot Mysteries series were the big hits, with only Unsolved Case Files: Jane Doe making it into our top 20. But that same top 20 also included popular games Vantage and Bomb Busters.
11 Videos
Our video work slowed dramatically in 2025. While we’re still committed to our YouTube channel, our focus remains on the written word. But if you’re reading this and you’re interested in doing your own video reviews, let me know!
For the year we had 127,863 total views in 2025, which was great for us, and we ended the year with a net positive of 267 subscribers. Our best-performing video of the year was Gary’s tutorial on How to Use Tabletop Simulator, part of our ongoing board game design series.
Please make sure to check those out—then “make sure to like and subscribe!”
117 Articles & Interviews
In past years our article and editorial coverage had slowed down, but 2025 saw the resurgence of this section of the site with a massive undertaking by Dr. Andrew Holmes. Called the Reiner Knizia Alphabet, this bi-weekly article series did a thorough analysis into Reiner Knizia games, with each article focusing on a different letter of the alphabet—from A to Z.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
We ended the series with a double-whammy. An interview with Dr. Reiner Knizia himself, and a massive giveaway of 7 of Reiner Knizia’s games (in partnership with 25th Century Games, Allplay, Bitewing Games, and Ravensburger).
Our biggest fan, turned contributor, K. David Ladage penned an extensive series on “perfected game mechanics”, selecting 6 per article and covering many of the mechanisms listed on BoardGameGeek.
Board Game Conventions
Just like in years past, our coverage of board game conventions continues to drive traffic. This includes talking about the games beforehand in our private chats, and relishing the time spent at the end afterwards. Take our Most Anticipated Games of Essen SPIEL 2025—the number one search result before the event. And then Andrew Lynch and Justin Bell followed that up with their recap of Essen SPIEL 2025, and Justin also visited PAX East 2025. Kevin Brantley went to GAMA Expo 2025 (along with myself), PAX Unplugged 2025, Origins Game Fair 2025, and Geekway to the West 2025, and Joseph Buszek spent time at SDHistCon 2025. But we broke a Meeple Mountain record by gathering SIX members of our team together at Gen Con 2025—a first!
Hot Topics
We also dropped plenty of one-off articles. Andrew Lynch’s Is This Really What We Want? – AI Art in Board Games generated a huge buzz on social media, as well as on BoardGameGeek (where it collected 36 pages of comments and wound up getting locked to avoid flame wars).
Kevin Brantley shared his experienced working publisher booths at conventions through the company Conhorde, Andrew Lynch penned an in-depth guide to Root expansions, K. David Ladage bared his soul to talk about 6 Games that Saved Me, Justin Bell started a 4 part, as yet unfinished, series on High Frontier 4 All, while also declaring that Board Game Arena was his “game of the year”.
But perhaps the single most meaningful article (to me) that we published this year was Ten Years and 3,000 Posts: Meeple Mountain by the Numbers, our celebration of turning TEN YEARS OLD, and publishing our 3,000th post. I spent weeks working on this article, collecting stats and figures, calling out contributions from team members, and generally contemplating the path that brought Meeple Mountain to where it is today.
5 Top 6 Lists
Apparently, our Top Six section was on hiatus in 2025, with only five published. The two we released were both focused on game design (sort of). Gary Chavez penned an encouragement for game designers titled Top Six Awesome Habits for Board Game Designers, and Andrew Holmes took a break from writing about Reiner Knizia to skewer the notion that chess is a “good game” by publishing his Top 6 Reasons Why Chess is a Bad Game. What do you think about that?
New Feature Development
As mentioned in previous Year in Review articles, I’m a professional software engineer by trade, and WordPress development (the platform used by Meeple Mountain) is part of my core skill set. This year didn’t see as many publicly visible features, but we did release a completely revamped board game giveaway section of the site. This new feature will make it easier to start and manage giveaways, so look for more of those in the future.
The biggest use of my development time was spent behind the scenes, working on software to improve the development of our newsletter—making it easier to create and publish. Many thanks to Tom Franklin, our newsletter editor, for his hard work in helping The Mountainer newsletter grow over the past year.
Website Traffic & Social Media
In 2025 we hit some amazing milestones on social media.
- 3,400+ followers on Facebook
- 4,300+ followers on Twitter
- 3,000+ followers on Instagram
- 3,400+ subs on YouTube
- 2,000+ followers on Blue Sky Social
- 3,900+ subscribers to our newsletter
In 2025, our website had a total of 1.55M pageviews, which is a 24% increase from last year’s traffic of 1.18M.
Here’s a fun statistic for my fellow data nerds: the top ten most common countries our readers are from
- 1 United States – 40%
- 2 United Kingdom – 8%
- 3 Canada – 7%
- 4 China – 6%
- This one surprised us!
- 5 Germany – 4%
- 6 Australia – 3%
- 7 Netherlands – 2%
- 8 Spain – 2%
- 9 France – 2%
- 10 Italy – 1%
Only time will tell if these numbers continue, but it’s certainly looking promising.
Board Gaming in Nashville
I live in Nashville, Meeple Mountain was born in Nashville, and I’ve been part of the board gaming scene here since the early 2010s. The board gaming scene in Nashville is strong, especially with thousands of people moving here every month. While Meeple Mountain no longer runs monthly game nights, our Nashville Tabletop Day event is still going strong, and will be entering it’s 9th year in 2026.
I will still be running Nashville Tabletop Day though, never fear. And 2025 saw us again returning to Trevecca Nazarene University’s Boone Convocation Center where we hosted almost 500 gamers. We also rolled our own custom QR-code based event management and notification system. This allowed us to track games and notify attendees throughout the event. And it worked amazingly well.
Here’s some relevant numbers from the event.
- 405 attendees
- 33 volunteers
- 24 sponsors
- 194 play to win titles
- 42 door prizes
- 2,776 entries for play to win games
- 118% satisfaction!
Nashville Tabletop Day 2026 is already locked in for Saturday, April 18, once again at Trevecca University. So if you’re in the area, make sure to join us!
What Does 2026 Have in Store for Meeple Mountain?
I thought we were in a great position last year, but I think 2025 was even better for Meeple Mountain than 2024. Meeple Mountain is finally operating in the black, which means I’m no longer paying for all our expenses out of my own pocket. Many thanks to our Crowdfunding Roundup featured placement participants, as well as for our board game gift guide.
So how about some concrete goals?
Thanks to consistency in our newsletter releases, and our newsletter editor’s insights, we’ve added over 1,500 new subscribers to The Mountaineer, bringing us to just shy of 4k subs—which was one of my primary goals for 2025. I’d love to see that number hit 5,000 in 2026, as we continue to deliver great content to the inboxes of our readers.
Read past newsletters
I’d also love to consider an additional newsletter, perhaps one targeting publishers; sharing the insights that our readers bring us. What content is popular and what isn’t? What gets the most clicks, and what doesn’t, etc.
I really want to find someone who loves doing video and bring them onto the team. Short form, long form, playthroughs, reviews, etc. We’ll never give up written content, but video is just so compelling that we want to find a way to release more of that content. If you’d like to join our team and focus on creating video content, please let us know!
I’d still love to do a website redesign, but that’s a pretty tall order. Maybe 2026 will be the year I do it? At the very least, I’d like to do some spring cleaning and speed up the performance of the site—which would make both Google and me happy.
I’d also like to work on some internal tooling to make our writing team happier.
So, I guess what I’m saying is that I want 2026 to be the year that we’re all happier.
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Cheers
Andy Matthews
Meeple Mountain
Founder / Editor in Chief
