2023: A Year in Numbers

It’s for the first time in a while that I feel that this year has been better than the last. That’s not difficult to beat since 2022 was horrible, but it’s nice to reflect on the past 12 months and feel good about how they have gone on a personal level. Let’s hope that positivity continues into 2024 with my new house and a steady job on the horizon. I hope that you have had a good year as well, and I wish you all the best to come in 2024, including many victories against your games.

In this article, I will go over the past year in terms of what has happened in the game, what happened on the blog, and all the affiliated sites. I will try to put everything in numbers and compare a bit to the past yearly recaps. This has been a relatively slow year for me as many of the co-authors dropped their work or slowed down significantly due to personal reasons. My own content has also been delayed on multiple occasions due to my working all day, not having the energy to write in the evenings, and needing the weekends to recharge. Add to this that my holidays are usually quite fully booked with other things, and there is very little time left for me to write articles. Still, I set some goals for 2023, so I want to see if I reached any of them and what goals I can set for 2024.

Game

I introduced this segment last year, covering all the expansions released for the game in 2023. Sadly, it has been a rather slow year for the game. Some standard releases that we saw coming from miles away without any real surprises. We also got a lot less than in 2022, as that year saw the introduction of the Starter decks.

All in all, we got the repackaged Dream-chaser cycle towards the summer, with a lot of people enjoying the new (to them) player cards and a fantastic story. For veteran players, the new campaign and upgradable ships were a nice addition, though it wasn’t reason enough for me to buy the expansions. Still, this greatly expands on what the newer players would need to get a better feeling for this game. In October, we got the repackaged Two Towers Saga boxes. Again, there weren’t any real changes here; it is kind of what we expected coming from the Fellowship of the Ring saga boxes.

With these three boxes in total, there wasn’t a lot this year to spend your money on. There was even less, now that GameZenter is no longer printing the Nightmare packs for the game, and word got out that all the old content would no longer be reprinted. This has caused the secondary market for the game to inflate a lot, especially for Dwarrowdelf packs (newer players wanting to buy a good cycle that is unlikely to be reprinted) and Vengeance of Mordor packs (both newer and veteran players try to get those packs since it only ever had 1 print run). I’m not too happy with what this has done for the prices of those packs, and the scalpers have really had a great year because of that.

Looking to 2024, I think we will get a similar year to 2023, with Ered Mithrin being the summer release and the repackaged Return of the King Saga boxes coming towards the holiday season. The more interesting question becomes the content for 2025. Based on the Starter decks, we knew we were going to get 3 repackaged cycles, and the Sagas have now all been covered as well. Will we perhaps still get repackaged content from other cycles and repackaged Hobbit boxes? I guess time will tell!

On the fan-created content front, there wasn’t a lot released this year, either. AleP took a year off to work on their next cycle, though they did have a reworked version of the Siege of Erebor in September. This was a fantastic quest that I covered on the blog as my first dedicated AleP article. While I did playtest their upcoming Deluxe scenarios, and a spoiler article was released earlier in the year, we have not gotten a release date for those yet. Other projects, such as Legacy of Feanor, were put on hold due to personal reasons by the creator. That’s the risk with these one-man projects, but I am glad to hear that the issues that led to the delay have mostly gone away by now. Here’s hoping for plenty of content by the community in 2024!

Blog

This year was a relatively slow year for the blog. Little new content meant next to no news articles to be released. Since I started to work again in January after my sick leave in 2022, I also had less time to work on articles during the day. That disappeared entirely when I got back to full-time in May. It was a great achievement for me personally to recover from my illness in that short timeframe, but the blog’s content suffered a bit. There were also no real milestones to be achieved this year apart from the 5-year anniversary. It is crazy to think that the blog has been going on for so long already! With most of the scenarios already covered in those 5 years, I used this year mostly for Nightmare articles and finishing off the PODs. Let’s have a look at the statistics for 2023 and see what patterns we see there.

Likes and Comments

With relatively few articles to be released this year, there was also not a lot to like or comment on, so the statistics for this year have decreased compared to 2022. The number of likes is even less than half of what it was in 2021, which was the high-water mark for likes on the articles. Not that I care too much about likes since it can only be handed out by people with WordPress accounts, but it’s still a statistic to keep an eye on.

Comments are more important to me, as they show active interaction of people asking questions about articles (old and new) and me trying to answer them all. We received 47 this year after filtering spam comments. This stat does not show all the comments, though, as I generally receive a lot of them when sharing the links to new articles on sites like Discord and Facebook. It makes communication a lot easier than answering them via WordPress. The drop compared to 2022 isn’t as big as it was for the likes, just 20 fewer comments than last year.

Views per month

I really like keeping track of how many people see the blog every day. And while the 1k average views per day is now a thing of the past, this year has seen a very steady year in terms of views. January, March, and July stand apart a little, reaching 30k+ views per month. In January, this was because I still had a lot of articles to be released, so that drew quite a crowd. March saw the start of the Custom Scenario Kit analysis articles, which also got me a lot of views on that article and the ones related to it. July is usually a busier month, as the summer holidays offer more free time for people to read articles. Nothing important was released during that month, though I was more active in the community during that time, working on releasing the books for the general audience.

Taking 2023 as a whole, we had a combined view count of 312k views in the last 12 months. Comparing that to other years shows that it is on par with the results obtained during the COVID pandemic in 2020 and 2021. Both those years were just short of 300k, so 2023 has been better than those years. A possible cause could be that more people bought into the revised editions of the game and needed some help with those quests. This slow growth means that there is still a need for this blog to stick around, and I’ll gladly continue for another year! Only 2022 was a better year for the blog. I think that is because I could dedicate more time to it thanks to being on sick leave and between jobs for a while in that year. I am 35k short of 2022’s statistics, though, so the difference isn’t huge. At this rate, the blog will have reached 2 million views by 2025, which is crazy!

Articles

In total, we have created 42 new articles in 2023. This includes the various (Nightmare) scenario analyses, staples articles, monthly updates, and some additional articles that I came up with during the year. It has still been quite a productive year, though this is the fewest articles I’ve written in a single year. Still, I uphold quality over quantity, and if some POD articles go well past the 10k words, then it is no wonder that the number of articles this year was a little lower than usual. In total, the blog now holds 536 articles, which means that we have passed 500 articles this year! We still average about 80 per year, so I would love to keep that going.

Of all the articles that were created this year, this is the top 5!

Top 5 newly released articles in 2023

1. Ten Decks for New Players – 5,791 views
2. Buying LOTR LCG in 2023 (and later) – 3,681 views
3. Vision of the Palantir Loot 2022 – 2,069 views
4. Lure of Middle Earth 2023: Experiences and Memories – 885 views
5. Con of the Rings 2023: Experiences and Memories – 790 views

Looks like the more generic articles win this year, not those based on a particular scenario. The new player articles always do well since they are what new players have to reread often as well. The top article was also published in January, which will have helped it to get more views with time. My buying guide is also a new-player-orientated article, which did pretty well.

The third most popular article is related to the Loot from last year, which I published this year. It got delayed a bunch due to scheduling and my illness, but it added over 2k views to the total. The two convention articles I wrote this year have also got enough views to make it into the top 5, so I will definitely be continuing that with future conventions.

When looking at all the articles that have ever been released on the blog, the following five have gotten the most views last year:

Top 5 most popular articles in 2023

1. New Player Buying Guide – 10,839 views
2. First Impressions: Starter Decks – 6,012 views
3. Ten Decks for New Players – 5,791 views
4. Buying LOTR LCG in 2023 (and later) – 3,681 views
5. Dear New LOTR LCG Player, – 3,495 views

Ok, ok, I get it. New player articles are popular. All the articles in the top 5 are aimed at newer players, which is likely also due to the fact that they are linked together. Looking at the top 10 shows even more buying guides and starter articles, which means that it is quite a popular subject. I might need to find some more new-player topics to write about next year. A bit further down the list, we find the top-viewed Scenario analysis article, which is for the Battle of Carn Dum. This makes a lot of sense since that quest is quite difficult and will need a strategy to beat with some consistency. I am dreading the fact that the Nightmare version of that quest is the next article on my list to write for January, but hopefully, it will be as popular as the normal version’s article!

Countries

It’s great to see that the blog keeps track of where the blog is accessed so that I have an overview of where all the players in the community are located. There have been some shifts in the top 10 from last year, with slightly fewer Brazilians and Poland falling off the map entirely. They are replaced by the Australian community. Top of the list by a wide margin remains the country with the highest English-speaking population. The USA has always been at the top of the rankings but did drop by 15k this year compared to 2022.

Expanding the map to see all the countries that have accessed the blog these past 12 months shows that we are really a worldwide phenomenon. Sure, a lot of the countries coloured in blue are probably VPN locations or people who accidentally followed a link once, but it still counts in my book! I hope to one day see the entire world painted this shade of blue so that at least one person in each country plays LOTR LCG.

Authors

In the past, a lot of fellow authors have used the blog to post about their thoughts on the game. I’m always willing to offer a platform for those who want to give something back to the community but don’t want to make an entire site around it. Sadly, this year, I did not see that many articles written by authors other than myself. We had 2 articles by RedSpiderr at the beginning of the year, both of which performed really well. The LOTR Saga by MortenDall also saw 2 contributions this year, progressing into the Return of the King portion of the Saga. I also published two articles under my own name, but which were written by other members of the community. This included one storage article and the most recent article on the blog, where Kyle Butler dives into the first AleP cycle with Ambush at Erelas. The rest of the articles were all me! Still, the blog keeps track of which author received the most views this year, so we can still share that list, as there have been quite some articles published by others in previous years:

*gasp* I’m in 1st place??? No waaaaay!!!
To be fair, a lot of fellow authors received more views this year than last year, so they have gotten some more exposure with their older articles. 11k views for Brinx and Morten on their LOTR Saga articles is quite impressive. Towards the bottom of the list are the people who have only ever done one or two articles, and I am very sad to see our beloved bear at the bottom. We might need more bear-themed articles in 2024…

Patreon

It was an interesting year for the Patreon side of the blog since I introduced some changes at the beginning of the year. I did away with the old format of different tiers and such just because I couldn’t live up to the expectations that those goals set. Instead, I opted to create one level of support at $1/month, with the option to pay more if you really wanted to. Most people didn’t, and as such, a lot of money was wasted in Patreon and platform fees. I did make a bit more money because some people opted for the yearly subscription at a 10% discount, which gave me more money in the short-term (May in the graph below), but left the rest of the months a bit lower than they were before.

At the beginning of the year, I earned $310 per month, and by December 2023, it was down to $242 per month. Still, this is more than enough to pay for my platform and site expenses, and it even allowed me to fund the shipping of the Loot back in May. The spike in May is largely in part of the people who figured out that you’d have to be a Patreon supporter to earn the Loot that I make, and many of them ended up going for a yearly subscription, hence why it peaks at $582. All in all, I earned $3611 this year from Patreon alone, which is a fantastic amount even after nearly 6 years of blogging. This money was used to pay for the site and its domain and for shipping the Loot halfway through the year. It also covered some expenses from previous years. All in all, the blog is currently at a $400 profit after all those years of making Loot and giving back to the community. What I will do with the remaining amount and any new money coming in remains to be seen. I do have new ideas for Loot, but I would need a US shipping address to get everything delivered. I am not too keen on doing all of that, plus shipping is a real pain, and I am glad to have had a bit of a rest period from it. But the idea is still pretty neat, so perhaps I will release it in the new year and offer up plans for people to order the items themselves.

Aside from the Patreon income, I have also received various donations to the blog in the past year. This was largely from people who wanted the PDF version of the Field Guide to print for themselves. I am really glad that some people were willing to send some money directly via PayPal, which amounted to just over $1200. Because the PDF was such a success, I started to offer the books online in August. I cannot trace how many books actually sold, but it must have been over 150 since then. I have only rounded the prices, so I am not making as much money off of these sales as you might think. In total, I got a payout this month of $28,34 in profits from the books. A majority of the price goes into production costs, and while I could have them printed in bulk, they’re not selling that well. But every little bit helps, and the money will go to the blog to keep the lights on for a while longer.

Personal Statistics

On a more personal note, I have largely neglected this game in 2023. Not because I don’t love it anymore but more because life got in the way, and I needed the time to work on other parts of it. Because of that, this segment on personal statistics will be relatively short compared to other years.

Playthroughs

I have to be honest; I don’t think I have logged any games since Con of the Rings back in October. While my playthrough book is currently packed away somewhere for the move, I would think that the stats aren’t that great compared to other years. I played the game a lot less in my spare time, whereas in previous years, I would have a game by myself every week or so. I logged a lot fewer solo games this year but made up for it by logging more multiplayer games. This includes digital games with the standard Sunday Night gaming group on DragnCards, as well as physical games. The two conventions I attended this year definitely increased my playthrough average month over month, and the bi-monthly national group get-together also helped me play more games.

This year also saw an increase in my appreciation for the Custom Scenario Kits. I made several decks with those encounter cards and offered them up for players to play against during physical get-togethers. You will have seen me play a more antagonistic role as sort of a Dungeon Master controlling the encounter deck and a group of up to 4 players attempting to defeat my decks. Most were successful, but some teams definitely took longer than others. This did take away from my gaming time at conventions, as I didn’t play a deck myself, but it is a great experience to shake things up a little.

I will have to include the statistics for 2023 in the 2024 article or perhaps in the 6th-anniversary article coming up by the end of January. In the meantime, I hope that those of you who’ve gotten the playthrough log this year are more determined to continue logging your playthroughs, and I am eager to hear any fun statistics on the most used heroes or most games against individual scenarios of this year in the comments.

Collection

Since I already owned all of the content that was rereleased this year, it was a relatively cheap year for my gaming budget. I didn’t need to buy any of the big expansions, though I did add them to my collection sheet for the Patreon supporters who might want to check them off their list. Instead, my collection has been reduced a little, as I decided towards the end of the year that I should really start selling the playmats and alt arts that I owned. These were not seeing that much play, and I would rather have the money to expand my gaming library or to put the money towards the move into my new home. I did end up keeping a handful of playmats just so that I would be able to continue playing the game on a nice surface. All in all, I did end up making $2k on the alt arts and playmats, which was a big help towards funding a dedicated gaming table for my new home.

Here is the updated collection tracker of all the items I have owned up to this point. I did not make a different colour for the things I have sold.

Resolutions

In last year’s article, I set a few resolutions to hopefully meet by the end of 2023. So let’s reflect on the individual points and see what new goals I can set for 2024.

From 2023

• “Attend more conventions.” Well, we are starting off strong with a solid checkmark on this point on the list. I did go to more conventions this year, making it to both Lure of Middle Earth for the first time and returning to Con of the Rings in the second half of the year. Interacting with the community at these events is always fun, and I have even managed to join a national group here in the Netherlands for occasional physical get-togethers. This has helped me to get more cards on the table and work with what I actually paid for.
• “Complete more Nightmare scenarios.” Another check. The initial goal was to at least complete the NM Against the Shadow cycle. This was successful, and I even managed to get pretty far into the NM Angmar Awakened cycle; just one quest left! Next year will see me progress further into the cycles for sure.
• “Offer up more positions for co-authors to start series or continue ongoing projects.” We’re on a roll here since I have put out the offer to several people this year. Sadly, not everyone could deliver on their promise, which has left the content well a bit dry for this year. But a new author is working on the AleP stuff, and I got another editor to work on older articles to bring them more in line with modern articles. If you want to help with this resolution, check out the Careers page, which was added this year.
• “Appear some more on podcasts and video channels this year.” Sadly, I don’t think I have done this in 2023. The timezones don’t always line up, and apart from a brief cameo in the Con of the Rings videos, I wasn’t around much. I did interact a lot with community members and content creators though, and my name is still dropped often on certain episodes. Hopefully, this will change in the new year.
• “Maintain a strong community and a pillar of knowledge for new players with this site!” Difficult to judge for myself, but I feel that my input on the blog and in several other corners of the community has been appreciated.

For 2024

• Complete the NM Angmar Awakened and Dream-chaser cycles.
• Get more involved with community-created content and write more articles on their scenarios.
• Host some games in my new house for local players.
• Continue the good work from this year! This includes not being so hard on myself for having slower months.

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And with that, 2023 is over. I hope you have enjoyed this look back at the past year and join me in welcoming in the new year. I really hope to get some more games in this year, both physically and digitally. I have my tickets for Lure of Middle Earth already for February, and I will do my best to attend any other conventions in the coming year as well. But if you’ll excuse me, I need to pack up my computer and put it in a box, since I am literally moving to a new house tomorrow!

See you next year!