Best of Troy Press

Troy Press publishes free and PWYW role playing games, print-and-play games, and a range of books, as well as sharing its market research into the tabletop gaming industry.

The best way to reach the author, J. Alan Henning, is through Mastodon: @[email protected] (tips for using Mastodon).

Now that 2024 is in the books, I present the final stats on what your fellow readers found most interesting:

This was the first year our blog traffic declined. The reason: in 2023, Wealth Systems in RPGs made Hacker News and racked up over 7,000 page views. Taking out that one viral post (it dropped from #1 in the rankings to #21 this year), we would have grown 4% instead of shrinking 13%. I’ve not seen any growth in views from posting on Mastodon, but I’m not willing to go to a VC-backed site like Bluesky just yet.

The Top 10 most-viewed blog posts over the course of the year:

1. Alternatives to Dungeon World
2. Stonetop is a State-of-the-Art Fantasy Role-Playing Game
3. Top 10 Episodes of Star Trek: Lower Decks, in Chronological Order
4. Rules for “Diamonds” Trick-Taking Card Game
5. Star Trek in Chronological Order
6. Table Comparing Dungeon World to 5 Hacks
7. Freebooters on the Frontier 2e is the OSR PbtA Homage to OD&D
8. Uncommon World: Open-Source Fantasy PbtA
9. Jump-In Uno: Perfect for Large Gatherings
10. Top 35 Most Famous Poets

Most of this is “evergreen” content, though I updated the Top 10 episodes of Lower Decks prior to the fifth season (and I will again after recency bias subsides and the ratings stabilize for the new season).

I was much more consistent about publishing posts on Sundays, never missing a Sunday from April on. However, the only 2024 post to break into the top 10 was Top 35 Most Famous Poets (a post that did well to my surprise and amazement). Here are my top 10 posts this year:

1. Top 35 Most Famous Poets
2. Chasing Adventure: A Fantasy PbtA with Fewer D&Disms
3. The Best-Delayed Plans: The Game Master’s Guide to Adventure Prep
4. Top 15 ST:TNG Episodes, in Chronological Order
5. Design Patterns in Choose Your Own Adventures
6. Tiny BASIC Interpreter in Your Browser
7. wwwBASIC: Google’s Browser BASIC
8. The Best Season of Star Trek: Discovery
9. A History of Suits in Card Games
10. Customizing Stonetop
11. Real-world Language Proficiency for Fantasy Games

I had to share #11, the first guest post I’ve published. (Skander, you outdid 40 other posts I published this year, so maybe you should write something else for us all?)

And here are the bottom 10, if you want to show them some love. (Excluding those from Q4, which are on the home page as I publish this and haven’t had much time to get views.)

30. The Cleaning of Prison Station Echo
31. RPG Sessions with 8 or More Players
32. RPG-a-Day 2024 Recap
33. U.S. Gamers Prefer the Familiar
34. Esperanto Resources
35. Regaining the Book Reading Habit
36. Eighty Days: A BASIC Travel Game
37. Size of PnP Card Games People Have Printed Out
38. Improv Almanac: Dangers and Discoveries for 88 Places 
39. Axis & Allies 1941 – ABC Variant

And here are the unloved children from 2023, which all had at least a year to languish unread:

43. Uncommon World 1.1
44. A Lexember to Remember: Birds in Denju
45. RPG as a Service
46. Alternatives to Dungeons & Dragons
47. Father, Son, and Unholy Ghost
48. 7 Wonders: Architects Makes a Great Gift
49. Comparing How Americans Play Games Now vs. 1940
50. Prequelitis in Strange New Worlds
51. Tips for Using Mastodon
52. Denju: Language of the Cedreg Empire

Our Top Games by Views

And here our are top games:

1. Uncommon World: Open-Source Fantasy PbtA
2. Fantastic Worlds: An Anthology of Resources for Fantasy PbtA Games
3. Rules for “Diamonds” Trick-Taking Card Game
4. Spin Rummy
5. Under the Blood-Red Mountain
6. BLUELITE: A Holmes Basic Hack [2024]
7. Hard-Knock World
8. Suddenly an Ogre: A DW Gamebook
9. Improv Almanac: Dangers and Discoveries for 88 Places  [2024]
10. Play BASIC Computer Games Online
11. Double Draw: Rules for a 5-Card Draw Variant
12. Melee, Missiles & Magic: An Homage to Tunnels & Trolls 1E
13. A New Life in Auspele: A Choose-Your-Way Game
14. Axis & Allies 1941 – ABC Variant [2024]
15. Castle Conquests
16. Melee in the Mines
17. Civscape
18. Colossal Cave Adventure: The Card Game
19. Eighty Days: A BASIC Travel Game [2024]
20. The Pearls and the Peril
21. 7-Card Chaos
22. City Blocks
23. Hopping Halflings

Uncommon World alone has 31% of the views, and the top 3 have 55% of the views. I’m honestly disappointed that 2024’s games haven’t done better: I invested a lot of time and money into Improv Almanac and thought it could be broadly useful, and my son and I really enjoyed playtesting our ABC Variant of Axis & Allies 1941. Check them out!

For older stats, check out History of Troy Press Content.

Illustration credit: The Procession of the Trojan Horse in Troy, circa 1760, public domain.