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: @jalanhenning@dice.camp (tips for using Mastodon).

Now that 2025 is in the books, I present the final stats on what your fellow readers found most interesting:

The good news is blog traffic doubled! The bad news is that it all came from the Top 10 most-viewed blog posts over the course of the year—

1. Top 15 ST:TNG Episodes, in Chronological Order
2. Top 20 Pumpkin Beers
3. Top 10 Episodes of Star Trek: Voyager, in Chronological Order
4. Most Played Board Games and Card Games
5. 1973 Implementation of Wordle was Published by DEC
6. Star Trek: Enterprise Top 10 Episode Lists
7. Top 35 Most Famous Poets
8. Star Trek in Chronological Order
9. Top 10 Episodes of Star Trek: Lower Decks, in Chronological Order
10. Rules for “Diamonds” Trick-Taking Card Game

Most of this is “evergreen” content, with top-10 style lists replacing the PbtA and card-game articles that dominated in 2024. It’s now a meta-top 10.

I switched from publishing most Sundays in 2024 to publishing on Saturdays, thinking my blog is the type of thing that people read on their weekends, and I wanted to get fresh content to them earlier in the weekend.

Here are my top 10 posts this year:

1. Most Played Board Games and Card Games
2. Star Trek: Enterprise Top 10 Episode Lists
3. Dungeon World 2: What We Know So Far
4. Hugo-Award Winning Novels
5. Apocalypse World: Burned Over Playtest
6. The Top 100 Star Trek Episodes in Chronological Order
7. An Analysis of PbtA Harm Systems
8. Space: 1999’s Top 10 Episodes in Logical Order
9. Best Translations of the Epic of Gilgamesh
10. Lexember 2025—Prompts for Conlang Lexicons

Two posts this year broke into the overall Top 10. Of these, I was surprised by Most Played Board Games and Card Games, as that is something I’ve written about many times over the years, without it ever resonating before.

An Analysis of PbtA Harm Systems marks the second time in two years that my one guest post of the year made the top 11 posts of the year!

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. Authorial Burden in Interactive Fiction
31. The Original Sin of Kemeny & Kurtz 
32. IMDB Ratings Over Time
33. Dungeon Prep
34. A Planet of the Week Campaign
35. Coincidences in Stories
36. Live Music in America
37. Interview with Jon Simantov, Designer of Liberation
38. Horsing Around
39. Who Rates and Reviews Books, Movies, Games, and Beer Anyway?

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 Itch.io Downloads

And here are the top downloads from Itch.io:

1. Uncommon World
2. Planet of the Week: Player’s Guide
3. The Best-Delayed Plans: The Game Master’s Guide to Adventure Prep
4. Reflections on PbtA Design
5. Fantastic Worlds
6. Planet of the Week: GM’s Guide
7. Under the Blood-Red Mountain
8. Fith
9. How to Design Card Games
10. 5E Skill System for Fantasy PbtA Games
11. Improv Almanac
12. Hintutubí 1 Science Mission
13. Hard-Knock World
14. BLUELITE: A Holmes Basic Hack
15. Suddenly an Ogre
16. Melee, Missiles & Magic
17. Solitaire Square
18. Axis & Allies 1941 – ABC Variant
19. Muna Lingi
20. A New Life in Auspele
21. Melee in the Mines
22. Castle Conquests

Planet of the Week has been a joy to create and run, so I’m pleased it has been downloaded so much. I was addicted to Solitaire Square on my phone for a bit, but Itch.io users don’t seem to like play-in-the-browser games as much as they like downloads.

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

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