My Eight Best Performing Substack Posts of 2025
Looking back on what people read the most from my ramblings.
I looked back, and I made my first post on this Substack on March 26th 2025. I think, purely from memory, that I created the account on the previous day.
Nine months later, the stats page tells me that I’m just shy of 60K views for the 109 posts that I’ve written in that time.
What a ride it’s been! And, right off the bat, I want to thank every person who has read any of my posts, or punched the “like” button, restacked a post or even stuck their head above the parapet and made a comment.
You’re all amazing. Thank You!
I have to say—and I’ve seen other people say this, but it bears repeating—that the Solo TTRPG Community on Substack is universally welcoming, kind, helpful and generous to a fault.
I can’t wait to see what 2026 brings…
However, before we get to the new year, how about we rest for a moment in the current year and reflect on which posts have found the most traction here on my little old Substack page?
So here goes with the EIGHT Rolling Alone posts that have had the most views this year….
First up, we have an actionable list of super-quick tips which people struggling to get started in the wonderful hobby of solo TTRPG might find helpful.
There’s a lot of love for Mork Borg in the solo TTRPG community. And quite right, too. It’s rules-lite, theme-heavy, brutally chaotic and a whole lot of fun. Whilst it’s written for a group, it adapts easily to solo play, with several supplements available to assist. This post discussed my own first tentative steps into the game, which I fully intend to play more in 2026.
Then we have this post, which was, in effect, a review (of sorts) of the core book for the Mythic Game Master Emulator by Tana Pigeon. I’ve recently been re-reading the book because I want to play some games in early 2026, which will require me to use Mythic, since it doesn’t have native solo rules. It really is a high-quality piece of work!
This next one was something I’d been thinking of writing for a while, since I felt like an outlier in my fruitless quest to get to grips with PDF and online tools. What I discovered was that lots of people feel the same way as I do—namely, that there is something rather wonderful about switching off our devices and digging into analogue tools like books, tables, miniatures and dice.
I’ve spent a fair bit of time thinking about the nuts and bolts of playing games on my own this year, and this next post was quite an early reflection (published on June 16th) about how I struggled to get to grips with complicated rule books and the machinations of solo oracles at first. I hope it helped others to push on through that sense of overwhelm to find the peaceful calm of playing solo.
This next selection was a big surprise for me. I hesitated for a long while before even smashing the “publish” button, since I had no idea if anyone would be remotely interested in the Sport Replay Gaming sub-niche. It turned out that people were—and I had a load of questions and follow-ups on this post.
One thing I love about solo TTRPG is just how generous people are with their time, skills and output. It’s perfectly possible to have a viable and amazing time with this hobby without spending any money at all, such is the plethora of resources floating around the Internet that people have made and are simply offering for free. I decided at an early stage that I’d try to give a little something back, and this was my first faltering attempt to add to the store of Ironsworn freebies.
Finally, we have the post that received the most views on my Substack in 2026, and it’s one I wrote only a few days ago. This was simply a list of my favourite solo games that I’ve played in the nine months since I came to this amazing hobby. By far and away, this one generated more comments, reads, and likes than anything I’ve written on my Substack so far.
So there we have it—the six posts (not in any particular order) that had the most readers in 2025. All of them have garnered more than 1,000 reads, which, frankly, blows my mind!
You’ll notice that among these “best performers”, there is a notable lack of Actual Play Reports. Those play reports tend to perform less well, albeit they gather a fair slab of reads as time goes by—”evergreen” posts, in other words. I’ll still be writing these reports in 2026, because—frankly—I enjoy them! And even if they don’t individually hit the heights of popularity, their views add up collectively!
If you missed any of these little beauties, then feel free to click on the appropriate link. I’m picking up new subscribers all the time, so I guess that many of you will find something new to read among this selection.