Recently, with all sorts of new rule systems coming onto the market and perking up player interest it appears that the UK Ancients competition circuit has been undergoing a bit of a renaissance (geddit?).
Rather than just rely on gut feel, I've pulled together some stats for the rulesets covered in the main "BHGS" series of events, as these are (I believe) the rulesets that have most takeup in competitions right now. This does unashamedly mean the focus is on mostly 15mm events – so all of the various iterations of WAB and it's derivatives are not covered, but unless I'm missing something I don't believe any of those sets are supporting the same sorts of numbers of players or events throughout the year as the ones I looked at.
The data I did use was collated from several sources – the current BHGS rankings for FoGAM and L'Art de la Guerre, plus the DBMM rankings page and finally John Graham Leigh's DBM results page, all to look at how many people are playing each system in competitions across the UK.
The main (and I believe fairly safe) assumption is that these four sets of rankings & results capture pretty much all of the competitive games played in the past 12 months in the UK across these 4 systems. I also then shared this with the veritable king of stats analysis in UK gaming, Martin from Vexillia who did some validation and additional analysis (thanks Martin!)
What I looked at was numbers of players, number and size of events, and then also how much does each set appear to depend on a "core" of very active players, and finally also how long is the "tail" of occasional players in each ruleset.
So, what's the state of play?
Find out at: link