"UK Ancients Tourney attendance by ruleset" Topic

Almost a year ago I wrote a blog post on the relative popularity of various "competition" Ancients sets in the UK, which, unusually for this sort of thing was based on actual analysis of real numbers rather than just a subjective TMP-esque mumble of personal preference and "down my club we think this…".

At the time, FoG Ancients was the largest set by some distance but had declined from it's peak of a few years previous, the popularity of DBMM had been flat for some time and a new set L'Art de la Guerre (which you'll have seen on my website no doubt) was just finishing its first full year of being played in the UK.

Well, how does that all look now, and what's changed in the UK competition scene?

This comprehensive blog post has a stab at providing the answer:

"anyone who does competitions is a <bleep>, I went to a competition 30 years ago and played someone horrible and I'll now never go again, tournament wargaming is silly fantasy wargaming, I only ever play historically accurate scenarios in my garage with my mate Steve and anyone who does different is a <bleep>"

There, I saved you posting that… :-)

Now we can just get on with the discussion about the content of this post …

In case you suffer from tl;dr here's a summary:

Lots of words & numbers that say: overall numbers level, ADLG up, DBMM down at bit, and FOGAM down a lot.

Still worth reading the whole thing.

--
Martin Stephenson
The Waving Flag | Twitter | eBay

How is Impetus fairing in your calculations?

It appears from the forum that there are only 3 tournaments likely to happen this year for Impetus, one in York and one at Derby and one in Bristol.

There have been other events in the past, a Welsh Open which doesn't seem to have happened since 2015, an event in Middlesborough last May which doesn't seem to be recurring, and an event at Triples last year – however Triples has now gone so that knocks it off the list and no-one seemingly as yet has put their hand up to replace it.

All three current events are 1-day events, the York event earlier this year getting 18 players (up from I think 8 the year before) and Derby with 8 last year and also 8 the year before. Bristol had 7. From impetus.ativiforum.com/f6-events

There were just under 30 different players entering across the 4 events to take place in the last year, so whilst its on paper the same size player pool as MeG and Spearpoint, with just 2-3 events currently published as happening this year and with every event staged being of one day duration with 2-3 rounds Impetus isn't making that big a dent in the overall UK Ancients competition participation landscape at the moment.

Mr Madaxeman seems to be a man of great passions. Just a year or two ago he was telling us that Field of Glory was the best of the best. For the last year or so he has passed the crown to L'Art de la Guerre, with the attendant kneeling and knuckling of the forehead. It is grand to see such enthusiasm and his energy drives him to create a highly informative website, however having him tell us what the currently popular ancient rules are is akin to having the chairman of a political party offer analysis on the latest polls.

FoGAM may be down but this is from a very high base. Perversely I think the biggest threat to FoGAM is version 3.0. It is likely to split the FoG community and isn't likely to make a better game. Even if it is a half hour or so quicker.

I plan to stay with version 2.0

IT is interesting how many different sets there are now all with there own competitions. It seems like there is no co,mon agreement like in the old days?

No impetus?

The third annual To the Strongest! Tournament this February at Chalgrove had 29 players.

link

We are just sorting out the date for next year- looks like being on 24th February 2018 for your diaries! :-)

Impetus covered in a post above…

TTS – 29 is a solid number, would be even better if there were more events though :-)

Maybe a second, you never know! ;-)

The rules googles are on! Happy honeymoon.

We've run an Impetus tournament as well as a Basic Impetus Tournament at Huzzah! for a couple years. This year our convention tournament will be Lion Rampant. Next year, who knows?

I like using BI as a tournament rule set, especially with the new BI V2 out. Nice to have it in .pdf format with all the lists available, etc, and at a very nice cost too.

Did you think of including SAGA

I'd left Saga out as it's not really a 'mass battle' set in the DBM/FoG mold, and also because its stats are dominated by the Derby event, for which results aren't available anywhere I've seen.

Derby is 2 days and gets something like 40+ players, after that Chris Churcills West Midlands event is a one-dayer with almost 30, and there are a handful of other events (3 of them as part of the BHGS events) with between 6-12 players.

Without the names from Derby it's tricky to estimate the player pool and number of duplicate appearances properly but my guess would be maybe 50 players, 6-7 events and a total entry figure around 100-120?