"Who's playing what UK Ancients set- the 2018 update" Topic

09 May 2018 3:03 p.m. PST
Just updated the UK competition stats for Ancients on my blog to cover the last 12 months:

Madaxeman Blog Link

The table (ahem) below is a summary of the full report showing measurable comparisons between the leading sets (its more readable on the blog post, honest):

Players Change Players 3+ Players (2018) Events Total Entries Average Field
ADLG 162 +40 92 115 28 499 18
DBMM 86 +2 35 62 18 264 15
FOGAM 79 -18 36 49 15 253 17
DBA 65 +3 40 50 13 186 14
MeG 61 +30 22 39 12 185 15
DBM 40 - 21 19 9 130 14

Players – different players entering a UK event in the last 12 months
Change – net change in previous 12 month period
3+ events – number of players who entered 3 or more events for each ruleset
Players 2018 – number of different players to enter an event this calendar year (included as a benchmark for FoG 3.0, which started in January 2018)
Events – number of competitions throughout the year. Where one event includes multiple pools they are counted as different events
Total entries – count of entries at all UK events
Average field – average field (doh!)

Nice.

What are their names? :-)

All 400 of them ?!

"DBx-based games are also still by far the most popular with almost 75% of all UK players choosing a "single-base, single unit" system in preference to "multi-base unit" rulesets."

Given that TtS! and IMPETVS are (or can be) single base, single unit systems, I'm a little surprised they're not higher ranked. Perhaps it's a bit of a language barrier with IMPETVS, although AdG can have its linguistic issues too (yet look at its apparent popularity!).

Cheers

I know there is avid Impetus community in GB. We have a 8 or so in our club playing it in Southern Ontario, Canada. Of course competition gaming is only one facet of the ancient gaming community. I don't know what kind of game ADLG gives (looks interesting) but visually it does not compare to the bigger Impetus or TtS bases.

I can only measure tournaments, and TTS has just one with 33 players, and Impetus has maybe 1 or two with very limited numbers of players

The Impetus forum seems very quiet as well relative to other systems but TTS is busy FWIW

The different Forum activity maybe, in part, the relative age to the rules set. Impetus is now a mature set where as TtS and ADLG are still relatively new. Lorenzo certainly envisaged a strong competition game component for Impetus. Not sure how that has developed over time. The competition scene in North America has weakened considerably over the past 25 years for all systems.

So why is AdG doing so well in the UK?

(I have the rules and know they're a good set; just wondering why they in particular seem to be doing so *very* well. AdG has been around since 2008. My 3rd edition is 2014.)

Cheers

"TTS has just one with 33 players" well we only had 31 players in the end- but we fought 120 competition games between us on that one day in February.

Also we've added a second tournament this year- in Leven, in Fife, Scotland on 22nd/23rd September. I'll be there- I'm coming up with a small band of hardened Sassenach invaders. We expect to have 15-20 players- if anyone would like to come please email me at the address on my blog:

bigredbat.blogspot.co.uk

ADG is on its third edition, but this is the first one published in English.

That probably accounts for why it didn't get much airtime in the Anglophone world until recently..!

I do also think the underlying familiarity of many UK gamers with DBx type systems has helped. Essentially it's been lucky enough to be the current newest version of DBx-type rules, at a time when a number of other sets were maybe starting to feel a little tired.

So right product, right language, right place, right time. :)

Cheers

(And a sensible price point!)