With the festive period now closing in fast it's time to repeat my now-almost-as-traditional-as-sprouts snapshot summary of the state of play in the UK ancients competition scene.
This only looks at the 6 biggest competition sets, with the more complete analysis again out in a few months to cover to the year to April-ish covering other smaller sets too,
As of today the headlines are as follows::
Total Player Numbers:
(players numbers & %age of UK players)
1. ADLG (36% of total pool across all 6 rulesets)
2. DBMM (18%)
3.= DBA (13%)
3.= MeG (13%)
5. FoGAM (12%)
6. DBM (7%)
Net Change in numbers 2017-18
1. ADLG (+19)
2. MeG (+13)
3. DBMM (+4)
4. DBA (-)
5. DBM (-2)
6. FoGAM (-28)
New Competition Players for each system in 2018
1. ADLG (53, or 46 excluding overseas*)
2. MeG (28, or 26 excluding overseas*)
3. DBA (16)
4. FoGAM (11)
5. DBMM (11)
6. DBM (2)
(* Overseas players often only appear once then do not return next year, so only UK-based players are included)
Attrition Rate among prior UK competition attendees (compared to 2017)
1. FoGAM (39 / -44%)
2. DBA (16 / -31%)
3. MeG (15 / -29%)
4. ADLG (30 / -18%)
5. DBMM (14 / -13%)
6. DBM (4 / -10%)
Overall that means a net growth of 6 players year on year in 2018 – which is nice.
Worth noting also that 76% of UK Ancients competition players across the most popular 6 sets are now playing DBx-based rules systems – an impressive achievement for a certain Mr Barker and his ideas almost 30 years after the launch of DBA 1.0!
A more detailed article is available with stats for each ruleset on The Madaxeman.com Blog
