"UK Ancients competition scene : 2020 player stats" Topic

With competition wargaming pretty much now done and dusted until (hopefully "early") summer across the UK there's no real reason to delay publishing my once a year analysis of the relative popularity of various competition Ancients sets as unfortunately nothing will change now for a few months anyway.

I also have the luxury of a little more time to delve deeper than usual into some of the nooks and crannies of the stats!

So, whats' been going on?

As of today there are still a good spread of viable Ancients competition sets out there all attracting north of 40-odd players and hosting events throughout the year.
L'Art de la Guerre (ADLG) has continued to grow for a 5th consecutive year, such that it's pool of UK-based players is now almost as big as the next 3 most popular sets combined.

ADLG is also driving an increasingly widespread use of 25mm figures on UK tabletops, to the extent that 2019-20 saw more UK-based players entering 25mm ADLG events than for any other single (non-ADLG) ruleset at any scale.

To The Strongest! is now neck and neck with DBA as the third most popoular set, and is threatening to chase down DBMM's seemingly locked-in position as the second most widely played ruleset as it continues to pull in (but still churn through) large numbers of new players, even though the number of events for TTS! still remains far lower than for any other set.

Both MeG and FoG have seen notable falls in the number of players taking part in each circuit this year, with new player recruitment almost entirely drying up for both sets in the UK. For both however the level of competition participation by the remaining players remains solid.

DBM and DBMM are still both bubbling along at their previous levels, with the venerable DBM circuit enjoying an unexpected growth spurt in player numbers in the last few months.

The Summary:

The good news is that the number of Ancients events, and the level of participation is continuing to rise, although the absolute number of players has remained stable over the last year as a continuing uptick in the numbers of people playing ADLG, TTS! and DBM has more than balanced out declines in numbers taking part in FoGAM, MeG and to a lesser extend DBMM events.

The tables and charts below show the current direct comparisons between the leading sets:

Total Player Numbers (UK/Overseas), and amount of change from 2018-19

ADLG has seen the biggest net increase in players over the last 12 months, with TTS! and DBM also recording smaller increases whilst other sets have lost ground to varying degrees.

The number of overseas players now travelling regularly to the UK to play Ancients now stands at 48, up from 31 last year and has reached almost 10% of total player numbers – although this does vary significantly by ruleset.

"Market Share" of leading Ancients sets by Total Player Numbers:

DBMM and ADLG players still make up just over half of the entire UK Ancients competition scene, with the other systems all each hovering in the 7-14% range.

One-unit-one-base systems (TTS!, and the DBx-based or derived DBM, DBA, DMM and ADLG) have increased their share of the overall player pool noticably in the last 12 months, with 82% of all UK-based Ancients players now favouring this approach, up from 75% last year.

Trends in numbers of "New" players adopting each ruleset

Looking in more detail at just "new" players (those not seen on each individual circuit before), 5 years after it's English-language launch and even with the core rulebook now out of print for almost a year ADLG still continues to expand it's player pool. In the last 12 months more UK-based players joined the UK ADLG competition circuit than the total numbers of players for either FoG or DBM.

The following graph shows the number of "new" players drawn into play each ruleset in any given 12-month period, as measured over the last 5 years, with the starting points for ADLG, MeG and TTS! being their first appearance in these stats. Over the past 5 years ADLG has also been consistently bringing in more new players in each 12-month period than almost any other ruleset, with around 40-50 new players each year.

TTS! and ADLG between them contributed over of 3/4 of all "new" players to the various circuits this year, although these numbers do also count players dropping out of one circuit and appearing for the first time in another.

(note – differences in 'net change' between this and the previous chart for some rulesets is due to some players returning to competitions after missing the entireity of the 2018-19 season. These players are not counted as "new")

Numbers of Events and Total Entry numbers

Even with overall player numbers flat, the number of entries (each time an individual takes part in a competition) has still continued to rise year on year, and with 107 competitions held across all 7 rulesets in the last 12 months there are sure to be plenty of people out there raring to roll some dice again once the current social isolation rules are relaxed!

5 Year Trend analysis:

This illustrates the change (or not) of overall player numbers (in the preceeeding 12 month period) for each ruleset since 2016, measured at snapshots taken at year-end and in April/May each year. These do figures include overseas players.

For a more detailed look at the individual rulesets follow this link to my Blog

The Boring Methodology Stuff

As usual, all the data is compiled using actual names and numbers of players taking part in events in the UK, as published online on a forum or similar. Sometimes I've had to rely on runners and riders lists rather than results, and sometimes I've had to make some assumtions and guesses where nicknames have been used – but generally, given the amount of hard data here any errors shouldn't be enough to skew the bigger picture. Rulesets that didn't get to 40 players missed the cut for this analysis as well – Swordpoint was the closest to this mark and may appear next year if current trends continue.

The other key caveat is – as always – that this is just competition data. What gets played at your club, or even solo in your basement isn't visible and isn't measurable, so this is just a count of those weird people who, pre-social isolation, used to go out into the world and enter competitions held in the UK.

Last year's analysis ran from May-May, but with things screeching to a halt in mid-March there were a couple of ways to approach this year.

- Run a 10-month "year", from May 2019 to now.
- Run a 12-month "year", from March 2019 to now.

Having chewed it over I finally opted for using a full 12-months, and "double-counting" those competitions that happened between mid March and the beginning of May last year, so attendances at those events count in both this years and last years stats. Neither way would have been perfect, but I felt that any trends are easier to understand and spot if when comparing 12 months with 12 months rather than comparing 12 months with 10 months worth of events and data.

I've also presented the stats in a way which shines a clearer light on the numbers of purely UK-based players than it has perhaps done in previous years. This is because some rulesets have now started to see very significant numbers of overseas players coming to the UK to typically take part in one (or at most two) events per year, inflating both total player numbers and also the numbers of 'occasional' players for a couple of the featured rulesets.

With some rulesets now drawing almost 20% of their total player pools from overseas, and others not attracting any overseas players at all last year, without adjusting the numbers to show the impact of overseas players these stats would struggle to give a fully transparent view of what was happening in the UK ancients community.

Tim
This really is most interesting. Thanks for doing this. Nice to see some numbers , rather than "near my house"observations. All the rules you mention must be doing well just by dint of having competitions. There are another 20 odd sets out there which do not seem to have competitions.

Excellet

martin

Thanks a lot, Tim, always interesting! I hope we'll be able to churn few some more new TtS! players, later this year. ;-)

Interestingly I've noticed an increase in rules sales this last month. Also sales of bases are up. I think people must have unexpectedly found themselves with time on their hands. :-/ Hopefully some will join the competition circuit in Q3.

Thanks :) Always interesting to see these numbers.

Tim,

These are very interesting. Thanks for doing this AND for your website.

Any thoughts on how this data might extrapolate to the rest of the world? Are we talking about 1,000 or 2,000 or 3,000 regular anceints gamers worldwide?

Bill Hupp
T&R Miniatures

Honestly, it's impossible to do that extrapolation – the dynamics of competitions vs casual play are pretty much impossible to guess at never mind trying to extend this outside the UK.

If rules writers published their sales figures you could maybe have a stab at it based on that data – but even then there are probably loads of copies of rules stuck on the shelves of FLGS's, and an even greater %age of sets which languish unopened on the shelves of wargamers as well!

This is data of UK-based competition attendance, and whilst there is going to be "some" degree of mapping, allowing people to add some numbers to the bar-room chat on the topic is about all this does really

Will be interesting to see how MeG compares to ADLG once the scene opens up again. Maybe with PSC taking over the sale and marketing it will get more traction, especially as there always seems to be problems with ADLG and supply.

Not playing much ancients these days having maxed out on DBM and FoG years back, if I did play again it would likely be MeG or ADLG. Hard to tell from reviews but MeG appeals more than ADLG, just surprised to see it so low in the charts, maybe availability was hurting it too?

Hi Adrian !

ADLG has been out of hard-copy print for the best part of a year (although a 5 Euro PDF is available), and a V4 is being discussed to be out towards the back end of this year.

I'm not aware of any supply-side issues with MeG – Damian at Donnington and Alan at Hoka Hey both sell it at shows and through their online shops, and between them they cover a good chunk of the UK show circuit. It's also been available to buy from the publisher direct ever since it was launched 4 years ago – but a relaunch from PSC will certainly get it out there and in front of peoples minds again.

ADLG is very much DBx based, so if that's not your thing it probably won't be for you, however taken together as a basket all of the one-unit-one-base style games seem to be much more popular in the UK compared to all of the single base removal/unit based games, so that may be a factor in these UK-specific stats perhaps?

Hi Tim, looooooong time no see :(

Yeah I was merely guessing that in between the move to PSC taking the reins there may have been some supply issues that may have been preventing MeG coming more popular. The issue you allude to though is perhaps more likely the reason. The figure count is also considerable for MeG too. Maybe it's also the facts that ADLG IS so close to DBMM (I've seen a lot of reports that it's a much improved system) that makes it so popular.

At first look I thought I might prefer the different approach of MeG but, having seen a recent intro video I'm not so sure. The cards may add some degree of uncertainty and the coloured dice are different, just not sure overall that the added level of paraphernalia would float my boat long term.

Will likely just stick with WW2 and building up my 15mm Napoleonics again for now :)

There's a chap at our club who is a big advocate of cards for generating random numbers instead of dice. His theory is that a deck of cards (only containing cards numbered 1-6) can be used instead of D6.

The idea is that then you still get a random number each time you "flip" (rather than "roll") but over the course of the game you are guaranteed to have an even distribution of 1's, 2's… and 6's. Of course, you also need a deep enough deck to prevent card counting, or the whole things just falls apart.

He's not convinced any of the rest of us to adopt it as yet as we all prefer to leave things to actual chance, and see the hot (or cold) streaks that using dice delivers as being a fundamental part of the enjoyment of playing the game – but we're also happy to let him use cards as it does stop him whingeing endlessly about his bad luck when he uses dice!!

TtS! is card driven and there are two schools of players.

The "shufflers" love to shuffle at pretty much every available opportunity, whereas the "counters" love to play through every last card in the deck of 80, and shuffle, thereafter.

The "counters" rationalise that playing every card evens out the swings of luck, and there is a game within a game, for them, as their tactics are likely to be influenced by the cards they think are remaining in the deck, so they might attack if there are a lot of unplayed high value cards, for example. I recently encouraged some of the counters to try shuffling, and they absolutely detested it!

Do players need to stick to one or another approach?

As well as your "attack" scenario, I could imagine a "counter" deciding to shuffle after seeing a run of decent cards…?

In UK tournaments we specify shuffling. If both players are "counters", though, it would be fine so long as they stuck to the same methodology.

It turns out that most of our French players favour the latter approach. I suppose when we have a French tournament "counting" might be the standard for that event.

If you are going to shuffle a deck regularly, what advantage or difference is there to just throwing dice?

Hi Durrati

There isn't except for a lack of cards cluttering up the battlefield! My group have been playing To the Strongest for over two years now and after trying all the methods we much prefer using D10's. To the Strongest! is a great set of rules.

Cheers Paul

<Q>If you are going to shuffle a deck regularly, what advantage or difference is there to just throwing dice?</Q>

The cards sit behind units during a move as a temporary record- units can move multiple times. You can leave a dice behind a unit, too, but cards are clearly visible from further away. Some people leave dice behind units, though, or chits, which is fine.