"Who's playing What Ancients Games - Post Lockdown Edition" Topic

It's now been over two years since I last posted a full-year update on who was playing what on the UK Ancients Competition scene – which is of course hardly surprising given that no-one was able to play anything face to face for much of that time, with various grades of Lockdown running from the start of 2020 until around mid-June 2021.

Ancients competition wargaming in the UK did however stutter (or in some cases "roar") back to life again in the middle of last year, and so with over 12 months of events to look back on it's probably as good a time as any to start once again having a look at Who's Playing What.

This set of "post-Lockdown" stats cover the UK "player universe" numbers for competition players across 7 of the most popular Ancients mass-battle rulesets for all events held in the UK in since things started up again at the end of June 2021 that I can find results for.

Some headlines:

Total Unique Player Numbers
ADLG 177 (180)
MeG 66 (62)
DBMM 61 (72)
DBA 55 (67)
DBM 40 (44)
FoGAM 35 (48)
TTS! 28 (64)
(2019 calendar year in brackets)

This shows how many different, UK-based players have taken part in an competition since Lockdown restrictions were eased in summer 2021.

The upshot is that post-Lockdown, total player numbers across all sets still compare very favourably with the 2019 totals – and (as I'll go into in the commentary on each set) even the more notable shortfalls can usually be explained by event scheduling or other issues unrelated to any loss of enthusiasm for face to face gaming in general post-Lockdown

The full thing, with more stats and ruleset-by-ruleset commentary is online to dive into at:

link

Interesting that the DBx series of rules still has nearly as many players as the newcomer Art de la Guerre.

Unknown to me what MeG, FoGAM and TTS! are…maybe we should have written the names out in full?

Mortem et Glorium
Field of Glory Ancient & Medieval
To the Strongest

Personally I have always thought of ADLG as very much being part of the DBx "family" as well – there are far more similarities than differences between ADLG and DBM.

Phil Barker's legacy lives on :-)

I am surprised that there are not more To the Strongest players. It is such a clean and flexible system.

Possibly the limited number of competitions for TTS compared to other systems.
Also the inherent bias against grid based games which can be viewed as simply board games. I had the same bias until I actually played the game and have been hooked ever since.

Interesting and very objective article.

I'd agree that ADLG is as much of a DBX style game (and very much DBM style) as any of the other 3, it just doesn't have the DB in the title, but grouping any of the DBx style games together to make any kind of popularity point is pretty pointless IMO given that DBMM, DBM and DBA are all vastly different games, they merely share some commonalities having been written by the same author. That does not make them collectively the same game. Chalk and cheese in many respects.

From what I've seen over the years, I'm not sure the level of interest represented in the UK for those DBx games exists outside of the UK, except maybe for DBA. The player base for DBMM and DBM is pretty much non-existent in the USA and continental Europe, at least in the competition scene. Even in the UK the interest is very tightly focussed geographically as alluded to in the OP.

MeG seems also to be predominantly a UK interest game with isolated pockets in Greece and Poland and a few players in other countries, not enough to run an event though without a heavy attendance of UK players. How many MeG players were there at GenCon recently for instance? 3?

I looked at TTS a while back but the grid and the cards put me off, I think players of the more traditional 'dice and measure' games would be more likely to gravitate towards the other games listed than TTS, simply because of the mechanics.

I am surprised that there are not more To the Strongest players.

There are, but we aren't particularly tournament-focussed, we've only organised a few events.

With TTS!, my sense is that there are many more players out there, and there is more interest in attending events than these numbers reflect – it's mainly the (currently) limited post-Lockdown calendar that is driving the stats here. It's something I've discussed a few times with BigRedBat too, as the numbers achieved in 2019 (off the back of a relatively limited calendar) would seem to back that hunch up.

Attendances and interest outside the UK is a bit of a stab in the dark for many sets – my linguistic skills are unfortunately not good enough to bestow me with a credible level of multilingual Google-Fu to research it either!

From what I can glean, there are DBMM compeition scenes in Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, and to a lesser extent Germany, and also the smaller territories of Hong Kong, and (I think) Ibiza (!). DBA is definately played by decent numbers in the US, NZ, as well as the UK and I'm pretty sure it is played elsewhere too, with DBM possibly not really played by enough in any given country to create a competition "circuit" anywhere other than the UK.

There are 'some' FoG players in Germany, and a small group in Southern USA, but I'm not so sure if it's seriously played in competition-level numbers anywhere else. MeG seems to have a couple of almost-club-based groups playing in Greece & Poland, a small circuit in France/Belgium, some tournaments in Australia but not really anything on a national (or even regional) scale in the US or elsewhere.

ADLG does have an international rankings page that captures events from around the world, so that's actually the easiest to see – link

That page only captures events who's results are uploaded to the global database, but even so it shows 92 events took place all around the world 'post-Lockdown', i.e. in 2021 and 2022. There are active ADLG 'circuits' in UK, France/Belgium, Italy, Spain (all of which also have translated, published rulebooks), Portugal, USA, Australia, and now Germany, plus a few events also taking place annually in Ireland, Canada, Greece and New Zealand.

TTS is very popular from what I've seen / read, I know quite a lot of people that play it and there's a lot of activity on social media about it (all positive), I know people that play a fantasy variant of it too, they rave about it. I'd like to give it a try, despite my slight reticence over the cards (that said I'm just dipping my toe in the water with Malifaux which is card driven so my concerns over the cards might subside LOL (the grid concerns me less). Biggest problem for me is gaming opportunities are less than I'd like and I can only keep so many rules in my head these days otherwise playing a game infrequently almost involves a full re-learn of the rules :( The supplier Big Red Bat is one of those that I really enjoy dealing with (I'be bought other stuff), similar to Pendraken and Forged in Battle.

Sad in some ways to see FoGAM decline in popularity as much as it has given how popular it was back in the day and, more importantly, the very high quality of the rule / supplement publications. For the first time, an ancients rule set for which the books were a pleasure to own and read! :)

FWIW while I've heard good things about TTS, three things turn me off:

1) The grid 100% is a factor. Grid = board game to me, and I can't shake that mentality no matter what, especially due to #2 below.

2) Seems rather difficult to find a mat with a grid on it, and I don't want to do one myself.

3) Possibly the table space needed (not sure of this one) as I only have room for a small table in my office for gaming.

-Wayne

I suspect in the short term grid based rules, if they are simple, can work for fun games. I play Lost Battles, which is a grid based set of rules, and i enjoy it on an ad-hoc basis. However something is lost when you place a grid or hexes on the playing area, in terms of figure gaming bling. You want the playing area to look like a diorama in a museum, if at possible. Grids remove that.

In all the games of TTS! I've seen played the grid is completely invisible.

The way it's done is to place a dot of terrain or foliage on the corner of each "square", or even just have a slightly discoloured mark on the cloth.

Hey presto, a grid with no lines at all.