29 Jan 2018

Who's playing what - Part II

Thanks to Denis Grey, I now have comprehensive stats for player numbers in the UK DBA circuit to add to those for other rulesets.

Looking at attendance across the 15 or so annual tournaments in the UK, participation in DBA has been steadily rising over the past 3 years and looks set to carry on that upward trend into 2018 (if numbers at the first 2 events of the year are anything to go by).

Numbers of players have been:

  • 2016:  48 players
  • 2017:  56 players
  • 2018:  64 players 
86 people in total have played at least one DBA event in the last 3 years. 

Adding these more accurate numbers into the mix gives the following popularity table for numbers of people entering at least one UK ancients competitions during 2017.

  1. L'Art de la Guerre : 163
  2. FoG AM : 89  
  3. DBMM : 84
  4. DBA : 64
  5. MeG : 52
  6. DBM : 40
  7. Swordpoint : around 40
One interesting thing to consider from these numbers is the popularity of "DBx"-based, "one base = one unit" format games - almost exactly 2/3 of all UK competition ancients players are playing systems in which one stand = a unit. Barkers legacy is still going strong! 

I'm sure there must be some 6th and 7th edition numbers out there too, and maybe also Armati or War & Conquest ?

 

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6 comments:

  1. Sun of York29 January 2018 at 12:28

    No mention of Impetus? It also has one base represents one unit.

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  2. Madaxeman29 January 2018 at 13:13

    Yep, thats true - however the pool of UK players is pretty small (20-odd), and they only run 2-3 events a year so it's not really at a scale to make much of a difference to the stats.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous31 January 2018 at 11:39

    Recently saw that the 4th To The Strongest! Worlds Competition has been scheduled for end of February. So I will add To The Strongest! to the very short list containing Impetus.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Frogs of War4 February 2018 at 19:10

    very interesting, thanks a lot!
    your blog is the best for historical mins!!!
    a wonderfull resource of information. i don't play anymore ADLG (i 'm french) and don't understand the interest still for old style game system like ADLG DBA DBM event Mortem & Gloriam.... there is so many more "accurate" game system now!!!
    also i understant that those old game system are made for tournement instead of the new one made for friendly encourter

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  5. Bryan Letcher25 February 2018 at 18:49

    I think Armati is vastly under represented. I think due to your site swinging more ADLG of course those numbers will be high. You can see from the Society of Ancients site for 2017, ADLG is quite low. I am in the states and FOG and DBA is much more prevalent in the midwest here.

    http://www.soa.org.uk/joomla/2017-rule-sets-used

    ReplyDelete
  6. Madaxeman12 March 2018 at 23:23

    The SoA site currently shows a sample of 43 people, whereas the data I'm using represents around 600 people... admittedly my data is restricted to those who play in competitions but even so its a much, much bigger sample size than the SoA page has.

    Armati has almost no competition scene in the UK, and hasn't had a reprint or new edition since 2003 whereas ADLG is now on it's 4th reprint of V3, so has sold at least 6,000 copies in English in the last 3 years alone. FoGAM has not as far as I know seen a competition in the US since the new version came out.

    ReplyDelete