Who Played What - the 2025 Edition

 Put down the egg-nog, step away from the mince pie, hold fire on the jingle bells and brace yourself for another vaguely interesting edition of my regular end of year update on competition attendances across a number of widely played Ancients mass-battle rulesets in the UK.

As usual I'll start with (repeating) the ground rules and caveats. 

The only thing these numbers measure is attendances at UK “competition” events held during 2025 for which results (or runners and riders) have been published online that I've been able to find and make sense of.

Every ruleset in this list is very good at doing this with most also producing their own annual rankings as an additional reference point to double-check the data. The odd player might be missed (or included) at an individual event, especially where nicknames have been used or if someone dropped out part way through the weekend, but other than that unless any events have somehow been publicised, organised, played and concluded during 2025 without leaving an online footprint of any kind on any of the mainstream forums used by the players of the rulesets concerned (I mean, really...?) it’s a fair bet that every competition that has happened should have been included. 

Whilst some players appear in the stats twice because they played two rulesets over the course of the past year this is discounted for the analysis as numbers are too low to impact the main trends. And it's too much work to de-dupe them by name as well !

The final thing to bear in mind is that for most of the rulesets in this analysis the total number of players falls between 30-70, so a car not starting, or the designated driver's daughter getting married on the weekend that 4 clubmates would otherwise have done their “once a year” competition will generate a 5-10% swing in overall player numbers for almost all of these 7 rulesets - so please don't read too much into any single digit, single year variation. 

Instead it’s the bigger trends and swings that count, capturing moments in time and adding them together to form a broad-brush picture over the longer term - which is why I have similar stats from the end of 2024, 2023, 2022, 2019, 2018, and 2017. 

So with those qualifications out of the way, onto the 2025 data.

Total Player Numbers 

(UK based players / UK+Overseas players): 

1. ADLG    174 / 191       (2024: 172/184)     (L'Art de la Guerre)
2. DBA       74 / 75          (2024: 64/64)          (De Bellis Antiquarius)
3. MeG       60 / 65           (2024: 77/82)         (Mortem et Gloriam)
4. DBMM   54 / 68          (2024: 57/71)         (De Bellis Magister Militum)
5. TTS!        51 / 51         (2024: 47/47)         (To The Strongest!)
6. DBM      41 / 41           (2024: 37/38)         (De Bellis Militarium)
7. FoGAM  36 /38           (2024: 41/41)          (Field of Glory Ancient & Medieval)

No change at the top as ADLG continues its stranglehold on the popularity rankings, with a total attendee count that is not too far short of matching that of the next three sets combined.

DBA continued its inexorable rise of recent years, leapfrogging MeG into 2nd place as DBA's 17% increase in UK players this year was counterpunched by a 22% decline in UK MeGGers across the same period.  DBMM remains marooned in mid table yet again this year. although its continued strong overseas showing means it achieved a bigger pool of UK tournament attendees than MeG's even thought it has fewer UK-based players. TTS! also makes another year of small incremental gains to nail down 5th place.

At the other end of the scale the two "free" sets, FoG and DBM, have swapped places with one new player plus a few returnees to the DBM circuit seeing it bounce back up to 41 again, overhauling a FoG player pool that lost a handful of players and saw no new players at all pick up competitive FoG in 2025. 

In aggregate these was an almost inconsequential fall in the total number of UK-based players, with 491 last year compared to 504 in 2024 (and 496 in 2023). This rises to 528 including overseas entrants, compared to 538 in 2024.   

Total number of entries made 

1. ADLG      696    (2024: 729)
2. MEG        274    (309)
3. DBA         244   (241)
4. DBMM    204    (226)
5. FOG         199    (240)
6. TTS          142     (159) 
7. DBM        139    (164)

These figures count the total number of entries across all competitions for each set, and are therefore indicative of a number of factors - average attendance, number of events held - and also reflect to a degree the number of active players on each circuit. As such, some of the rulesets figures in this table show quite marked year on year variances, this year mainly negative. 

DBA was the only set to see an increase in participation this year, with FoG, MeG, DBMM, TTS! and DBM all seeing overall attendances fall by 10%  or more. 

TTS!, MeG, DBM, ADLG and DBMM all lost a few, often fairly small local events from their regular circuits, driving some of these declines, with TTS! taking the worst attendance hit with their 3 "lost" events including the only 2 events previously held in the South West region, and a London-based Doubles competition that attracted a lot of "unique" players last year.

FoG was something of an outlier, as it maintained an unchanged circuit of 12 events whilst experiencing lower attendances almost all across the board, as only 2 of the 12 regular competitions on the 2025 UK FoG circuit managed to maintain last year's turnout levels.  

New to Each Circuit this year

1. DBA        28 / (2024: 17)
2. ADLG     25 / (20)
3. TTS!        13 / (19)
4. MeG        5 / (16)
5. DBM        1 / (3)
6. DBMM     2 / (3)
7. FoGAM    - / (2) 

A huge year for DBA, streaking to the top of the leaderboard with an astonishing 28 new players joining the UK circuit in 2025 - even more impressive when you consider that 11 of the 25 "new" ADLG players were overseas-based visitors to these shores compared to only 1 DBA player packing that tiny army in their hand baggage and heading here.  

Aside from DBA and ADLG, the new-player count for all of the other rulesets fell year on year, and ADLG also shows a small y-o-y decline (of 1) if only UK-based players are considered.  FoG's inability to attract any new players in 2025 I believe marks the first time this has happened for any ruleset since I started collating these stats back in 2017. 

Ruleset-specific commentary

ADLG (L'Art de la Guerre)

ADLG remained the most widely played Ancients competition ruleset across the UK in 2025 with 32 events held compared to 36 in 2024. Taking the Covid-affected years out of the equation ADLG has now been competitively played by 170-200 UK-based players every year since 2019. 

69 players (36% of the total pool) played in only 1 event this year, with a further 19 only appearing twice to put an aggregate total of 46% of the UK ADLG circuit in the "casual competitor" category this year. This is lower than most other sets, but is also 1% higher than 2024, accounted for by the increased number of overseas visitors seen in 2025.

16 players accounted for 25% of all of the 696 competition entries made in 2025 (1 more player than last year), with 43 players (also up from 39 in 2024) making up half of the aggregate annual field, meaing that the UK ADLG circuit became marginally more diverse in terms of potential opponents than it was in 2024.

The 32 events held included some competitions some taking place in parallel (in different scales) at the same venue, and with date clashes as well the most events anyone could theoretically have entered in 2024 was 26. Only three players managed to make it to even half of this total, again helping ADLG to deliver potentially the most diverse mix of potential opponents of any ruleset - although someone would still have to drive the 657 miles from Plymouth to Elgin to be sure of experiencing the full benefit of that mathematically-derived diversity!

8 of the 32 ADLG competitions were held in the 25mm/28mm scale, the rest being 15mm events. The 28mm events attracted 48 different players and 118 total entries. Were these 8 larger scale tournaments to be treated as a circuit in their own right, 28mm ADLG would have seen more players, but less entries than both FoG and DBM

Four competitions this year drew in 40 or more competitors playing ADLG, each of these running parallel events in both scales with Warfare hitting an impressive 58 across 15mm & 28mm this past November - meaning this one event exceeded the full-year UK-wide pools of players for 3 of the 6 other sets. 

DBMM

The size of the DBMM player universe across all UK events remains pretty much flat this year, although still continuing the slight downward trajectory seen since the Covid hiatus.

Overseas players make up a bigger proportion of UK DBMM pool than for any other set, at almost 20% of the total player numbers - with no "overseas" player attending more than 2 events it seems unlikely that any of the players listed as "international" on the DBMM.org rankings site are in fact now UK based.

Of the 16 DBMM events to take place 9 failed to reach double figures of attendees (although three of these were pools at events where 6mm and 15mm ran in parallel). 2025 was also a year where overall participation fell noticably, with the 204 entries across the year dropping almost 10% from the 226 recorded in 2024 - following on from the previous 10%+ fall (from 263 to 226) seen between 2023-2024

6 players made up 25% of all entries, with 15 different players forming half of the aggregate field. 25 players (37%) only entered one tournament, and 37 (54%) only entered one or two events this year, although this stat is of course skewed by the large number of overseas players. This pattern is essentially unchanged from previous years

DBA

DBA has really picked up the pace in the last few years, and that storming run continued in 2025 with 75 players making up the biggest DBA circuit since I started looking at competition results back in 2016.

DBA always seems to be able to draw in new players, and 2025 has been no exception with 25 new faces appearing on the circuit for the first time (including 1 US visitor). 28 players (37% of the pool) entered only 1 event during the year, with over half of the UK's DBA players (44 players, 59%) only entering 1 or 2 competitions this year.

With all bar one of the DBA events in the calendar being one-day affairs, the logistics of "how far will I travel to play in a one-day event (and then drive home)?" is probably behind some of this particular stat's relatively high score for the UK DBA community as other circuits which run mostly with 2-day events might expect more of their attendees to stay overnight.   

6 players made up 25% of all entries, with 14 making up half of the aggregate field across the year. One player nearly completed a full sweep, attending 13 out of 14 possible events across the year - not bad for an 85 year old (or so I'm told)!

TTS! (To The Strongest!)

TTS! had a curates egg of a year, with a decline in the number of events but a slight increase in player numbers as some competitions which popped up in 2024 did not return in 2025.

The 9 events held this year averaged just over 16 participants each, with the Worlds topping the list with 32. No-one (quite) managed to attend all 9, but two players only missed out once with 8 appearances each. The 5 most active players contributing 25% of the overall entries and 13 contributing more than half that annual total.

17 players (33%) only entered one event, with 30 (60%) only entering one or two, meaning that the 5 most enthusiastic players between them appeared almost as many times as the "lest enthusiastic" 30. 

MeG  (Mortem et Gloriam)

MeG experienced a notable drop in top-line numbers in 2025 as the loss of a couple of events from the circuit, a reduction in the numbers of "new" players and lower overall attendances at the majority of events in the calendar held across 2025 delivered a player count of 65/60 (International/UK-only) - down around 20% year on year, and almost a third down from the 2022 peak where 89 players, 78 of which were UK based, appeared at a UK MeG event.  

19 players entered only one event this year, 11 of who's appearance was at one of two different events taking place in different locations on the same weekend in May! A further 10 only attended 2 events, meaning that these "occasional" players now make up the minority of the MeG circuit - a notable change from recent years where significant numbers of (usually) new, but often short-lived circuit participants had seen this group make up as much as 59% of the UK player pool

At the other end of the scale the keenest 4 MeG players on the circuit managed between them make more appearances than the least-active 32 combined, with 7 players making 1 in 4 of all aggregate entries this year, and 14 players chipping in with over 50% of  entries across the entire calendar.

All of MeG's events are now held in 15mm, with the 28mm MAGNA format not featuring on the circuit in 2025.  The event circuit is also strongly centred around Midlands, with 44% of the total attendance across the year being seen at the 6 events held in just two venues in Daventry and Derby. 

FOGAM  (Field of Glory Ancient & Medieval)

2025 has see the recent limited growth in the UK FoGAM circuit come to a grinding halt, with a few non-returnees and no new players seeing FoG slip below DBM to be the least widely played ruleset in this survey.

Attendances across 10 of the 12 events held this year all fell, with just Godendag and the FiB Team event managing to hold steady. The FiB Teams event again weighed in with the biggest attendance of the year, with 29 of the 36 UK based players taking part, followed by Warfare with 22.  

The UK calendar again saw 12 events taking place, and while no-one this year managed a full sweep of attendance, 3 players did turn up at 11/12 of the possible tournaments. 

Just 5 players made up more than 1/4 of all entries to the UK FoG circuit, with 11 players making up 50% of the aggregate field across the year. 16 players (down from 21 last year) attended at least half of the available events.

8 players only attended 1 event (21%), with 11 (29%) attending 1 or 2, the lowest percentage of "casual" participation of any ruleset in this year's survey.

DBM

Numbers for DBM again barely moved year on year, with 41 players making an appearance in 2025 compared to 38 the year before - as always, unsurprising for a circuit strongly centered around a smallish handful of clubs.  The total number of entries did however fall to 139 compared to 164 in 2024 and 166 across 2023.

Underlining that gradual tailing off, 12 DBM players only attended one event this year (up from just 7 last year), with 18 (up from 13 in 2024) only making it to two of a slightly reduced calendar of 9 events (10 in 2025). The busiest 6 players made up just over 25% of the total entry, with 12 people contributing half of the aggregate field across the year.

No-one managed a clean sweep by appearing at every single event in the year, with 14 managing to grasp at least half of the opportunities to play competitive DBM during 2025.

The Conclusion (FWIW!)

In summary as 2025 draws to a close these 7 popular Ancients rulesets have continued to see around 500 UK-based players taking part in at least one UK Ancients competition in the last 12 months. That total remains down by around 75 on the 2019 pre-Covid peak, but in line or better than most other pre-Covid years.

(Aggregated player count by year, omitting 2020 & 2021 due to Covid impact)

This year has seen most sets lose (often smaller, one day) events from their calendars, and this may have resulted in overall attendance numbers trending downward for some sets, although not to a significant extent in most cases. DBA's surge in player numbers is the notable exception, with the oldest ruleset in this sample still clearly going strong even now!

(Individual ruleset player count by year, omitting 2020 & 2021 due to Covid impact)

The closest set to making it into this analysis is still GB's Swordpoint, but with only a handful of events and round 21 players it is still some way behind even FoG in terms of popularity. 

 

With nothing else new really coming along to make a mark on the Ancients competition scene in the best part of a decade either, perhaps next year I can just do a straight cut-and-paste! 

(If there's anything I've missed that you are better sighted on than me, please don't hesitate to get in touch with the data and I'll do my best to add it back into the stats and update this post)

The Khurasanians go to Spain !

 In these 6 all new, all singing and flamenco-dancing battle reports you can thrill, gasp, gag and feel mildy queasy all at the same time as you read the epic tale of how a 15mm Khurasanian army fared as it took to the stage at an international ADLG event held in sunny Spain back in April of this year.

As usual there are plenty of nonsensical historical "facts" (ahem) about the armies in play, a smattering of vaguely related videos, and loads of pictures of 15mm toy soldiers verbally harassing both me, and one another.

This time however the Khursanian army is commanded by none other than Frank Zappa alter-ego Sheikh Yabouti, leading to some rather hippie-esque post match analysis, including almost enough 1970's references to make up for the near-total lack of self-reflection and self-awareness of his own role in his many downfalls. 

Nasty Medieval Hannibal also has his say as a counterpoint to the Sheikh's nonsense - and as usual he lands far more punches than he pulls. 

In a brand new, international-reader-friendly initiative I have (OK, AI has..) managed to translate all 6 of the reports into the languages of my opponents (3 into Spanish, 1 into German, 1 into Portuguese and 1 into....Australian!) 

So, pop a shrimp on the barbie, pull up a chair, slice yourself a chorizo, break open the Hob-nobs and pop a tinned sardine on top as you prepare to read through all 6 (or 7, if you also read the Australian one) Madaxeman battle reports! 

• Game 1 Khurasanian vs Ghaznavid    (also in Spanish)
• Game 2 Khurasanian vs Ottoman Empire     (also in German)
• Game 3 Khurasanian vs Mongol Empire    (also in Portuguese)
• Game 4 Khurasanian vs Wars of the Roses   (also in Spanish)
• Game 5 Khurasanian vs Mongol Empire   (also in Spanish)
• Game 6 Khurasanian vs French Ordonnance  (and also in Australian)

(Over the next few days and weeks I will also be publishing some Spanish Military Tourism videos, using photos taken during our trip to Madrid and the surrounding towns, so look out for that as well) 

The Persians are Coming!

Last month my mostly-Legio Heroica 15mm Sassanid Persian army fought its way out of the Bisley storage cabinet* for the first time in almost 8 years (!!) to conduct a 5-battle campaign against a number of fairly historical foes at the Roll Call competition in Cranfield.

All of the many highs (and lows) of this sequence of military misadventures have now been painstakingly captured and lovingly crafted into a semi-coherent wordy and verbose narrative for your delight and delectation, and are even now available on Madaxeman.com.

These include three battles against the Sassanids arch-enemies the Byzantines, as well as a Sassanid Civil War and a somewhat time travelling faceoff against the might of the Fatimid Caliphate.

You'll see Elephants, Camels, fierce hill tribesmen and well-drilled Roman-style cavalry whirling across a number of tabletops, all with the added bonus of all of the in-stream historical videos, dreadful puns, partially-relevant animated GIFs, and vague attempts to explain the rules of the game that you may by now have come to love and dread in equal measure. 

There are - of course - also a great many photos in which you can see what the soldiers are saying and thinking on the tabletop, blatantly false and self-congratulatory summaries of the battle from the Great Shah, and all topped off with the usual bitingly acerbic analysis from Hannibal himself.

So, pour yourself a cup of Iranian tea and get ready to dunk into the un-digestive-able narrative that is 5 all new Sassanid Persian battle reports on Madaxeman.com!  

(* That link to eBay is an Affiliate Link. If you buy something after following it I get a small commission from eBay)

Museum Z-Range Gallowglass

 Earlier this year I dithered for a while before just sneaking into the end of the Museum Miniatures January sale to pick up some mail-clad, axe-waving figures to use as Galloglass / Galloghalich / Gallogalisghaghs / whatever, those post-Viking 2-handed axemen who feature in Irish and Scottish armies of the early Medieval period. 

I've been using Vikings for these guys when I've dropped an army on table, but it isn't quite right and with some decent looking figures in Museum's new Z range Saxons that looked like they would fit I decided to drop some cash and buy on in there with some packs of 15/ASX13 Dark Ages double handed axe plus a few more Saxon range figures for added variety (as the ASX13 only has 3 poses) 

I decided to go old-school with these and paint them up with a black undercoat and "normal" paints, partly just to make sure I could remember how to do it in this age of Contrasts and Washes! 

They start off on lolly sticks with a Halfords black undercoat, and the main colours you can see here are:

• Vallejo Ivory (the off-white)
• Warlord Fanatic White
• Warlord Army Green
• Warlord Abomination Gore (dark red) 
• Warlord Fanatic Gunmetal
• Warlord Fanatic Leather Brown
• Warlord Deep Blue

Given this is a fairly limited pallette I was quite pleased with the mix of coherence and variety this set of paints achieved.

The first really surprising thing about these figures was that they all have shields on their backs! 

Having looked again at the pictures of the renders on Museum's site, you can just about make out the shields, but I'd honestly not noticed them when I bought them, as all of the shots are taken from the front angle of the figures which very much hides the shields. 

This is a mixed blessing - being Galloglass I didn't really want them to have shields, but then again my opponent won't really see them anyway ... and I will get to see my own handiwork in painting them, which is a rare bonus too! 

From the front..

Quite different from the front and the back! 

And here are the "lightbox" photos of the finished set.

Overall I'm really pleased with them. Unlike some recent Museum purchases the casting on these really does stand up to scrutiny and matches the quality and detail of the 3D renders on the site - even if my own painting can't meet that same standard!

One final note of weirdness was that I had left out some figures from this batch, as they mostly had very distinctive "Saxon" helmets, and were mostly spear-armed. 

I undercoated these leftovers in white to see what they would have looked like done in Contrasts, and that's when I noticed that some of the figures seemed to be a very different scale to the rest - notably the little trumpeter in the same pack (15/ASX91 Anglo Saxon Med Command) as a much larger axeman and spearman 

You can see the trumpeter, and the three guys to the left of him in this photo all from the same pack and range  - all of the spearmen here are much bigger than the childlike trumpeter. 

I used another trumpeter figure in with the main set of figures and he doesn't look out of place or scale at all, so I'm not quiet sure why these spearmen are so huge when figures in the same range (and pack!) are much larger?

Who knows.. ! 

 

Forged in Battle Byzantine Infantry Skirmishers

 Now you're probably sick of seeing horses for my Byzantines, here are some pedestians! 

Yes, the Byzantine armies can often have a handful of foot slingers, archers, and javelinmen - including, in ADLG terms, some actual proper Medium Foot javelineers, and fortunately FiB do a pack of mixed javelins and slings to make up these chaps. 

The pack in question is WE-BE08 Early Byzantine (Justinian) - Psiloi (Slingers (12) & Javelins (12), which has rather more slingers than is needed in ADLG, but fewer javelinmen. 

My solution was to base up a mix of Light Infantry with slings and javelins, and then to make up 3 bases of Medium Javelineers using 3 javelin figures and two slingers lurking behind them.

I've painted them in three distinct schemes, which I suspect will help as it seems likely that a slinger and a javelin light foot will be found in each of the three commands in my arm - when it gets on table eventually. 

I also didn't go with shield designs on these, partly as they are lower class troops so may not have invested as much time and effort in shield designs, but mainly as the shields are pretty small, so it would have been too hard to do a decent design on them!

 

Newline Designs "Hittite" Chariots

Newline Designs make some of the best value (and actually, "best" by any criteria) 28mm Biblical figures out there IMO, and I have previously bought a near-full Later Assyrian army from them which has taken to the competitive tabletop on several occasions.

With a couple more events coming up this year where the Assyrians could potentially appear I have been looking at adding some 2-horse chariots to my army in order to repurpose it as an "Early" Assyrian force, getting some more usage out of the many infantry, cavalry and chariots who have done such sterling service as Later Assyrians/Sargonids over the last few years. 

Unfortunately Newline don't make "Assyrian" two horse chariots, and their 4-horse ones are so hefty that it's impossible to imagine two horses pulling them at all, never mind at speed over a battlefield... so a bit of morphing and imagination was needed as I bought a set of three "Hittite" chariots for the princely sum of just £24 to repurpose as Assyrians.

And here they are - well, almost.. 

As you can see I have used some "wallpaper" on the fronts of the cabs to make them look a bit more like my existing Assyrian troops. 

These chariots come with three crew, a driver and two spearmen. In ADLG the crew for Assyrian chariots are archers, so I have some Assyrian bowmen on order to slot into these cabs at a later date.

I elected to use Contrast paints for part of the colour scheme for these - my Assyrians are in block colours, but I do like the more washed out effect for wood grain which is cast onto the model - it reallt picks out the grain nicely.

Here you can just about see where I have magnetized the javelin-armed crew members either to the base of the chariot, or in some cases to the side walls.

The idea is to allow them to be swapped out for the Assyrian archers when they arrive, and also to use up some of the large number of rare earth mini magnets I seem to have acquired with no real plan as to how to use them over the years! 

Of course, doing it this way opens up the oppotyunity for these three to become the nucleus of a Hittite army in future as well.. which with Newline's annual sale knocking 25% off of these beasties, making them a ridiculous £6 each (compared to Foundry's eye-watering £18 per single chariot!) is a real possibility in future!

This slightly darker, more solid-paint model seems to have had some frosting on the wallpaper when the matt varnish was being sprayed, which I didn't notice as I rushed them to the lightbox. 

 

Another coat of brush-on matt varnish should hopefully fix it. 

Some very nice models indeed, and amazing value to boot!