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Hello everyone.
I've been looking for an answer to this for ages now and I was wondering if anybody on here new how many people play table top wargames?

Im looking for the figures for the uk but other counties would be great or even the world.

Thanks for your time .

I think that's a question that's more complicated than it seems. Do you count someone who has bought a two player starter box and played a few games before putting it in the attic? People that used to play but no longer? People that would like to play but can't?

Yeah,

You need to define exactly what 'play' means. I've played 40K in the last year, I own models, but at this time have no plans to play a game. Does that count?

Also, your thread title says "Warhammer" and your post says "tabletop games." These things are not synonymous.

Assuming you mean tabletop games, does that extend to the likes of Space Hulk, which is technically a board game? All board games, or do you exclude the likes of Monopoly? If you're making that distinction, where is the line? What about something like Risk? Then there's something like X Wing which isn't a full blooded wargame, but isn't a board game either.

Then, once you've got that dialled in, are we just talking sci fi? Sci fi and Fantasy? What about Historicals?

You need a very precise question in order to get anything even approaching a precise answer.

What Az and MWH said.

A friend of mine attempted to do a similar survey just for local gamers (and possibly even lapsed ones or potential ones with a little high street survey) with an eye for opening a store IIRC.

He gave up on it as the task was too monumental. This was just one city, and as cities go Lincoln is not that big. You've got a doozy of task on your hands OP if you want to research this across the board.

I think there's like a couple people who play... might be more... maybe as much as 5 people.

Pretty easy to figure out if you can understand math or statistics at all.

Take my area. There are 24 gamers at the two stores I frequent. There are six similar stores within a 100mile radius. Find out the size of the country, account for differences between places, and do the same for the other countries. Add in GW sales figures, but average them down to per year. Bring all those together and I believe the answer is about 175,000 active or semi-active players, 25,000 hardcore players, and 760,000 once in a while players.

TrollSlayerThorak'Khun'Na wrote:
Pretty easy to figure out if you can understand math or statistics at all.

I believe the word you were looking for was "estimate" or perhaps "guess in the ballpark of", not "figure out."

Wow wow wow... I believe I have been very naive.
I was hoping that someone would just go 'about 800,000 or so based on a recent survey.' Obviously not...
Specifically I mean how many people actively collect and/or play tabletop games, that are generally played on a battlefield style table (not board games).
I meant to put the title as table top games so that's just an error on my part.
The stats for the UK would be great but this is just a curious question so anywhere in the world would be good . Hope that clears things up.

Good luck with that. I doubt anyone collects that data set, although I would be curious about it too.

I play! You have my bolter!

There's 92k registered Dakka users.

That's got to be a point to start from?

It's like asking how many pool players are there in the UK. How do you define a player? Is it someone who has played in the last year? Anyone who owns miniatures? Anyone who's ever played a tabletop game?

The biggest local club near me has around 500 members on their fb page, in a city of ~300,000. The local GW has about 800 likes on their facebook page. So I think it would be fair to say that there are at least 1000 people in my local area with some interest in wargaming. That would be about 1/300th of the population. If you extrapolate that across all of the UK, that would be roughly 210,000 people.

Going by GWs most recent financial report, each one of those people would need to have spent about £100 at GW last year (on average), for the figures to add up. That doesn't seem too unrealistic, so for my wild guess, I would say 210,000 is a good low end estimate for the number of people currently buying and playing GW games in the UK. However, if you broaden your definitions of "player" and "game" that figure could go up to many millions.

So somewhere between 200,000 and 10 million, depending on what question you're asking.

 kronk wrote:
I play! You have my bolter!

And my whippystick!

TrollSlayerThorak'Khun'Na wrote:
Pretty easy to figure out if you can understand math or statistics at all.

Take my area. There are 24 gamers at the two stores I frequent. There are six similar stores within a 100mile radius. Find out the size of the country, account for differences between places, and do the same for the other countries. Add in GW sales figures, but average them down to per year. Bring all those together and I believe the answer is about 175,000 active or semi-active players, 25,000 hardcore players, and 760,000 once in a while players.

This only gives you an idea of people who game at stores. There are many more 'garage gamers' whose only interaction with a store is to buy the occasional model, who play in small groups of friends at their own homes. There's another group of people who only game at clubs, who again only ever go to a store to buy something.

This depends on region though. The US has a higher amount of store gamers. Europe, Australia and NZ have more club and garage gamers.

I play 40k with a small group of friends for an evening (a REALLY long evening) once every other week.

@Loki / TrollSlayer - the easiest way to guestimate would be to make an assumption as to how much the average gamer spends, and then divide that by the total sales of GW. It won't be a great guestimate, because I'm sure there are some gamers that spend a lot and some that barely play or just model, or whatever. But there is also a trade markup (40%) to help offset that.

If someone asked me to just guess a number, I'd just take, for example, $200,000,000 / $500 = 400,000. And no, $200m is not an accurate number; I just picked a nice round number easily divisible by 500

(And obviously, $500 might be overstating it, too. And there's 2nd hand models.)

I like the thinking to use GW sales. But then again that doesn't account for eBay, gumtree, thefts, car boot sales, so yeah... Should not have picked this scab .

Plus there's no indication what percentage of GW sales (really? Only GW? That's an issue itself) are sold to players rather than collectors.

GW have claimed they sell mostly to collectors, anecdotal evidence seems to contradict that.

 Azreal13 wrote:
There's 92k registered Dakka users.

That's got to be a point to start from?

Not really, a fair number of us don't play Warhammer any more.

The Auld Grump

No, but his actual post says tabletop games, and he admits using Warhammer in the thread title was a lapse.

But how many of those registered users have posted in the last year? Two? I don’t think accounts ever expire.

The number might be a good base for people who have one point played, or painted, miniature wargames, but for active, it might be a little off.

 Azreal13 wrote:
There's 92k registered Dakka users.

I don't know if you can really deduce much from that. It's difficult to tell how many of those are unique people and not just bots, ~40% of members have never posted, another ~20% have fewer than 5 posts. I figure there are about 36,000 dakka members with more than 5 posts, even if we assume those are all unique people, we still have no way of knowing what percentage of war gamers use the internet, let alone post on Dakka. We could maybe employ the 1% rule to say that there are roughly ~4 million wargamers in the English speaking world, which if we say is roughly a billion people, would be 0.4% of the population. But that's making an awful lot of assumptions.

However from all the different guestimates, it seems like the number of war gamers is going to be around 1% or less of the population, which I suppose feels about right.

Barnzie4Moop wrote:
Wow wow wow... I believe I have been very naive.
I was hoping that someone would just go 'about 800,000 or so based on a recent survey.' Obviously not...

I don't recall it being a question on the census...

Put it like this - if you've not recently taken part in any nationwide surveys questioning whether you play tabletop games, what makes you think:
a) that there has been one
or
b) that it would be accurate, given that it missed you for starters?

Games-Workshop has Facebook pages for their stores these days.
That might help work it out for UK GW players.
But, assume for every 1 there, there's at least 1 more who hasn't signed up.
Any other games, you'll have to look at club and store groups.
Like in my sig

I was just curious asking this question. It's nice to see I got people thinking.
In hindsight this question was a bit (a lot) stupid but still... It's interesting to ponder all the different variables involved in such data gathering.
P.s thanks to everyone's input.

Proper statistics could do the trick.
But then you need a reliable sample set which is missing atm.
The term ''playing'' needs to be clarified first.

I think you have to look at a random sample - now this won't necessarily be accurate but let me try some estimating using Ottawa, Canada which has roughly 1 mil people (in the greater area).

We've got about 5 stores where people play regularly, which is about 20 people per store. And I know there are quite a few garage players who don't play in-store so lets put that to 40/store.

So lets say 200 people in an area of 1 million. (or 0.02% of population)

0.02 % of 7 billion = 1.4 million

So even if we say that warhammer hasn't reached half of the world, we are still left with 700000.

Which kinda makes sense, if you figure about maybe 1/10 have signed up for dakka dakka (someone above said something like 70k dakka users)

 chaosmarauder wrote:
I think you have to look at a random sample - now this won't necessarily be accurate but let me try some estimating using Ottawa, Canada which has roughly 1 mil people (in the greater area).

We've got about 5 stores where people play regularly, which is about 20 people per store. And I know there are quite a few garage players who don't play in-store so lets put that to 40/store.

So lets say 200 people in an area of 1 million. (or 0.02% of population)

0.02 % of 7 billion = 1.4 million

So even if we say that warhammer hasn't reached half of the world, we are still left with 700000.

Which kinda makes sense, if you figure about maybe 1/10 have signed up for dakka dakka (someone above said something like 70k dakka users)

This figure could make sense. Agreed.

That seems fair chaosmarauder.

So many variables to consider.
I will try looking at GW sales and working backwards with what seems like a fair average spend, see if it matches up with the figures calculated on here.

Barnzie4Moop wrote:
Hello everyone.
I've been looking for an answer to this for ages now and I was wondering if anybody on here new how many people play table top wargames?

Im looking for the figures for the uk but other counties would be great or even the world.

Thanks for your time .

Everyone does.

If they don't now, they just don't know it, yet.....

Dead men walking with temporary use of their arms and legs.....

Just an update - I just shipped an item on ebay to someone in Brunei so my original statement of half the world not being reached yet might be wrong...

By last count it was 27.