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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 (Post Lockdown / 2019 Calendar year)
L#'Art de la Guerre 177 (180)
Mortem et Gloriam 66 (62)
DBMM 61 (72)
DBA 55 (67)
DBM 40 (44)
Field of Glory Ancients 35 (48)
To The Strongest! 28 (64)
(2019 calendar year in brackets)

This shows how many different, UK-based players have taken part in any 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:

https://madaxemandotcom.blogspot.com/2022/07/whos-playing-what-post-lockdown-edition.html

That is quite a lead for ADLG.
It is tempting to simply be smug about the superiority of my favoured ruleset, but putting more thought into something than is sensible is the nerd way.

*WARNING: the following is almost entirely speculation and opinion.*

The obvious thing to point to is that the data are derived from tournaments.

From my reading of rulesets (I am not very familiar with MeG or TTS!) ADLG appears to be the most well suited to tournament play.
Herve did a great job "trimming the fat" without reducing the experience. In terms of how many rules there are to remember (as an ancients ruleset goes anyway), the number of figures required, the time required for a game and the space/size of tables required.*
Which are all good things for both tournament minded players and tournament organisers (also makes if easier to get casual games in TBH).

Being "the tournament ruleset" has a few implicaions:
- ADLG will be over-represented in data derived form tournament results.
- It makes it more likely that results of ADLG tournaments will be made accessible.
- It makes it more likely that tournaments will be ADLG tournaments; both because ADLG players are presumably more inclined to play in/arrange tournaments and because TOs would go along with the rest of the circuit.

Roughly 3 times the players of other rulesets, which are fairly similar to each other, is still quite a lead though.

*DBA requires fewer figures, less space and has a thinner rulebook.
However; in DBA that comes at the cost of games feeling like playing a trimmed down game. ADLG offers an experience similar to the rulesets that have 15mm on a 6x4, but with less fuss somehow.

I am not sure that DBA actually has fewer or even simpler rules that ADLG though.
16 pages for DBA vs 88 for ADLG (excluding lists) sounds obvious, but:
- DBA also has 16 pages of diagrams, which ADLG has interspersed with the rules (so 32 vs 88 pages).
- DBA has a small font, narrow spacing and a block of text layout. ADLG has an open 2 column layout with a bigger font, extra line spacing and a dedication to bullet point lists.
- ADLG has photos of miniatures decorating the rules.
- DBA is written in a concise "every word and all punctuation is vital" style**; while ADLG gives overviews, notes exceptions from other part of the rulebook, adds sentances just to clarify things and even preempts potential questions.

**except when Phil decides to write a load of rules to some minor thing (in terms of impact on actual games/how often it actually comes up) like dedicating a page to having 4 types of BUA.

Absolutely - this is a survey of tournament entries, and so only measures... tournament entries.

Any wider inferences need therefore to be extrapolated very carefully, being mindful of the inherent biases that this data set naturally creates.

However, rather uniquely, it is built on observable, proper actual data - which is very different to the usual "I think..." stuff that comes out whenever the subject of "best/most popular" ruleset comes along on any forum.


Given these are all "tournament" sets by definition, I'm also not sure there's any reason to think that ADLG is overrepresented because its somehow the most (subjectively) "tournament-ey" set out of of a list of other tournament-ey sets. The only thing I think is very clear though is that that ADLG is currently a fair bit more popular in tournaments than most other ancients sets out there, and so it seems likely it's also a lot more popular in non-tournament settings than any of these other "tournament" sets too.