Rules War :: Two Years On

There’s a lot of discussion on the Yahoo! DBMMlist about health of the new rules.  It is clear that many DBM players have not taken to DBMM.  Lots of reasons have been put forward for the state of affairs.  The most cited seem to be:

• Competition from Field of Glory (FOG).
• The difficulty DBM players face in making the transition to DBMM.
• The difficulty new players face in learning the game unaided.
• The need for clarifications for some basic game mechanisms.

Recently, some posters have expressed a concern that DBMM may be heading for niche status rather than replacing DBM as the most popular rule set.  This is a worrying prospect as DBMM has the makings of a great game. It’s just a  swine to learn and reach the stage were you can play with fluency.

Anyway, I thought I’d do a bit of research and see if there’s anything that could paint a quantitative picture of the state of play regarding DBM, DBMM and FOG.  I came up with this from the Northern DBM League:



Bearing in mind that most DBM and FOG games were doubles and DBMM were singles, this shows:

• The overall number of players dropped some 20% in 2007-08 compared to 2005-06 with a steep decline in 2007. 
• In 2008 FOG has proved more attractive than DBMM with nearly three times as many people playing FOG.
• Even in decline, DBM is more popular than DBMM even if the DBM average of 18 players hides a mixed year with 32 and 20 players in the first and second rounds compared to 12 in each of the last three rounds.

This analysis confirms the decline of DBM in the Northern League.  Clearly, DBMM has failed to supplant DBM and remains the rule set with the smallest number of players. 

I posted the bare bones of the above on the Yahoo! DBMMlist and Jim Gibson kindly provided some further figures culled from three major UK competitions at Warfare, Roll Call and Britcon.  I analysed these in the same way as the Northern League figures:



What’s interesting here is:

• The total number of player registrations increased by a third (75) from 227 to 302. This has to be a good thing.
• The 2008 DBMM:FOG ratio above is the same as the Northern League at roughly 1:3.  So I suspect this pattern is UK wide.
• FOG grew really strongly in 2008 attracting players 5 times faster than DBMM.
• FOG replaced DBM as the dominant rule set in just one year despite DBMM release a year earlier.
• DBMM and DBM were minority rule sets in 2008 (same as Northern League).
• DBM lost 83 players whilst DBMM gained 26 suggesting that most DBM players switched to FOG which gained 132.

So, both data sets show FOG as the rule set attracting the most players leaving DBM & DBMM, as some have feared, as niche rule sets in 2008. I hope this improves in 2009 but only time will tell.

Index of Northern League reviews.