The Northern League

Introduction

The Northern League is an annual series of wargames competitions in the North of England. It started as a DBM doubles league and has featured competitions with many rule sets including DBMM, FOG and most recently ADLG.

Every year since 2008 I have written a post about the changing nature of the League along with various summary statistics. This page summarises both the posts and the data.

Rules used & attendance

Key events

• 2006 last year of the dominance of DBM.
• 2008 transition from DBM to DBMM.
• 2013 advent of FOG AM v2 and the beginning of the decline of FOG AM.
• 2016 demise of both FOG AM & R.
• 2017 mass switch from FOG to ADLG and a period of stability begins.
• 2018 last ever FOG AM competition.
• 2019 mainly a singles competition due to the popularity of ADLG.
• 2021 partial year due to the end of Covid in the summer.
• 2022 first full year post Covid.
• 2025 ADLG now dominant & DBMM declining.

Data set

Average Players / Round
Year	DBM	DBMM	FOG AM	FOG R	ADLG	Totals
2006	58.0					58.0
2007	38.0					38.0
2008	18.0	7.2	16.6			41.8
2009	7.0	11.8	26.6			45.4
2010		8.8	33.0			41.8
2011		11.0	34.8			45.8
2012		11.6	27.4	5.8		44.8
2013		12.4	19.0	10.0		41.4
2014		12.8	14.4	9.6		36.8
2015		13.4	7.4	8.8		29.6
2016		11.0	4.8	9.6		25.4
2017		11.8			12.6	24.4
2018		13.2	3.2		14.4	30.8
2019		13.2			18.8	32.0
2021		13.0			11.3	24.3
2022		12.8			16.6	29.4
2023		11.4			15.2	26.6
2024		10.4			16.2	26.6
2025		8.6			17.8	26.4

Data quality

The "official" DBMM results are always published much later than the ADLG results so I switched to getting the results from http://dbmm.org.uk/. In doing so I uncovered a issue that affects all the DBMM data prior to this year.

The DBMM doubles pairings are fluid. Some players are listed in teams, but I found that it was very common for a doubles team to consist of just one player. This means I overestimated the average players per round for DBMM because I assumed all teams listed as doubles always played as such. The effect is small (of the order of 1 to 2 players per round), but likely to be significant.

There's far too much work involved in correcting the data from 2008-24, but I have used the correct figures for 2025 and will do so in the future.

The same situation does sometimes arise with ADLG but it is very infrequent as the competition is overwhelmingly a singles event: there's only one doubles team listed in 2025. Any occasional, ad hoc, teams (to balance numbers) have their score assigned to both individual's scores not to the team.

Document history

• Created: 16:28, Wed 19 December, 2019
• Updated: 16:25, Mon 12 January, 2026