Rules War :: Compilation Released

This booklet collects a series of my blog posts together with an extract of an article I wrote for Miniature Wargames.  They share a theme: the popularity of rules for 15 mm wargames in the ancient, medieval & renaissance periods amongst competition wargamers.



Whilst every wargamer knows, or thinks they know, what is popular and what isn't it's very difficult to get consistent and reliable data to illuminate this perennial debate. The five articles in this collection show just what can and can't be done using freely available public data.

I first became interested in this topic in 2007 when Field of Glory (FOG) and De Bellis Magistrorum Militum (DBMM) were vying to fill the void left by the demise of the once monolithic De Bellis Multitudinis (DBM) but solid data in this area was, and remains, remarkably difficult to find.

By 2008 I had started to analyse the number of players in the Northern League.  This was, and is, a competition played over five rounds at different venues across the north of England.  I published my first results in a post entitled "Rules War".   Thereafter I posted an annual review whilst continuing to develop how the data was collected and analysed.

By 2013 I had established a consistent database and a firm numerical measure of popularity of the various rules together with enough data to identify other trends.  This is where this collection starts.  The first three articles are annual reviews of the Northern League for 2013, 2014 and 2015.  The first also looks at trends from 2006 to 2013 whilst the others show how the trends developed and in some cases reversed.

The final two articles are attempts to extend the analysis to cover two other Leagues: one in the South West and the other National. The former compliments the picture from the Northern League but the latter is an object lesson in how difficult it is to obtain reliable data.

I hope you enjoy reading this booklet.

Download epub compilation.

The epub file should be useful to those of you who have a dedicated ereader or an ereader app on your phone or tablet.  They can also be easily read online in a browser if you have the right extension installed.