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It’s that time again: time to review the state of the Northern League (the wargames competition scene in the North of England). It's a bit late this year. The organiser's probably been busy.
I'm glad to say that, yet again, I managed to participate in my increasingly standard two rounds.
Late last year I released the first version of this tool. It was a nice data project that I thought would fill a rainy afternoon and be of benefit to others. Earlier this month Chris Laudermilk left a comment that lead to a significantly improved v1.0.
Via email, Chris contributed a couple of neat formulae. One parsed the options text removing the need for users to enter the number of elements. The other selected the troop type where there was only one option; once again reducing user input. Very efficient.
What's new and what's changed?
Unfortunately, there's a drawback with the second formula. When a user
selects an army and enters an option it overwrites the formula. Repeated
use would remove more of the formulae eventually removing them altogether.
It’s that time again: time to review the state of the Northern League (the wargames competition scene in the North of England). In fact it's a little early this year as the organisers seem to be red hot this year.
I'm glad to say that this year I managed to participate in my increasingly standard two rounds.
I haven't played De Bellis Antiquitatis (DBA) for decades, but I do own a copy of the latest version. Who knows I may use it one day.
I built this a few months ago after I spotted a nearly full data set on the Fanaticus DBA forum. This was just before I left the forum and was looking for a small data project to occupy some dead time.
It’s that time again: time to review the state of the Northern League (the wargames competition scene in the North of England). I'm glad to say that this year I managed to participate in both the opening and final rounds.
My wife and I have been trying to move house for almost all of this year, but the whole process in England is a nightmare. As I write, we're still not certain our purchase will ever happen.
One of the by-products is that we have spent, and continue to spend, considerable amounts of time looking at our possessions and thinking “do we need this?” and “how are we going to move that?”.
Now add in the factor that this is a very troubling set of questions for a wargamer, and you should be able to imagine how stressful the entire process is.
2025 update: three years on an AI is running amok, so I reworked the images in the original animated gif to "unblur" them with the help of an AI powered image editing site. I also cropped the images closer to the subject. I think it's an improvement. Progress marches on.
Original post: Sometime ago I stumbled across a free STL file for the "Confused General" from the cover of the De Bellis Antiquitatis (DBA) rules.
Thanks to fellow Lance & Longbow Society member Will McNally I now have half a dozen 15 mm resin prints. I'm grateful to Will for finding time to print these amongst his busy printing schedule.
It’s that time again. Unlike last year when the League was cancelled, it's time to review the state of the Northern League (the wargames competition scene in the North of England). I'm glad to say that this year I managed to participate in the final (open) round.
It’s that time again. Time to review the state of the Northern League; the wargames competition scene in the North of England. I suppose it is something of a landmark that the data below covers thirteen years of the League.
2018 saw the second year of the increasingly popular Art De La Guerre (ADLG) competition. It also saw the return of the Field of Glory Ancients & Medieval (FOG AM) competition; albeit in a truncated three round format.
Doesn’t time fly? Once again it is time to review the state of the Northern League; the wargames competition scene in the North of England.
2017 was a year of change. The League saw its very first Art De La Guerre (ADLG) competition and no Field of Glory (FOG) competitions at all. The absence of FOG R was deliberate but that of FOG AM was due to lack of support.
One further change was that ADLG introduced a different format for the day: three 2.25 hour games with small 200 point armies. The DBMM format was unchanged from the standard: two 3.50 hour games with 450 point armies.
Doesn’t time fly? Is it time to review the state of the Northern League, the competition scene in the North of England, once again? It appears so. This year the review is a touch late as the data's only just been released.
In 2016 the trend of steadily declining numbers continued. In last year's review I expressed the hope that the missing FOG AM players would return and the League would spring back to life. Sadly FOG AM continued its decline:
One of the most interesting replies I received following the publication of my 2015 review of the Northern League was from John Graham-Leigh. He runs the DBM Doubles League based in the South Western UK which was known as the South West Doubles League until 2011.
He kindly provided me with comparable data for the DBM Doubles League covering 2008-15. I couldn’t resist running a quick comparison not least because in the South West they remained true to DBM whilst in the North they moved away from DBM running DBM, FOG AM and DBMM competitions as early as 2008. DBM last ran in the Northern League in 2009.
Before comparing the two leagues I wanted to look at the combined trend; not least because it will say something about the national scene as far as regional leagues are concerned. To compare the attendance data I’ve summed the numbers playing in all the Northern League’s ancient & medieval competitions regardless of the rules used.
Doesn’t time fly? Is it time to review the state of the Northern League, the competition scene in the North of England, once again? It appears so.
If you want to read the background to this analysis have a look at last year’s post. In it I said that "2015 looks like it's going to be another year of transition. As the Chinese curse says "may you live in interesting times". This has turned out to be all too true as the graph below shows:
It's clear that overall attendance has continued to decline and the downward trend from 2011 to 2015 cannot be ignored.
It's that time of year again! Time to review the state of the Northern League the competition scene in the North of England.
If you want to read the background to this analysis have a look at this earlier post. In this article I said that "the Northern League is both stable and set fair for the future". This is no longer true as this chart shows:
My latest article has been printed in this month's Miniature Wargames (Issue 374). It's about the local competition scene in the North of England. Here's a taster:
"Competition wargamers! There's quite a few of these about judging by the number of local, national and international tournaments organised each year.
Now some people love competing others loathe it, but competition wargaming remains an established and vibrant part of our hobby.
What I would like to do in this article is look at one small part of the UK competition scene and draw out some long term trends which I hope will be of general interest but before that I would like to say a little about how and why I started to enter competitions."
To read the rest of the article you will either have to buy the magazine or wait until I put the article online in a couple of months. In the meantime you can read some of my other articles online.
Before Christmas the lists were a buzz with a bit a to do about the way that DBMM ranking points are calculated. It was all a bit “handbags at forty paces” and I didn’t really pay much attention to it other than to notice the volume of messages on various lists.
This was until Dave Thompson re-jigged the rankings using a different scoring scheme. This piqued my interest; as the founder of DBMM for the Befuddled I was worried in case my reputation was at stake. I decided to delve a bit deeper.
