I was talking with a noted game designer on a podcast and he was asking me how many wargames I thought came out in year. I said fifty. He said over a hundred. We continued this by email, at which point he directed me to a list of “wargames” on BGG from 2016-2018 that he said was “20 pages long” and contained “real wargames, not space stuff or orcs.” He said he started counting and stopped at page two when he “got to 106.”
I don’t usually care about stuff like this, but for some reason I hate when people make unverified claims about verifiable data. I mean, there is an answer to this, right? So why not just find it instead of speculating? So, since I had the day off today and am kind of an an obsessive about data, I pulled all the 2017 games from BGG under the “Wargame” category and started putting them into an Excel spreadsheet. Just the game name, publisher, whether I thought it was a “wargame,” and a comment on why (not). I got through the numbers (“1776”, “1812”, “1945” etc.) and the letters of the alphabet through D. Then I stopped because I don’t have infinite time even on days off. But I got through 207 entries, and found some very interesting stuff.
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Of those 207 games, I counted 63 of them as “wargames” in the sense that we understand them. Historical wargames of some sort. That’s 30%. 30%
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20 of those 207 games had not been released. That’s basically 10% of the games for 2017 being incorrectly labeled for release date. I’m sure this is because a game is announced, someone makes a BGG page for it, the date goes by, it isn’t released, and it just ends up sitting there. But in my opinion, that’s a huge contaminant of the data.
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The real question so far hasn’t actually been whether or not something is a wargame. That’s actually pretty easy to decide, and I gave the benefit of the doubt to pretty much every game if it was some sort of historically based design, even if it was a stretch. No, the difficult thing was deciding if something even was a game, in the sense that I could actually get it. There are tons of things that maybe exist in theory, like there is a paper copy somewhere in somebody’s house, but there is no way anyone else is gonna get it. There is so much self-published stuff that I don’t know if this even merits being included. I mean, yeah, Lou Coatney says that this Arnhem point-to-point thing he designed is really popular in his Oslo game club, but so what? I should say that the reason we were arguing about this was that we were discussing just how “niche” wargaming is as a hobby compared to the boardgaming hobby at large. The claim was made (not by me!) that one out of every ten boardgames published is a “historical wargame.” I say no freaking way. Furthermore, if you are trying to argue that historical wargaming is not super-niche, you shouldn’t include hand-drawn self-published “games.”
I’ll attach the Excel file when I have finished.
Btw, there are 27 separate listings for Bushido miniatures in the 2017 wargames listing. Individual minis for the game Bushido.