Wargames Illustrated Ask You Which Genre/Period Is Your Favourite?
February 16, 2015 by brennon
Wargames Illustrated held a little competition/survey recently to find out what their readership's favourite genre/period was for wargaming. See what the results were from this newest survey and the one held a few years ago...
Above is the older of the two surveys which clearly shows that World War II is a major player when it comes to the readership of Wargames Illustrated. Don't be so surprised to see the Fantasy and Sci-Fi genres so low on the agenda as the readership of Wargames Illustrated is mostly Historical gamers. It makes sense therefore to see both Ancient and Napoleonic eras also getting near the top.
Here is the new one from this year. You can see that since then there has been a grown in the amount of people playing World War II probably due to both Bolt Action and Flames of War in no small part. Dark Ages has also popped up on the spectrum with an increase of 2%. I'd like to think my favourite system, SAGA, had something to do with that!
World War I also showed up on the radar probably due to the centenary over the last year and a bit. Something else that has popped up as a choice in its own right is the addition of Steampunk! It's fascinating to see that become such a stand out addition to wargaming but then again there are a lot of systems out there now that focus on alternative takes on established time periods.
The real question is where do you think you fit on this chart?
Supported by (Turn Off)
Supported by (Turn Off)
"Something else that has popped up as a choice in its own right is the addition of Steampunk!"
Supported by (Turn Off)
Don’t forget that the magazine has been owned by Battlefront since 2009. Although they aren’t an in-house magazine by any means, Flames of War understandably gets a lot of coverage.
My problem with such surveys is the venue in which they’re asked. Put that same one in, say, White Dwarf or No Quarter and the pie would be sliced differently.
Yes of course – but it is interesting to see what the vast majority of the readership of Wargames Illustrated focus on as their period of choice – and then seeing how a predominantly full on historical magazine picks up things like Steampunk.
…for example, I would have thought Napoleonics would have had a much bigger slice of the pie.
I would suggest that a lot of wargamers don’t buy any magazines at all
All these things go in cycles 30 years ago it would have probably been Napoleonics in 10 years time something completely different,though WW2 through Rapid Fire and CD and Spearhead will always be near the top of the list
It would be interesting to see the results if Beast of War carried out a similar survey…
Of course the “Age of Beasts”, where clawed and jawed warfare dominated would lead such a survey.
near useless survey conducted by the producer of the largest 15 MM WW II minis game.
Wargames Illustrated is their house mag, these results should not surprise anyone.
Such a survey can be pretty misleading as mentioned in various posts above and is quite useless since it represents actually nothing.
Interesting that Sci-fi/Fantasy has gone from a lowly 6% to not on the chart at all. I’m wondering if they introduced steampunk as its own category this time and that drained enough votes to knock sci-fi/fantasy into obscurity.