Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

I confess. I’m a data geek.

It’s actually a large part of my day job – data analysis that is. So I really couldn’t resist having a look at some data about the games we played down at the Cross Gaming Club throughout 2011.

Luckily the club has a forum challenge thread to arrange game bookings so I was able to go back through and collate booking data to use as a proxy. Now, the games booked may not necessarily those that actually got played. There were plenty of no-shows, rearrangements, or random pickup games, etc, but I reckon it should be a pretty good indicator.

Oh, and another quick disclaimer – I manually browsed through the threads so I can’t guarantee the accuracy of my data collection. Should be indicative though.

So, to start us off on our fascinating(!) data journey, let’s take a look at how many games were booked in.

Nothing too spectacular, but you can see we get around 50-60 games booked per month. This is across three sessions per week – Tuesday early, Tuesday late, and Thursday. March/April looks a bit odd but I think that’s a calendar quirk in that it was effectively a five week month (1st was a Tuesday and 31st was a Thursday).

You can see how early club closing affected December. We had to close the club as the pub wanted to rent out the space for more lucrative Christmas parties. Damn them.

It does dispel one myth for me though, that the club is “quiet” in the summer months. Seems like game bookings are not too seasonal with the exception of the aforementioned winter closure and a slight uptake in Spring.

So, which games did we play?

EDIT: Oops, I just noticed the chart title states 2012, when it was of course 2011

Warmachine/Hordes – by Privateer Press – is clearly the most popular tabletop miniatures game at the Cross, accounting for 38% of the 633 games booked in 2012. It’s also nice to see Malifaux and Infinity getting a look in. A few GW game systems were played, but there wasn’t such interest in 40K as in previous years.

In fact, if we look at how the games were booked each month by system (as a percentage of all games for the month) we can see some interesting trends.

You can see that 40K steadily declined as the year progressed. WarmaHordes gained in popularity and more and more people started to pick up Malifaux, and then Infinity. It’s particularly interesting to look at October-December and see how the Slow Grow League pulled Malifaux players back to Warmachine/Hordes (myself included). Infinity was unaffected by this and continued an upward trend as more and more players got into the superb sci-fi skirmish system.

Should I be so bold as to make some predictions for 2012?

Well, firstly, despite a recent claim that Malifaux is a “dead game”, I’d expect it to draw players back in after the Slow Grow League is done in a month or so. The third book models are steadily being released and players will want to try out the new stuff. I also see Infinity continuing to gain in popularity. There’s rumour of a new book with mission-based gameplay coming early this year so that could be a significant draw.

40K and Warhammer Fantasy Battle will probably languish in 2012 unless GW release anything significant. The recent Vampire Counts army book might just be the tonic WFB needs, and maybe a revised and fluffy Chaos Codex for 40K could encourage a resurgence.

There’s also a large amount of interest for an Ash Wastes post apocalyptic Necromunda campaign that will likely get a good number of players in.

Guess we’ll just have to look back in a years time how my predictions pan out.

~ by Max Von Deadlock on February 6, 2012.