A Data Driven Look at the Kings of War Community

A recent discussion in the Kings of War Fanatics group on Facebook brought up the question of how many people play Kings of War. So I thought I’d do some digging and see what I could figure out.

So first things first, I don’t know how many people play Kings of War.

What I do know is something about the number and whereabouts of the people who read dash28 (or at least as much as Google knows and is willing to tell people using their Analytics product). Given that dash28 is a site entirely dedicated to Kings of War, there’s a pretty good chance that our visitors are interested in Kings of War. Also, almost all of our visitors either click through from Facebook, where we post links to our articles, or from a search engine where they were looking for Kings of War content. So I’m pretty confident that we don’t have a lot of randos landing on the site by mistake.

Now, second things second, I don’t think that everyone who plays Kings of War reads dash28.

As much as I’d like to think that, I don’t think we’ve got that kind of saturation. We do have enough visitors to be a representative sample, though. We can use it to put a lower bound of the size of the community and make some extrapolations.

We can also start by taking a look at a couple of other data sources. The Kings of War Fanatics group on Facebook has 11.2K members. That might put us in a vague sort of ballpark, but it’s hard to say how many of the group members are still currently interested in the game, and it doesn’t give us any clues as to how many interested folks there are out there who don’t belong to the group.

Rob Phaneuf from Counter Charge was kind enough to share some of their data with me. They can keep track of RSS subscribers to their podcast. The numbers vary from month to month based on the topics they cover, but they saw an average of 10.5K subscribers per month in 2019. Counter Charge is also dedicated to Kings of War, so it’s also highly likely that their subscribers have a significant interest in Kings of War. But just like with dash28 and the Fanatics group, it’s unlikely that everyone with any amount of interest in Kings of War listens to Counter Charge. It does give us a strong lower bound on the size of the community though.

Dash28 has had an average of 3.2K unique visitors per month so far in 2020, which is about 3 times smaller than Counter Charge. Over the course of the year though, we’ve seen a total of 19.3K unique visitors. Now, that’s a pretty big gap between the average and the total. If you do the back-of-the-envelope math, you realize that we must have only seen a lot of those visitors once. In fact, we’ve seen 6,962 visitors more than once this year and 11,324 visitors only once.

So, what’s that mean?

Different people enjoy the game in different ways

Regular tournament players are pretty easy to get a rough count of, especially in places that keep track of regional or national player rankings, but we know that tournament players are not the sum total of the community. What’s harder to figure out is how many players there are who don’t often participate in public events, ie. the ‘garage’ or ‘basement’ players. There’s also plenty of anecdotal evidence of gaming clubs that dabble in several different games and only play Kings of War occasionally, and people who are interested in Kings of War but struggle to find other players who live close enough to play with regularly.

While I might not be able to determine the full size of the community, I can split all the people who have visited dash28 this year into cohorts based on how often they visit dash28. If we assume that more site visits correlate with a higher level of interest in the game and a higher likelihood of being a frequent player, then we can estimate how many less frequent players or less engaged members of the community there are by how large those cohorts are in relation to one another.

Player Cohorts

• Fanatic – (for lack of a better term) No, not everyone in the massive Facebook group. These are people who’ve visited this site 8 or more times so far this year, or at least once a month on average.
• Regular – People who’ve visited this site 4 to 7 times so far this year, or at least once every 2 months.
• Casual – People who’ve visited this site 2 or 3 times so far this year.
• Curious – People who’ve visited this site only once so far this year.

Now that we’ve defined some cohorts, we can look at how many of our site visitors fall into each cohort:

If you add up the Fanatic, Regular, and Casual player cohorts, you get 6,962. I would guess that most regular tournament players fall into the Fanatic or Regular player cohorts. If that’s true, then you can extrapolate that:

for every 2 regular tournament players in your area there are

3 Casual players and

8 Curious players (somewhere).

Hopefully somewhere close enough for you to find them, but that brings up the question of where exactly all these players are….

It’s not such a small world, after all

Let’s take a look at what countries the Fanatic, Regular, and Casual players live in.

It’s hard to tell a lot from this map, but the thing that jumps out at me the most is just how many countries have at least some people who have more than a passing interest in Kings of War. The US, UK, and Australia are the top 3, but we already knew that. Kings of War is published by a UK company, and a lot of the content about it is in English (such as dash28 and Counter Charge), so it makes sense that primarily English speaking countries are at the top. Germany comes in at #4, which might be a little surprising. Elliot Moorish from the Rules Committee has been talking about traveling to Germany very soon for a tournament over on his blog, so maybe it’s not such a surprise to everyone.

Here’s all the countries that have at least 1% of the Fanatic, Regular, and Casual player cohorts:

Let’s talk about Curious players for a second. First off, there are Curious players in every country where there are Fanatic, Regular, or Casual players. So, no matter where you are, there are opportunities for community growth within your country. There are also a few countries where their relative share of the Curious player cohort is greater than their relative share of the Fanatic, Regular, and Casual player cohorts. I think that means these countries have a slightly larger community growth opportunity than other countries with similar sized active player bases:

Since the US has the largest share of players, and also has a lot of growth potential, and the data easily rolls up by state, I’m going to go into some more detail on the US. As much as I’d like to dive into some other countries, the data’s kinda sparse and this article is already long enough. Sorry, feel free to skip to The End if you don’t live in the US. Let’s take a closer look at Fanatic, Regular, and Casual players by US state :

Texas and California are the top 2. Texas and California are the two most populous states though, so that’s not surprising. Wyoming is the only state we haven’t seen anyone from, but it’s also the least populous, so also not too surprising. So let’s try to normalize it a little bit and look for states where the percentage of Fanatic, Regular, and Casual players is significantly different from the state’s percentage of the total population. That should tell us which states have more or fewer players per capita than we would expect.

Anecdotally, a lot of these look right. Having lived in California when Warhammer Fantasy ended, I know that the community completely splintered, the big tournaments didn’t switchover to Kings of War, and they have had to rebuilt a new community from the ground up. I moved from California to Virginia, and found it significantly easier to find Kings of War events along with an existing community. I also see a lot of states that I know have stable communities and regular events on the positive end, and I know the folks in the Carolinas have struggled to reach critical mass.

There are, again, Curious cohort players everywhere except Wyoming. With the exception of Kansas, there are more Curious players in every state than Fanatic, Regular, and Casual players in the state combined. So no matter where you are (yeah, yeah, except Wyoming) your community has growth potential. Let’s take a look at US States with higher percentages of Curious players than Fanatic, Regular, and Casual players, as those are likely states with more than expected growth potential.

The End

So what’s the takeaway here? Well, from the dash28 data we know that globally there are at least 19 thousand people with at least some interest in Kings of War, at least 6.9K people with a moderate level of interest, and at least 1.3K with a high level of interest. Based on the Counter Charge data, it’s likely that the real numbers are quite a bit higher. We know that everywhere there are Fanatic, Regular, or Casual players, there are on average almost twice as many Curious players. So no matter where you are, your community has the potential for growth.