The Fractured nature of local gaming

Ok this is going to be a slightly different post - please hang on with me here.

 I started thinking of this whilst I was playtesting my Panzerjager’s. I managed to get 10 games in, against 10 different opponents, and I was kind of surprised that some of the people I played against were surprised so many other locally played FoW.

I think there are 2 bits of background which are useful to know to begin with, the first is my own introduction to FoW, and by extension wargames. I follow a familiar path, I played 40K as a kid (lots of badly painted, poorly put together metal models in the mid 90’s) I stopped in my teens, and rediscovered it in my early 20’s.
Moved to Bournemouth, took up 40K, made good friends at the local store. Local store pissed us off, people started looking for other games, Ben and the mysterious PKY started FoW, I watched, I bought.

After that though only a couple of others in our little group played FoW so I started looking for others who may play. Using the groups section on the FoW website I met a few good players, and also started making slightly more regular visits to some local clubs. There were a few locally, some I liked some I didn’t.

But the interesting bit was finding out who played games against who, and in some ways the lack of connections between them. I was playing a game against one of the local players who was genuinely surprised when I mentioned that I’d been to one of the local clubs and seen 5 other people playing the game.

And other people at a local club (admittedly there are 4+ local clubs) were equally surprised when I mentioned that there was a whole group of individual people who played locally. Also having travelled to a few of the local clubs I’m intrigued by the different people who attend different ones, but then I think that has it’s own advantages, allowing people to find the club which is right for them.

The more interesting thing was that those who didn’t play in the clubs, who they played, other locals of course, but also people who lived in other towns and at tournaments. If you now look on the Battlefront boards, there is a post about ‘Bournemouth’ which one of our number so elegantly explains, ‘There are now at least 10 of us in the Bournemouth area that play Flames of War current age group i think 29-51 years old !!. We do not meet up as a club…’ I spoke to a couple about why they didn’t attend local clubs, and for most it just wasn’t their thing; and in the age of the internet (and being able to host games at you home address) is that really unusual? It may not grow the people playing the game with ‘oh wow that looks cool’ but most of us are internet savvy enough to look on various websites boards for other groups and players.

More recently due to the closure of our local GW’s (and there on-going changes in playing games – a thought for another thread) a couple of new gaming clubs have started, I was glancing over a forum of theirs, and again a couple who’ve started FoW and others who are interested. I’m really up for going to these to help grow the game, more players = more opponents = more fun I think.

So what do my ramblings mean? Well I think that it’s actually quite amazing that in a really small local community (around 400,00 players in the South East Dorset Conurbation) there are shed loads of players, yet very few actually seem to interact with each other. On the bright side, it also shows the huge diversity which FoW can accommodate, from hard-core tournament players, to the causal player, to those who like narrative gaming. 

Well thanks for reading my ramblings, and I hope it helps you to find other players for whatever system you play, and hopefully all the local players may make Breakthrough Assault 2, might bring the community together.

Thanks for reading

Dr Cox