[UPDATE: I went back and compared this to two other years: 1980, when the hobby was exploding, and 1990 when the hobby was cratering. I found some interesting things: in 1980 there were 56 games released that met my “wargame criteria” and 38 of them were boxed. This was out of 131 games in the Boardgamegeek database. In 1990, there were only 33 comparable games (!) released, only 17 of which were boxed. This is out of 113 games in the database. This shows you that even in that old data there is a lot of contamination by miniatures rules, science fiction and fantasy games, and stuff that isn’t a wargame. Secondly, it shows just how much our hobby has rebounded from the dark days of the early ’90s. Of course, this does not include sales numbers – I’ll bet that print runs in the 1970s and 1980s were larger than today.]

I was talking with a noted game designer on a podcast recently and he asked 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 Boardgamegeek.com 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.” QED?

I don’t know that if he hadn’t done that little “test,” that I would have necessarily done what I did next. Because in the end, who cares. But using what I suspect to be bad data to draw any sort of conclusion just makes me itchy. And I have been wondering for a long time how many of the games in Boardgamegeek’s notorious “Wargame” category were actually, well, wargames. So I decided to find out.

So I counted them.

What I found is interesting not just because it shows how misleading broad categorical data can be, but also because while I had suspected that historical wargaming was a niche within the boardgaming hobby, the data I found shows just how small that niche is.

And I’m perfectly ok with that.

So as not to prolong the suspense, I counted 680 games in the BGG “Wargame” category that were released in 2017. I chose just one year because, what, you thought I was going to do all 14,500 of them? Maybe next decade. I put them, one by one, into a spreadsheet, and included the name, publisher, and whether I thought the game was a wargame or not. I also included comments as to why I felt something was or was not a wargame, and noted whether the game was boxed or not, because that was one of the things I had in mind when I answered the question, “how many wargames are published in a year?”

Of the games published in 2017, the last full year for which there is data, there were 129 published games which I consider to be actual historical wargames, by my definition.

Which may not be yours.

I was pretty strict about the definition of wargame. I didn’t try to philosophize or justify a definition like calandale did, although I enjoyed listening to his reasoning. I tried to exclude things that were reprints of old games. But why did I accept Wild Blue Yonder, which is nothing but a repackaging of the Down in Flames series, or Red Typhoon, which is a reprint of an old Command magazine game, or African Campaign, which is a reprint of a game from 1973 (!), but I didn’t allow the Here I Stand reprint? Because. I tried to exclude really speculative stuff where it’s World War II and the Nazis have a base in Antarctica (Global War 1936-1945: Neuschwabenland – The New Berlin), but I also disallowed Triumph of the Will: Nazi Germany vs. Imperial Japan, 1948 while allowing Operation Unthinkable: Churchill’s World War III and Next War: Poland. Why? Because I did. I tried to disallow expansions, or scenario packs, or anything about miniatures. These are all things I don’t think of when I think, “how many wargames were released last year?”

But maybe you do?

And that’s why I’ve included a link to the file itself. Download it and categorize the games the way you like. I think it doesn’t make any sense to count games that have limited print runs in foreign countries. I don’t think it makes sense to include games published only in languages other than English. These are all criteria I have when I think of the wargaming hobby: a shared group of games that most of us can experience together. I just used a buyer service to obtain a Japanese-language game from the Japanese Yahoo! auction site. Did I count that game in my list? No.

What I also didn’t count was anything web- or self-published. There is what looks like a really cool game called 1972: The Lost Phantom that was designed for the BGG print-n-play contest which is available as a PDF. I didn’t count it. I didn’t count any games that you had to make some component, like the counters. This is not arts and crafts.

What I did do, though, was note those games separately, so that if you want to go back and add all 42 of those games back in, go ahead! If you want to take out the 21 games that appeared as magazine games, you can do that, too.

I counted 68 games that were released as boxed products and met the criterion of being a “historical wargame” as I understand it. This is the main number I was looking for, and corresponds to what I meant when I said that I thought there were fifty wargames released last year. Since a few of those are foreign (but with English rules and generally available), my estimate of fifty looks even better.

But I think that the thing I found most – not surprising, because I suspected it – well, sobering, was that of 680 games, even if you add the 42 excluded titles and feel generous with some of the games I excluded, there are maybe 200 games among 680 labeled as “wargames” on BGG that actually meet that definition. Ok, a narrow definition. But that’s not even 30%. Ok, it is if you round up. What makes up the other 70%? Anything from fantasy to scifi to a drinking game to miniatures rules, to even individual miniatures. There are 27 separate entries for single figures for the game Bushido. That’s one-fifth of all the wargames I counted.

I have no idea what the sales numbers are, but I am sure they are even worse than those stats. Someone on a forum suggested to me that there are probably single boardgames that outsell the entire wargame category. I wouldn’t doubt it.

So what’s the point? Well, that even if you suspect you have dirty data, you might not realize just how dirty it is. But really, that I don’t care how big wargaming is as a part of the bigger boardgaming hobby. If there are (as has been quoted to me) 6,000 boardgames published in a year (another number I won’t believe until someone parses the data) and there are 129 actual wargames published, that doesn’t make me feel bad. There are still too many games published each month for me to play. I love wargaming and don’t need it to be popular. I just need it to exist. And from what I’ve seen, it’s doing that just fine.

2017 released wargames data file (Excel format)

1990 released wargames data file (Excel format)

1980 released wargames data file (Excel format)