by Brant Guillory, 5 January 2026
In December, we launched our third year-end wargaming survey, which is now becoming an annual tradition. With 2 years of precedent, there’s some common themes we ask about—opponents, how long you’ve played, purchases, conventions, where you play—while also leaving some room for some other one-off questions that are just for this year. As always, we take feedback on the survey seriously and will try to update this year’s efforts based on ideas you gave us last year.
The Methods Section, aka: “How we conducted the survey”
As last year, this was a basic Google form, with 18 questions in the basic survey, plus a couple of additional ones if you attended any conventions. X questions were required. We’re holding steady on only asking for two BGG links—one required (what’d you play the most), and one optional (favorite game released in 2025).
As before, the majority of the responses were either dropdowns or buttons, with some open responses at the end of the survey. A few items have been repeated verbatim from year-to-year. Others continue to evolve, and some are continually rotated in & out for new one-off items of interest.
The survey opened up on 1 December of 2025, and stayed up until 1 January 2026. The response total (297) was our highest yet across all 3 years and we thank everyone who responded and also hounded some friends into responding, too! We promoted the survey through all of our usual channels, including our own site & social media channels; BGG; a bunch of Facebook groups & Discord servers; links posted at places like ConSimWorld, Grognard.com, Gamesquad, and more; and also promoted & linked to by our content creating friends like Ardwulf and Pushing Cardboard, among others. We’re still trying to find that sweet spot between “hey, please remember to do this during the holiday season” and “don’t bug the crap out of people too much”.
Of course, the usual caveat still applies: the stats we’re presenting are not trying to describe “the wargaming population” but rather “the people that replied to the survey”.
Descriptive Stats
Here is the overall snapshot of the respondents to this year’s survey. As expected, a huge chunk of the audience has been playing wargames for over 40 years. It’s also interesting to see where people learn about the survey.
click images to enlarge
A couple of notes on the demographics
- The “more than 40 years” length of time in wargaming continues to dominate both this survey and our solo wargaming survey in the Summer, but this is the first time that more than 50% of our year-end respondents were in the “more than 40 years” block. We might need to find a way to make this a little more granular in the future.
- BGG and Facebook continue to be fertile ground for spreading the word about our surveys
- Any channel or information source that only had a single vote for “Where did you find out about this survey?” was collapsed into the “other” category
- We increased our participation by almost 20%
Tracking a few year-over-year trends
Your Year in Wargaming
To start with, here are the key questions we asked about comparing your 2025 wargaming to the previous year; there’s 5 slides in this set.
Your Favorites
We asked for your favorite game released in 2025, and these games all had at least 5 mentions
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We also asked which game you played the most in 2025, regardless of when it was released, and as you’d expect this was a long & varied list. Here are the games with at least 3 mentions
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We have the full list of games for each of these in our forum
The most common type of wargame I play is…
As expected, “Traditional” Hex & Counter ran away with this one at 58.9%. This is pretty closely tracked with last year, where it was 57.8%. Traditional minis games clocked in at second, with 9.4% (10% in 2024), followed by Ops/Event-style CDGs at 7.4% and COIN/ICS games at 7.1% (both of checked in at 6.4% last year). Procedural solo games rounded out the top 5 both years, giving us 2 years of pretty consistent responses in the most common types of wargames being played.
Just for kicks, this year we asked “Is there one of these you absolutely hate to play?” and provided the same list of game types
This set of replies was far more varied, with Traditional minis games leading the way at 18.2%, followed by Block wargames and solo point-to-point games, both at 15% or greater. We’re unlikely to keep this as a regular item in the survey, but as a one-off it was interesting to see.
One question we added last year was asking you for your favorite publisher
Companies receiving at least 5 votes all included:
Note that we counted “The Gamers” separately from “MMP” as they were specified in the replies |
Avalon Hill, 4P Press, and OSG each had 3 votes
Decision Games, Lock ‘N Load Publishing, Osprey Games, The Dietz Foundation, Too Fat Lardies, Victory Games, and White Dog Games each had 3 votes Companies receiving a single vote included 3 Crown Games, Blue Panther, CMON, Clash of Arms Games, Columbia Games, , DVG, Daniel Mersey, Free League Publishing, GDW, Gale Force Nine, Ganesha Games, Grognard Simulations, Inc, Hexasim, Hollandspiele, Long Face Games, NUTS, Tactical Workshop, The Wargaming Company, Thin Red Line Games, VentoNuovo, Victory Point Games, Wargames Research Group, and Warlord |
Last year’s top 5 were GMT (101), MMP (29), Compass Games (15), Revolution Games (6), VUCA Simulations (6)
Spending!
One of our other new questions this year was “What’s the most you’ve spent on a single game?” and asked for you to separate your responses into “2025” vs “ever” and just for fun, “The answer you tell your family” 😆
77 of you had the same answer for all three questions
So there’s about a third of the overall survey respondents that are pretty consistent in what you reported spending, and fessing up to your family about it, too |
28 of you told your family that the most you spent on a game was under $50. Of those . . .
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2025 YEAR-END WARGAMING SURVEY
THE 2025 SURVEY ~ OVERALL STATS & 2025 OVERVIEW ~ CONVENTIONS & GAMEPLAY ~ PRE-ORDERS / MEDIA / INFORMATION ~ BIGGEST STORIES ~ FORUM THREAD
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