Your 2025 in Wargaming, Part 3 – Pre-Orders & Information-Seeking

Brant Guillory, 19 January 2026

We always tweak a few questions each year, just to look into some random items of interest.  This year, we dug into some details about pre-orders & purchasing, some of the wargaming media channels out there, and brought back a few questions about the information you look for about a game.

Pre-orders of games can often keeps companies and publishers afloat, and while wargame companies have been running crowdfunded p500 systems since GMT started back in the late 1990s, there’s a variety of different crowdfunding platforms these days, with Kickstarter being the largest¹ and others gaining occasional traction here and there.

First of all, we do want to note that 43 people reported no crowdfunding at all, with any platform.  Beyond that, here’s what we found from this year’s respondents:

So publisher-run pre-orders are attracting most of the attention from our participants.  After that, Kickstarter is the next most popular overall, with Gamefound behind it.  Interestingly, there are not a lot of people pre-ordering through their local game stores, and maybe that’s something we need a little more of just to get more attention on wargaming in your local stores.

When you see a game and think “I want to know more about that game . . . ”
. . . what is usually the FIRST thing to catch your interest?

We’ve asked this one before but it’s still something interesting to look at.

So the topic or subject of the game is still the key factor, but the next 2 most frequent answers were whether its part of a series, and who is designing.  This might be something we dig into next year.

Love ’em or Hate ’em

Out of a morbid sense of curiosity, we decided to do a comparison of the most common type of wargame you play against the type of wargame you reported that you hate to play.  Yes, we’re masochists.  Plus, we had to create a master-key outside the chart because the labels were too long to put across the top of the table!

A – “Traditional” Hex & Counter
B – “Traditional” minis wargames (w/ scaled terrain)
C – Area-Impulse Wargames
D – Big-Box Map-&-Minis games
E – Block Wargames
F – Card-Assisted Wargames (that are not ops/event-style games)
G – COIN / ICS series wargames
H – Ops/Event-style CDGs
I – Procedural solo wargames
J – Solo point-to-point or ‘tower defense’ style games

Wargaming Media

This year, we asked how often, if at all, you checked a variety of different wargaming media channels.  There was no way we could be comprehensive, since there are so many of them, but we did try to cover a wide variety of channels.

Here are the channels to which you’re subscribed, and check at least weekly, most often, and yes, it’s really long.  We appreciate how often y’all are checking out the Dragoons, but we also expect that a survey we’re running it likely to be biased toward people who read our site.  As noted at the end: blue is “subscribed” and red is “check weekly”

Just out of curiosity, if you discovered a new channel that you’ve started following from this list below, let us know in the comments!

Favorite Publisher, redux

We limited this part of publishers with at 3 responses for “favorite publisher” but we threw them on the comparisons with a couple of other questions, chief among them whether or not folks used a publisher p500 / pre-order system, but a couple of others.

Looks like a lot of the GMT fans have a bunch of games on p500 with them.  Compass Games trails GMT very closely in their number of games on pre-orders² but their fans seem to be more reticent about pre-ordering too many of those games.  MMP fans are a bit more spread out, as a VUCA’s.

As you’d probably expect, the folks reporting that Avalon Hill, SPI, and even OSG are all on the right side of the veterancy scale.  And with how long they’ve been around, finding all of The Gamers’ fans down there isn’t a big surprise.  Revolution Games is a newer company, but their fans are all on that end of the scale, too.  Meanwhile, GMT fans account for over 2/3 of the wargamers with under 10 years in the hobby, falling off to around 50% of the old-timers.

Compass & GMT fans are convention-goers.  MMP & The Gamers fans not so much.

Next week we’ll wrap up with a look at what you thought were the biggest stories of the year, and some other open responses

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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1. and interchangeable with crowdfunding, as in “we kickstarted it on Gamefound”
2. and might even be ahead if anyone wants to go count and let us know