The Loose Association of Wargamers

Question for those at clubs, do you have a good range of ages?

I’ve limited experience, but currently popping into the Edinburgh club and I’d say roughly 40+ with a bias towards 55+ but a smattering under 25. And 1 at 63 but looks 59.

The Wessex Wargames Society is predominantly 40+, with a small group of "Ancients" who gamed with Don Featherstone and Tony Bath when the club was formed, back in the 1960s. There's a significant Si-Fi/Fantasy crowd who are in the 30-50 range. Below 30, it's almost all children of members, ranging from my son Patrick (22), and possibly one or two older than him, to a handful of 8-12 year-olds and one or two teenagers among the SF/F crowd. Given the location, it is not a club that is ever going to acquire groups of students. Within WWS, almost everyone I game with regularly is in the 40-60 age range; thinking about it, everyone I game with outside of WWS is also within this age range.

I have to say that my experience of clubs, going right back to The Bun Shop in Kingston/Surbiton, back in the late 70s, was that a "gap" tended to exist where there was almost nobody aged between 18 and 32. This group had left school and either gone off to uni (where a few kept up the hobby - uni games clubs were still in their infancy), or went away to start work somewhere. From about 22 onwards, this group mostly dropped out of the hobby due to either (a) lack of money, (b) the pressures of career establishment (including the cost of finding somewhere to live and travelling to/from work), and (c) sexual relationships evolving into marriage and children. Or a combination of one or more of those. After that hiatus, the keen ones came back, or joined another club (or set up a new one) elsewhere. In terms of historical gaming, I don't think that those demographics have changed very much in the past 40 years.

Wot the Baron said. There were few at our club younger than me till a couple of years ago. My absence started with discovering grils and then became 2 decades because of mountains, deserts etc. We now definitely have a binormal age distribution with 8-25 and 50-70, not much in between.

The ankle bighter brigade did rather well, one being the first winner of the Christmas air wargaming championship named after my late papa.

FreddBloggs wrote: ↑Tue Apr 09, 2019 9:44 pm Question for those at clubs, do you have a good range of ages?

Yup, from mid 20’s through to those in their 50’s.

I’ve never had an absence from wargaming (one needs to question ones dedication to the cause if one lets such base trivial desires as sex interfere with wargaming!)

RPG’s yes, since the late 90’s, but that’s because our gaming group kinda fell apart. But this year I’m getting back into RPG games through the various Grogmeets and UK Games Expo

I’ve Wargamed pretty much continuously for 31 years. I’ve always been lucky in that the Missus and I agreed from Day 1 that we would each have ‘me time’. She horse rides every week and I do something gaming related, even if it’s just painting. When the kids came along, they didn’t impact us at all

Funnily enough, Sci-Fi and fantasy aren’t big in our club, even though the majority of members are under 35. Bolt Action is huge, followed by Team Yankee, Black Powder Naps and then Saga. We also have 3 or 4 big 3D Zombicide games a year. We have active Bolt Action and Zombicide campaigns running where the games have 5 or 6 players aside. And it all takes place above Brian’s Wargames shop that you have to walk through to go upstairs to play.

The club Jamie and I play at is in Bolton, whilst Bury has quite an active GW themed club. Not been there. Can’t be arsed.

BUGW is a place Jeremy doesn't like exposing his BUM.

FreddBloggs wrote: ↑Tue Apr 09, 2019 9:44 pm Question for those at clubs, do you have a good range of ages?

I would say that my club runs from late 20's to mid 60's,

levied troop wrote: ↑Tue Apr 09, 2019 10:05 pm I’ve limited experience, but currently popping into the Edinburgh club and I’d say roughly 40+ with a bias towards 55+ but a smattering under 25. And 1 at 63 but looks 59.

Is that the SESWC?