A Quick Look at the Numbers: 500+ New Lists and the State of Small Formats
This week Michał dropped a couple of interesting snapshots into our chat, and honestly, we love this kind of hobby-adjacent data digging. Sometimes it’s nice to step away from painting desks and army lists for a moment and just look at what people are actually playing.
The first thing that jumped out at us was the sheer volume: more than half a thousand new lists in a single week. That is a lot of fresh list-building activity, and it’s always fun to see the wider community staying active.
That kind of number suggests plenty of experimentation, testing, and probably a fair bit of pre-tournament tweaking. Even without going too deep into conclusions, it’s the sort of stat that makes the scene feel very alive.
At the same time, Michał also pointed out something a bit more surprising: relatively few people seem to be playing smaller formats.
And that’s where it gets especially interesting. From the chat, the takeaway was pretty clear: small formats are much less popular than we might casually assume, and Foray/BM appears to have even fewer games than PI.
We’re not going to over-interpret a couple of screenshots, but it does line up with a feeling many of us have had from the outside: people often talk about smaller formats as accessible, fast, and easier to get on the table, but the actual number of games played can tell a different story.
Maybe players still gravitate toward bigger, more “full-fat” versions of the game. Maybe local communities are just more used to standard-sized events. Or maybe list-building activity doesn’t translate evenly across all formats. Either way, it’s a neat reminder that our assumptions about what is “popular” are not always right.
We always enjoy these little statistical reality checks. If nothing else, they give us something to chat about between hobby projects — and maybe they nudge us to pay a bit more attention to formats that seem cool in theory, but don’t always get the same traction in practice.
If more data like this shows up, we’ll happily keep an eye on it.