Quantifying Lard

What are the most popular games at Lardy Days?

The preparation for Ebor Lard is pretty much done. I have one figure left to paint after realising that my existing Legionary optio has the wrong shield design.  That being the case, I thought I'd take the chance to share some analysis I've done on Lardy Day game preferences.

I've overseen the allocation of players to games for four years of Steel Lard. I think I'm in a position to make some vaguely informed statements about which of the Too Fat Ladies systems are the most popular.

Each year I asked players to choose their preferred games. Initially I asked for first, second and third preferences but last year I extended this to have all games ranked from highest to lowest preference. The reason for doing this was that we had an unusual number of games that had either appeared at Steel Lard previously or that had appeared at other Lardy Days recently.

In my analysis I considered only games that had been selected as first or second choice - typically everyone plays two games.

For each year this gave me a percentage figure for each game. For example if there were a total of 66 first and second preferences, a game getting 8 first/second choices would have 8÷66 or 12.1% of the top choices made.

Taking this percentage figure for each game I could then calculate the mean percentage for games as a whole (9.1% in 2022) and the extent to which each game's popularity differed from the mean. Note that in the analysis below I've removed the names of the game-runners and titles of the games to protect the guilty.

Thus in the table above a one of the Chain of Command games (with a score of 4.5) was the most popular choice, while another (scoring -9.1) was the least! A Relative Popularity (RP) of 0.0 shows a game that was neither more nor less popular than the average. This analysis was completed for all four years. 

Having established the popularity of each individual game I could then also work out the popularity of particular rule systems. Across the four years (2022-2025) the following scores result:

The systems in bold type have scores based on multiple games across the four years. The rest were offered just once so their scores may be a bit less statistically reliable.

I've broken down the figures for Chain of Command somewhat. The analysis covers the period during which CoC 2nd edition was being play-tested.  I thought it likely the chance to try out the new rules early was probably pushing up popularity. First edition (including the "CoCing Up the Mud and the Blood" WW1 variant) is still of above-average popularity but not quite so extremely and 2025, with CoC2 published, did show a slight decline in interest in the system.

A couple of other points of interest are the relative unpopularity of "What A..." games and of "all-day" games.

Amalgamating the scores, What A Tanker and What A Cowboy and variants thereof score an RP of -4.6. I wonder if this is because they are seen as beer and pretzels games that one can play at any time with friends and not engaging or different enough for a Lardy Day? Certainly my Harper's Ferry WAC game scored -3.7 whereas my three Sharp Practice games all had marginally positive RP.

We've had three all-day games over the course of the four years. Their RP scores vary widely (from +5.0 to -8.9) but overall it appears players would rather play two shorter games in a day with -2.8 being the overall RP value.

So what do you think? I'm no statistician and I may have got this all wrong but the numbers do appear to support my general impression of what goes down well with Lardy Day punters.