Kings of War Scene Health Update: 2026 Is Smaller Than 2025, but the Signal Is Mixed

The latest Mantic Companion and KoW Masters data shows fewer events, fewer player entries, and smaller tournaments than the same period in 2025. The recent player trend, however, is no longer clearly declining.

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2026 is behind 2025 The trailing twelve months give some useful context The recent trend is genuinely mixed The data is cleaner than it was in May So, how healthy is Kings of War?Relevant sources

I have been tracking the health of the Kings of War tournament scene for a while now, and the conclusion has changed as the data has changed. In 2025, I was comfortable describing the community as still growing and still healthy. By the May 2026 update, that needed more qualification. Kings of War organized play was still much larger than it had been before COVID, but the recent trend had turned downward. We now have another four months of results, a September 30 cutoff, and a cleaner method for reconciling Mantic Companion events with the KoW Masters archive.

The short version: 2026 organized play is clearly running behind 2025. But the latest data looks more like a smaller, softer tournament scene than a community falling off a cliff.

2026 is behind 2025

The cleanest comparison is January through September in both years.

Metric	Jan–Sep 2025	Jan–Sep 2026	Change
Tracked events	84	70	-16.7%
Player-event entries	1,503	1,054	-29.9%
Unique players	685	501	-26.9%
Average event size	17.9	15.1	-2.8 players

That is a meaningful decline. We are seeing fewer tournaments, fewer total tournament appearances, fewer distinct tracked players, and smaller events.

2026 trails the same period of 2025 across events, player entries, and unique players.

The gap in player entries is larger than the gap in event count. That is important. If this were mostly a calendar issue, we might expect fewer events while attendance at the remaining events stayed strong. Instead, average recorded attendance has fallen from 17.9 to 15.1. I would therefore describe the 2026 tournament scene as smaller in both breadth and volume. Note that given the data sources, we’re not getting a good read on the American scene, so I’d take these results as reflective of communities outside of North America.

The trailing twelve months give some useful context

The year-over-year comparison is the strongest evidence of contraction, but I also like the trailing twelve-month view because it is less sensitive to where January happens to fall. The latest window contains 96 tracked events and 1,439 player-event entries, or just under 15 entries per event. Back at the May cutoff, the comparable figures were 94 events and 1,470 entries.

The post-COVID expansion is obvious in the long view, but both event volume and player entries have come down from their recent highs.

This chart is probably the best summary of where I think we are. Kings of War organized play went through a substantial expansion from 2021 through 2024 and early 2025. The current scene remains much larger than the one we were measuring several years ago. But the most recent part of the curve is headed the other direction. The interesting wrinkle is that the event count has basically stabilized since my May update: 94 trailing-twelve-month events then, 96 now. Player entries have slipped slightly, from 1,470 to 1,439. So the new data does not reinforce a story of accelerating decline. It looks more like the scene stepped down from its recent peak and has spent the last several months somewhere around this lower level.

The recent trend is genuinely mixed

This is where the September update differs most from May. Using the same 24-month trend classifier, the overall label has moved from declining to flat. The player trend is still negative at about -2.25 players per month, but its 95% interval ranges from roughly -4.9 to +0.5. In plain English, the player data is noisy enough that we cannot confidently distinguish the recent trend from flat.

Events are different. The fitted trend is about -0.21 events per month, and the entire confidence interval remains below zero.

Recent player participation could plausibly be flat; the tracked event count still shows a clearer downward trend.

I would not read too much into this data at this point, but because I’ve presented it before, I want to give you an apples-to-apples comparison.

The data is cleaner than it was in May

There is another reason I am more comfortable with this update: I trust the underlying event count more. Combining Mantic Companion and KoW Masters sounds simple until the same tournament appears in both sources under slightly different names, venues, or player lists. The older approach also mixed KoW Masters event metadata with player-date fallback records in a way that could effectively count some tournaments twice. The revised process reconciles clear overlaps before calculating the headline numbers. It found 25 exact title matches plus 14 high-evidence title or venue matches, for 39 reconciled event pairs. The method keeps the KoW Masters record for those matched events rather than adding both sources together.

That also explains why readers should not compare every new headline total directly with a number from an older article. Some of the difference is improved bookkeeping rather than people entering or leaving the hobby. For the current article, the important comparisons–the May-to-September update and the 2025-versus-2026 comparison–use the reconciled method consistently.

So, how healthy is Kings of War?

I would move the answer down one notch from where I was a year ago. The organized-play scene still looks substantial. There are nearly 100 tracked events in the latest twelve months, and September alone added almost 200 player appearances. Nothing here suggests Kings of War tournament play is disappearing. But I also would not describe the current data as healthy growth: Compared with the same nine months of 2025, we have 14 fewer events and 449 fewer player-event entries. Events are smaller. The recent event trend remains negative. Those are real signals.

My current read is stable enough, but softer. The rapid expansion of the previous few years appears to have ended, and organized play has settled at a lower level than its 2024–25 peak.

For players, there probably is not much to do differently. Go to events you enjoy. Bring a friend. Support good TOs. For tournament organizers and Mantic, I think the question is more useful: does 2027 stabilize around this level, or does the decline in event volume continue? The September update has made the picture less alarming than it looked in May. It has not made the 2025-to-2026 decline disappear. More to come as we get more data . . .