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I’d tend to agree with @limburger on this one in that they appear dominant. Stargrave, Frostgrave, Infinity (I think that counts…), a lot of the space games like Billion Suns (in such confusing scales as this game :P), Muskets and Tomahawks (and other variants of such) are what I would think of as ‘from the ground up’ skirmish games and they have that allure of low model count/range agnostic/’each mini is a character’ that draws in a good crowd. There’s also a series of games designed to act as skirmish ‘versions’ of other games like Warcry, Necromunda (though that’s a little different I suppose), hell even games like Blood Bowl could be thought of this way.
These other games act as low mini count ‘starting zones’ for getting into the bigger games. I think every single Warcry team now has rules in mainline AoS, for example. Even the Shadespire/Underworlds/Whatever the damn name is… teams are done that way. While I wouldn’t say that makes those games dominant they do tend to attract a good whack of gamers to them. Think of it like this; with those types of games it’s dead easy to build multiple forces so you can con your mates into playing…which grows the field. How many of us have built multiple bands for these sorts of games? I think my brother has collected pretty much all of the Shadespire teams between him and his fiance because it’s not too ridiculous to do.
Cycles are a fact of life and things change with time. I don’t think it’s likely for some time, but more complex rules may become a thing that is popular again someday. Personally, I hope not because I like simple easy games myself, but I know there are others who enjoy a level of complexity to their games and I’m sure they’d welcome such a change. 😛
