Thanks for an interesting discussion.
"Red 11 standing by, Blue 7 calling in, Orange 5 through 10 still in one piece"...
Kobayashimaru, Reporting In.
Thankyou for the emails/Private Messages folks.
I still Bloomail/ Chat and Vassal (Local Lan etc),
I like trying to model Meta-Combinatorics and simulate gamestates
attenuated on the game data I can get, from tournaments annually etc as much as that is to playtest new pieces and customs.
It's like "P-NP Completeness, Goddel's Incompleteness Theorem" etc.
And play SWMinis, make custom miniatures etc.
"Is SWMinis alive?"
We have these existential "Game Theory/ Boardgame Theory" etc
from time to time,
at the risk of repeating myself on these points,
I feel that SWMinis has the potential to be something like chess,
recent tangents about gamestates playtesting modelling and replies from the granddaddy of Cellular Automata,
Stephen Wolfram about it all notwithstanding
I continue to dabble at Electronic Journal of Combinatorics and some NMM or Code-Stack-Exchange to that effect.
I think VASSAL, Tabletop Boardgame Simulator, SWMinisPlays Web-browser interface,
and other forms of emulation are replacing face-to-face games in the post COVID world etc.
I think SWMinis has also been impacted by other tabletop games,
such as Imperial Assault and other ways to game it up,
though, I see no reason those pieces couldn't be used as proxies to play the game etc.
But, to go back to the root distal of the reason for this
existential question;
"Is Star Wars Miniatures Alive?"
implies a few associated questions;
--- what is "Star Wars Miniatures",
A: An Out Of Production Boardgame from the early 21st C, extended much like Star Wars The Trading Card Game, by the folks here at Bloomilk and elsewhere, with things called "V-Sets" etc.
---- How can we discern if a game is 'alive'?
A: implies some minimum number of games played per year?
--- what is the rate of new players vs attrition /loss rate of players etc
A: Let's do a Fermi-Drake "Back of the Envelope" multivariate.
There are at time of writing, ~8.3 Billion people on Earth.
Of those, ~1-2 billion might like Science Fiction.
Of those, ~300+ Million might be fans of this specific fiction
of those, ~3-4 million at any time T might be prepared to play a derivative content from that fiction, for some interval.
Of those, a few hundred thousand may play the game for a long period of time.
so, in a few steps, we have a fraction of fans who might be interested to play etc.
What could be done,
to see SWMinis improve?
- Exhibition Matches ?
- Local Leagues etc.
All I can do, is continue to advocate for SWMinis,
and continue to make miniatures (physical models etc).