Becky Ensteness was fed up. She was at a local wargaming convention, where enthusiasts schlep their pewter armies to beige conference halls for a long, meditative weekend of stone cold tactics, and Ensteness couldn't wait to get her orders out. She's been a hobbyist wargamer for decades. In fact, she runs a company with her husband that ships boxes full of miniatures to eager customers all over the world.
Ensteness specializes in the historical sets; no orcs, or elves, or dark magic, just a small cadre of frilly line infantry mirroring the feints and stratagems of vintage Napoleonic campaigns. But despite all of her obvious bona fides, Ensteness is a woman, and none of the men at the convention could quite believe what they were seeing when she turned up with her battalions.
Many of her fellow competitors persistently assumed she was a girlfriend, or a wife, or a daughter of one of the other tabletop generals—dragged along to the battlefront against her wishes. Eventually, Ensteness grew tired of correcting them, so she allowed the men to believe their biases.
"They're all white men, all 50 and older. I'm doing what I think is normal. I'm walking around and checking in on the other games, the same thing that they do when they're not in a game. But when I go to their games, they start saying, 'Oh, are you here to see your dad?'" says Ensteness in an interview with WIRED. "I was with my wargaming group, and they were exhausted from saying, 'No, she's in our gaming group. We play with her every week.' So everyone just started saying, 'Yes, she's my daughter.' I briefly had a whole group of adopted wargaming dads."
"I have to explain who I am," continues Ensteness, now speaking about the culture of wargaming as a whole. "With every single interaction that I have."
The tabletop industry is in the middle of an unprecedented boom, and while there aren't any metrics tracking participation rates along gender lines, it does appear that its core demographic has grown increasingly inclusive as the business expands. One of the most popular board games in the world—2019's Wingspan—was designed by a woman.
