Wargames, Board Games, Card Games, Computer Games. Take a deep breath...

Saturday, November 03, 2007

State of Play

It's not all beer and skittles in wargaming right now. There's a reason months have passed since the last update. I simply haven’t been doing much.

I've given up my prior wargame of choice for the time being. Right now, Warhammer is just a confused, broken mess. The core rules are good, but the army books are seriously lacking in quality. No quality of design means poor play balance. Right now, three armies are able to taker across the board 5+ ward saves. Unsurprisingly, this puts them on their own platform of power, far above everyone else.

This unbalance results in a fair few rock/paper/scissors situations where it simply isn’t worth the effort to set your army up against certain opponents - you've lost on army choice. That isn't good for a game that demands its players spend hundreds of dollar and dozens of painting hours before they come to the table.

Also, there are simply too many armies. Business-wise I have no idea how they cope. Even if they had an even spread of popularity across their armies (which they don't) each new army release would appeal to a massive 1/13th of their gaming population. Bad design, bad business. Warhammer needs some serious fixing in the army department. So far I've not seen a recognition that this even needs to occur. So ta-ra Warhammer, see you when you get good.

Warhammer 40,000 is in a slightly different position. Right now it is less interesting to play than the computer game that's based on it. Enough said.

Right now, my gaming consists of:

Lord of the Rings - Games Workshop can make a lively, interesting, balanced, and above all fun tabletop wargame, and this is it.

Blood Bowl - another gem from Games Workshop. Blood Bowl events draw more players than events for Warhammer 40,000. No, really. Why they relegate this game to the shadows is simply beyond me.

Magic: The Gathering - design excellence in action makes this game a pleasure to play. It should be dull really, I mean just look at it. But get a reasonable group and you'll be apples.

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2 Comments:

Blogger Ev-Man said...

DK, Make with the new posts, ready. The people living vicariously through you who are hurting right now. Ev-Man

8:47 am

 
Blogger DK said...

YOur pain is sweet nectar.

5:14 pm

 

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