Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Age of Sigmar

I'm by no means a fan of Games Workshop.  Sure Necromunda and Mordheim were fun games, and I follow the basic mechanics of the game system of 40k and Warhammer Fantasy Battles (WFB), but between twenty years of ever changing store policies, price increases, and edition changes and the current price fluctuations between metal, finecast, and regular plastic minis I see at my FLGS, I'm largely unimpressed.   Fortunately for GW, I'm a tiny minority demographic, as players within there sweet spot drop paycheck after paycheck on units.

I had noticed some tiny signs on the GW racks promoting the "Age of Sigmar" and assumed it was going to be a new boxed set/expansion to reinvigorate WFB.  It's done something, alright, I just don't know if it collectively swings good or bad.

I would have completely ignored the hubub had I not caught a vlog covering some Youtube video of some spastic GW fan going off on the new rules in a manner best described as "full retard" and then burning his armies.  Don't bother searching for it, unless you haven't heard the same GW rants on mechanics and pricing over the last twenty years.  It was an uninspired, profanity laced tirade that had me pity the Warmachine players he was going to deal with on a full-time basis now.

In my uneducated synopsis of this whole change, they stripped down the rules to almost a grade school level to allow a better entry point for new players for a declining game, and allowed people with existing models a chance to still use theirs.

Here's a solid review of the new system in general.  I will add that I've seen a number of historical wargamers play around with the free pdf of the basic rules that GW provided and found the game simple and enjoyable.  Not enough to justify $110+ for the Age of Sigmar Boxed Set, but enough to dust off their GW models of yore and have fun playing with them for an afternoon. 

Fluff and mechanics aside, I can't get past the simply horrible models in the boxed set....

 

Spikes and horns and gilded cod pieces.  It's like Space Marines went to the Ren Faire.    Somebody likes it, but it sure isn't me... (Update:  And it's not this guy either..)

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