Along with their recent price increase overall, Games Workshop changed their paint line again. This time it wasn’t a few colors here and there that were ‘retired,’ the entire LINE has been changed. Now I’m not a big fan of GW’s paints overall: they are water based so dry out way faster than other manufacturers– but they have been the foundation of my paint palette for decades now– so much so that I am now driving around to non-GW stockists who carry GW paint to try to find key colors that DO NOT HAVE AN EQUIVALENT PAINT COLOR in the new set (like bestial brown). You see, most GW stockists sent back their paints for free replacements, leaving the only place you can get the old paints to be stockists that are on the ‘outs’ (i.e. they carried GW stuff but are just trying to sell off what they have an not buying new stuff– or ebay/craigslist, whatever. Of course the prices will rise and rise.
This is not to say the new paint line is altogether bad, some of GW’s colors (especially their inks and metallics) are great stuff but to have no equivalents? That’s the DRIZZLIN SHITS I tell you what.
I promised myself to play Warhammer a full ten times before writing a review of the new edition and it happened, the review, which you are reading, and ten games (fourteen actually). Finally after months of waiting, I can spout off about how much I love the current edition. I love it so much I now (shockingly) have three armies for the game. I wanted to get a second so I could play with people that don’t own anything and I got a deal on a third that I simply could not pass up (my main is Beastmen, second Dark Elves, and last Chaos). One could say I am all in on this version, so if this review seems a bit of self-justification that’s because it certainly is, gods damn it. Note, that reviewing a game like Condotierre or King of Tokyo after 10 plays means a few hours of play here and there, reviewing and edition of Warhammer Fantasy Battle after fourteen plays means 50+ hours at the table throwing vats worth of dice and probably 30+ more hours teaking an army list or ten, painting and priming and building a rather massive army of toy soldiers (if you can call packs of slavering, rapine goat-men soldiers).
A wave of unpainted goblins assault the partially painted undead and fully painted dwarfs.
To frame this review, I have to relay the shameful nerd path I have traveled in the hobby. It’s not very different than many people who were closeted nerds in their youth during the nerd-harsh 80’s–but I have to say I’ve always played GW’s big games rather casually and vastly preferred the skirmish games to the big fuckall table spreads like the current 40K and WFB. I started playing WFB just after junior highschool, around the same time Warhammer 40K first edition came out. After saving for and buying the rather expensive 3rd edition hardcover, I dabbled in the game and got a few of the miniature box sets (rudlugs armored orcs, etc) that were around at the time, but never really played a ton because, quite simply, there was no way to afford enough lead to put out a decent sized army like the pretty pictures in the book. Even in this early time, some of GW’s first plastics had come out, and while a few of the sculpts were OK, they didn’t stand up visually against the lead that was out at the time (this has drastically changed). We did get in a few games, mostly with our old Grenadier D&D miniatures (which had also been used for a battle using the ancient and comparatively rubbish TSR Chainmail/Swords and Spells rules) and a handful of citadel chaos warriors.
While Warhammer Fantasy Battle proper was an unrequited love in High School, both because I was trying to eschew the kids stuff like D&D and gaming altogether (this failed after only a few weeks in 1987 after I found out almost the ENTIRE wrestling team not only had played D&D but wanted to again RIGHT FUCKING NOW!). I didn’t get into the game hardcore until college when the Realm of Chaos supplement books hit the shelves. This introduced a variant of play where you start with a small force of maybe 8-12 fighters and then slowly grew a warband as you fight battles against friends min a narrative campaign, eventually to gain daemon-hood from one of the fickle and capricious chaos gods. We chewed through many weekends (and a lot of class time) grinding through short, decisive skirmish battles in a long campaign where dozens of warbands would be rolled under the dirt and new ones arise. Notably, only one champion made it to the highest “honor” during the campaign. The rest either croaked or became slathering, mindless spawn. Great times, but that’s most of the Warhammer I’ve played, well, until now.
Fourth Edition, the edition rightly-deemed “Herohammer,” really set the bar high for production values and components to help you play. Gone were the big hardcover rulebooks (for a time that is) replaced by a big box with lots of plastic guys and softcover rulebooks, all the templates you need, magic item cards for everything rather than having to dig around in a book for them, and tons and tons of dice. However, even from cursory plays, it was obvious that the rules were really about decking out a hero that can destroy armies all by themselves and started the system down the path of a highly competitive game that people would focus play at tournaments and leagues of one off games. Rather than some scenario concocted with what miniatures you have, or a narrative campaign like Chaos Warbands, two guys get together with armies balanced out by points and fighting it out for the win. This was to be what Warhammer is all about from this point on: single, competitive battles with pre-made armies, usually just a slugathon rather than any type of scenario. Though I played a few dozen times, the game headed in a direction I didn’t want to go (and I still couldn’t afford to put an army on the table really, deciding to eat, however meagerly, instead). Yet 4th was the ‘break out’ edition, and tons of people played and love it. Additional distractions from GW at this time were Epic 40K and Necromunda– along with 3rd edition Blood Bowl, so while I was playing a lot of GW stuff, it wasn’t Warhammer.
I ignored 5th edition (what with Blood Bowl 3rd edition, Necromunda and Mordheim around at the same time, who needed it?). After Mordheim fizzled out (our campaign went from 22 people to 6 or so in less than a month and that wasn’t due to anything but the rules being not too good), and with the release of Warhammer Fantasty Battle 6th edition I started officially! on my beastman army—and I really did want to play the normal, non-skirmish way that all the other dudes played–actually taking the time to put together a big army rather than a bunch of ragged bands of (unpainted) chaos warriors. I picked up the main book and the army book for the Beasts and gave a run at painting on a regular schedule, but just couldn’t keep the momentum of painting and buying figs to get enough to the table. Going from painting a few figs a year to a row of 50+ was quite daunting, especially since I refused to play the game with anything unpainted.
7th edition came so fast due to real life I barely noticed and it seemed only for the hardcore tournament players anyway and really just an update of 6th– and then came 8th in 2010, down from the heights of Nottingham to us gamers, what is, in my humble and rather inexperienced opinion, the best iteration of the game so far with the best production values for books and miniatures I’ve seen out of GW. At a time in life where I have a couple kids, a pretty demanding job and just general “I have responsibilities now” chaos, I knew it would be a tough row to hoe trying to even find time to paint, let alone play a game– but THIS is the edition to set aside severely limited freetime for. The hardback book is nothing short of incredible (and shockingly priced at 80$), with absolutely lavish illustration, photography, graphic design and content. Granted, as a rulebook, it’s a heavy fucker to carry around, but it’s easy to find the pages you need to find via the index– it’s just that well over half the book you will simply not need during any given game as most of the book is not the rules at all, but page upon page of backstory stuff, illustration, and a giant painting showcase. None of this stuff about the book quality and photography would matter if the rules themselves sucked–but they don’t and here’s why: from 7th to 8th the designers made some fundamental changes to the game, some subtle, some drastic, to make the game flat out more fun. Now, 6th edition was fun with getting rid of the herohammer a bit, hell 4th was a great time until people were able to ‘break’ the game a few months in– but 8th blows them all away and while the reasons in the rules are below, the core reason is simply this: they let Jervis Johnson all over it and he made it more fun than it’s ever been.
First: any stuff can kill any other stuff. If GW learned one thing from Rackham’s Confrontation, it’s that it’s important that every model on the table can pose a threat. This is a huge change from earlier editions. Essentially, from 4th edtion on, you had stuff on the table that could not be hurt at all by most other stuff on the table. Picture a bunch of goblins are running around with spears. We all know goblins are terrible in combat, run away a lot and generally get stomped, eviscerated, eaten, boiled, and basically harvested like bilious green wheat. However, goblin players bring a lot of goblins to any dust-up, so many that for every 20 or so you mulch, 40 more are there to poke you or net you and scream insults. In older editions of Warhammer, no matter how many goblins were out there, they were not going to be able to hurt your pimped out dark elf lord on a black dragon– even with the best rolling, they couldn’t touch him. The lord could fly around without a care in the world if the table was filled with just goblins–essentially they became tar pits that he could get stuck in for a period of time murdering them, but they weren’t dangerous to him or his gods damn dragon at all. In 8th edition, it’s the dark elf lord that’s afraid of the masses of goblins. If he doesn’t position and plan right, he has a good chance of getting swarmed and trampled by little green hobnails because GW added this simple rule: a 6 always hits and a 6 always wounds. That means no matter how badass you are, you have a 3% chance with every attack of having to take an armour save, no matter how high your weapon skill or toughness. When you are rolling dump-trucks worth of dice, as goblin units are wont to do, that 3% happens a LOT. Even with a 2+ armor save and a ward save of some kind, death can come quick to the heroes.
Second: charging distance is randomized. A huge, simple and most welcome change, one that will be with the game probably forever after. Charges are now 2D6+movement. So dwarves with their short little leggys can charge minimum of 5 inches (their max before was 6) and maximum of 15 inches on boxcars. In older editions, units had a fixed charge range, usually double their movement. This meant that people had to be very precise about when they charged and positioned. This took a long time and it wasn’t very fun. Random charge distance makes things crazy fun. This was the rule change that when I saw it, I had to buy and play the new edition. Along with number three below, while the games may not be shorter, you are spending your time on the fun stuff and not the boring stuff. This is key.
Third: you can measure everything at any time. Another positive thing about randomizing charges is that it allowed the designers to simply let the players measure every single distance they want at any time. Want to see how close your archers have to move to be in range of the pumpwagon? Measure away! Want to check your distances before declaring a charge? Well you better! This just cuts down a lot of the fiddling around with units and positioning stuff and painful guess work. For measurements before 8th edition, I would set up my armies and then measure out the table– memorizing little landmarks like the side of a bush or a shadow on the table and such so that I knew that from X wall to Y scratch in the table it was 6″, etc. This was just not that fun and felt beardy as hell when you are placing dice on the table and not moving them to mark off distances…
Fourth: the poor bloody infantry is king. This is something 40K already had figured out: people like to see big close in dust-ups between big groups of models. Battles are decided by positioning, tactics, magic usage, dicerolling all as part of getting your best infantry units winning combats against your opponents infantry units. Games come down to one or two big blocks of guys hacking at each other and that’s why people want to play, so they made it king and called it a day. Sure heroes are important, but they are so much better in the midst of some crazy combat than fighting alone. Can my 9 minotaurs stomp their way through 60 goblins before being perforated? Can my horde of bestigor sustain the horrific casualties from the initiative 6 black guard to attack back with their slow but powerful great weapons? Because infantry fights in huge units in 8th edition and has massive advantages over any unit that is unranked (such as the dread lord on a black dragon listed above), infantry dominates the battlefield: as it should be since the tactics around infantry positioning, movement and when to charge should be the meat of this type of game. What changed? Hordes (see below), the fact that the second rank can lend a supporting attack to the front rank fighters, even on the charge the fight is in initiative order and finally, the ranks behind the front can step up where there are fallen to continue the fight ( so no more charging units wiping out front ranks of units with no retaliation that turn).
Fifth: Hordes! Hordes are units with 10-model frontage. All this rule allows is another rank to add supporting attacks (so you need a minimum of 30 models to get the most out of a horde formation). Normally the front rank gets their attacks, plus the second rank can lay in a single supporting attack (with the exception of monstrous infantry that get more). With a horde, your unit will get two ranks of supporting attacks. This is a great example of a simple rules change that has massive effects on the game. The Hordes rule particularly combines with the “any stuff can kill any other stuff” above to help make the game a game of infantry fighting and not ‘my guy on the dragon kills everything without a scratch’ fighting. You want to throw your Hydras up against a 40+ goblin horde with spears, the outcome is going to be one stone dead hydra while the infantry unit is still probably viable. Combine an assault by some Dark elf spearmen with the hydra supporting or hitting the flank of the goblins, and you have what the game is all about.
Six (and this is the last one, I promise): Terrain does stuff. Almost every game of Warhammer 8th will have some crazy-ass magical terrain that has an effect on play, sometimes drastic, sometimes not. Phantom towers shoot out bolts of lightning into anything nearby, altars give every unit within range blood rage, and mysterious forests have random effects only discovered when entered by troops. One could say this just adds whimsy and randomness, but it creates a bevy of critical tactical decisions that can be the key to victory. Unlike mob-swarm 40K, unit placement and movement is everything in WFB, so tactics and placement around terrain that benefits or hurts your army is huge. The eleventh game I played had a Dwarf Brewhouse right smack in the middle of the table, giving anyone nearby “Stubborn.” Since I was up against Lizardmen who had a unit that was innately Stubborn, fighting around the dwarf brewhouse nullified that advantage because we all had it.
Games Workshop has had almost three decades to work out the kinks with Warhammer Fantasy Battle and with this ruleset, it shows a change in the ideas behind the game moving away from something akin to controlled, balanced play and far more into the fantasy world of Warhammer with all it’s insanity and things getting sucked into the void at the worst times (for you anyway!). While good tactics, placement and unit counters will win you the day, there is so much randomness in the game , and yet so much focus on having a balanced army, that I can see where it would put people off that are used to older editions. For me, it all adds up to big death and big fun. This is the best big miniature game out there.
We all see the golden demon and all the GW stuff, Warmachine stuff, etc. Lead Painter’s League has a painting competition that includes everything from just about every category– and it’s just great to see bare breasted amazons painted up next to non-Warmachine/40K mechs, plus all the glorious historicals. Check out round 2 here.
My buddy dave painted up his Dreadfleet set entire. Needless to say, it’s awesome and quite a feat with the merciless ebb of time and tide that family and kids imbue to your hobbies. Looking forward to a game with this stuff soon.
Part 1 of a 3 part series with each of the Epic rulesets (Epic40k, Epic Armageddon, NetEpic). This one is with the ‘failed’ version from 1997: Epic 40K. With reading, I think these are the best set of rules for Epic family, but we’ll see when we bust out the more recent rules which is the best on the table. This is the first time I’ve busted out my 6mm stuff in over 15 years!
Ugh. I felt like I painted a lot in December but I didn’t get much done in reality. I meant to get my Bestigor out the door but I only ended up completing three Gor, one Bestigor and my second Chariot (which has a bestigor on it). I couldn’t complete the riders in time for the new year but got close so finished those up last night. The bestigor is a bit messed up. He’s pinned to the floor of the chariot but his left foot is off the ground. Not really noticable but still not ideal. I had to put the driver quite a bit forward but I feel that worked out pretty well.
This January, now half way gone already, is all Bestigor– IF I can keep my dirty dirty paws off my old Epic 40K stuff. I started improving a couple of infantry stands here and there and it turned into fixing up 22 stands of infantry from their rather dismal 1992 paint jobs, and that took a lot of work.
see the floaty foot?crap I can see one of the ears wasn't painted...
As a high school/college lad (and an embarrassingly long time afterward) I was far too languishing poor to buy a lot of gaming stuff; but oh boy did we used to play. We would make boats for Man o’ War out of balsa wood, we played with pieces of paper representing units in Warhammer, made terrain from toilet paper tubes and furniture rubbish, wrote our own adventures for WFRP and Paranoia and so on. What we had rather than cash then was time– and quite a lot of it compared to at least my current count (hell 1 hour free from other stuff is a long time these days) . Granted we could have been working during this time to buy more stuff for the games, but you know, it was in between classes or those idle weekends right at the beginning of a college semester when all your homework was long done so why not throw down a 15 hour game of Adeptus Titanicus or two? Or play Talisman every single day (sometimes twice)?
These days I cannot wholly complain as I’ve gotten in a good 50 hours of Warhammer Fantasy Battle in the last year as well as a much smaller amount at the boardgame table, but the long swaths of time like back in the day just cannot be spent without planning months in advance. I think it’s because of this lack of actual play that makes those of us with heaving masses of other real life responsibilities buy stuff– sometimes lots of stuff–for games we know we may never even get a few games in.
Case in point for me personally was an Epic 40K fever over the Holiday, where I dropped 100$ or so on miniatures and terrain. I have one buddy that played it back in the day but no group to get into it– an certainly the game is dead as dead can be from the publisher so it’s a game with no real future at all (that said all of the incarnations of the game are pretty great). Yet, I see buying stuff for a game sort of like buying a lottery ticket– if you have the lottery ticket you can DREAM about winning and pressing random people onto your personal yacht that goes to your small country in Africa where you can hunt the most dangerous gameof all and drive ATV’s all over manicured English Gardens: if you have the gaming stuff you can DREAM about playing and in this stage of life as it were, I think that’s all you can be sure about doing– the play sometimes is just too much work to get to.
This does not just apply to miniature games– Starcraft 2 was a complete bust for me as I just didn’t have time to get involved in the game online early on nor get a group of friends to play with– and if you get on it later all you will do is get your ass kicked constantly and no one cares about it because the next big thing is already out. As for board games– I played Advanced Squad Leader (Starter Kit 1) last night and while it is a cracking great game I realized after checking ebay for the second starter kit (ouch that’s $$$) that I had only played three times in two years. Now ASL is a SUPER heavy, and it takes awhile to get back into the swing of the rules (it does play extremely smoothly once you get going and I still heap praise on it as an incredible design) but is it worth it to buy and expansion when you haven’t even gotten your plays worth out of the initial set? It may be if I can sit and think OK, I have X game expansion in the bank– I can think about setting up a game whenever, and can read forum posts about it, etc. because I have all the tools I need to possibly play it, it makes thinking about playing it just that more fun. Twilight Imperium 3, a game I still am on the fence about whether it’s a pile of shite or not, tempts me whenever I see it to pick up the new expansion, even though we’ve only played 3 times and some of my play group abhor it. Just like a lottery ticket, it may be the fantasizing about playing is worth the price of buying it and by buying it we may be scratching an itch for actually playing that we no longer can have at our stage of life. As pathtic as that is, that may be the long and short of the reasons for a random splurge on something that logically won’t hit the table more than once or twice, if ever.
We made it. Great to see everyone that was in town for the week between Xmas and New Years and we had a bit of a gaming deluge, though it cost a shocking amount of sleep to pull off. I’m hoping someday in the future the fruit of my loins learn how nice it is for them to sleep in. When you’re thanking your lucky stars that you don’t have to get up until 6:30AM on a day you have off, that’s pretty sad.
There's a hand size difference here.
Yesterday was our first annual Cosmic Encounter tournament on New Year’s day. We had 9 players and split into two tables, the winners of which moved on to a final at the champions table. The first two games had two shared wins so the final was a four person instead of five.
The final was Tripler, Fungus, Bully, and the Mercenary. The Fungus won the day with an attack on the Bully with four huge stacks of fungaloided ships. Appropriately, Fungus was played by the notorious JP Duvall. He shared a win in the preliminary and then convinced everyone in the final that they should only try to win it alone and only he was able to pull it off. Hopefully everyone had fun and had good eats and got to talk a lot of trash. I thought we should have a best of the worst game for the losers, but we ended up playing Dragon Lairds instead.
Today was Warhammer madness. I got in a 3 man game with my beastmen vs the Vampire Counts and Lizardmen at 3000 points per side which meant I had to put every model I owned on the table (so many still sadly unpainted). We rolled ‘Battle for the Pass’ so the board was cramped like craze with no real flanks to speak of. My beastmen ambush was useless, but I managed to pull out a win due to a very very stubborn and extremely pissed off Gor unit that started 50 in number and ended the game with a mere nine after trashing a unit of Blood Knights, a Skink/Kroxigor mixed unit and some grave guard that were ineffective on the flank. The highlights of the game include both of my ‘flanks’ evaporating as beastmen ran away at the sight of Chaos Hounds being spanked in combat, the Stegadon getting sucked down into a Pit of Shades (after the dispell dice came up one short!) and Skinks taking out a razorgor and my Giant in the same turn (gahhh!). Lord Lobo may post a battle report so I don’t want to go into too much detail but it was quite a butchers bill. After 10 games or so with the Beasts, my tactical advice is to–no matter what–get stuck in as fast as possible– don’t mill about at all, and don’t let a few units of zombies get in the way– if you hit tarpits– HIT them and move on. The beasts insane close combat prowess will likely carry the day if you can get them into touch. If your opponent feels like they were randomly punched in the face on the bus when playing your beastmen, you’re doing it right.
3000 points of beasts playing short sides is a dangerous affair if you table edges aren't blocked off...
As of last night I am officially on Xmas vacation. This means GAMING. I got in a game of Agricola and Dreamblade last night with my buddy JP who has the pleasure of having worked quite a large chunk of the last few years on that little game we call Skyrim. I pumped him for information which he was happy to give since the game was OUT– a far cry from last year when we couldn’t get him to say anything about this new ES game.
It looks like we’re going to get in on the most vicious of all games during the off week: Republic of Rome and try out the new fangled (not that it hasn’t been out for awhile) Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd edition. What’s more, a big game of Cosmic Encounter is in the works as well. I promise to post something stupid every day about what ever sort of nerd crap we are all doing. I know I will be trying to plow through my beastmen army, but I started getting an interest again in EPIC 40K and pulled out all that old stuff to give it a painting improvement before hopefully getting in a game. If anyone wants to read a run down of the sad epic (pun intended) of this failed game: read here. It wasn’t because it was not a great design, it was because no one would give it a chance that played the old version.
As for useless and redundant blog posts, I also want to give a run down of 2011’s games that were great and those that were disappointments. We have had the greatest deluge of AAA class titles in human history this Fall, and there just won’t be a year like this for probably another decade.. but I digress. Vacation. Nerdery. Drinking. Yes!
