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Last time Gabriel and his inheritors went wild on wargaming, part of the reason it fell apart was that they dug too greedily and too deep. Any one of the wargames that Games Workshop makes could be your entire life – they could certainly be your entire paycheck. They were playing Kill Team and Warhammer 40k 9th edition at the same time, and it didn’t help that each of these games shares some language that doesn’t actually mean the same thing in the different contexts. Plus, the 9th Edition of 40k just isn’t as fun as the new one – they got a taste of 10 and they’re sticking with it, despite my most fervent attempts.
I think that the rest of our group just has more bottomless appetites. Oh! And we don’t have to purchase three armies simultaneously. That probably helps too. We each have our own perversions; Kiko is into Solo Wargames, which you print out and play alone, I assume with the curtains drawn. Eric is drawn to historical dynamics like The War of the Roses or the Sengoku period. I draft on both of those but I’m also just an omnivore, generally; I like to read a book of rules, just rules, and simulate it in my head until I have no questions left. We are all of us looking forward to a prolonged “Coot Era” where model agnostic indie horseshit and traditional hobby gaming collide in a life where we itch constantly because we have little snips and twigs from fake bushes all over us.
A couple DMs during PAX Australia hooked me up with Mantic’s Halo: Flashpoint, whose underlying rule system isn’t actually new – it’s a fun reskin of their venerable Deadzone wargame. Kill Team, the 40k skirmish, still has measuring and some more traditional wargamey things – Deadzone leans all the way into being small. That means it all takes place on a grid, so rulers are out, and elevation or cover are very straightforward concepts here where it’s objectively weird shit in most games.
Videogame concepts like “respawns” have become more common in wargames generally, but Hlo in particular has idea that I think will make it manifest a unique life on the tabletop – aside from modes like Oddball, CTF, and Slayer, models have Shields like in the traditional game which make a lot of sense here. Let me get a few more of these sonsabitches painted and I’ll tell you how it plays.
(CW)TB out.