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They are in the thick of it over there, up to their asses in foetid muck, covered in preternatural sores – and that’s just Noah! Everybody else has some other army appropriate condition they’re suffering from. We might talk about a gently swinging censer, or the cool, sterile interior of an XV25 Stealth Suit. This is their second crack at the hobby, and it’s taken root largely because they’re focusing exclusively on Warhammer 40k and not splitting time between three or four Games Workshop systems at once. But already, in the manner of Wormtongue, I have begun to sow dissent.
You know how there’s always the Console War, which never changes, except somehow many of the belligerents on each side also own a Switch? This happens in Wargaming, too. In truth, several of the biggest wargames are all Games Workshop products – so even if you bounce between a couple, you’re still in their vertical. But lots of people also owned X-Wing, which was pre-painted and less complex; a perfect Second Game. There are some great options for Second Game right now – I always push Catalyst’s Battletech: Alpha Strike as the best value in the industry, and I think I’m right. With thirteen minis, a streamlined ruleset, dice, and terrain in the box, you can rest there or you can graduate at any time to the more sophisticated classic rules – the perfect on-ramp. I think that Mantic Games might have executed this concept with Halo: Flashpoint – fast fun, but with enough mechanical headroom to seize the mind.
Wargaming as a hobby is incredibly cloistered, a series of rituals performed by robed adherents, and the systems broadly share so many concepts that you often draft on one to learn another. This means that onboarding someone into our mystery is often an afterthought – the process starts by reading thirty some-odd pages of scripture, but the real questions you’ll grapple with are the same as the fresh acolyte of any religion. They will all be within interactions the “rules” only suggest. It’s not that the map isn’t the territory – it’s that the map generally describes a world which cannot possibly exist, and the work is in harmonizing that with the real world. This is a form of labor I delight in! But there might be hard limits on how many people want to collaboratively embroider a secular religion in their leisure time. Compare that to this:
This is on the other side of Halo: Flashpoint’s map. It’s a truncated scenario that contains many of the big questions you’re going to ask, a smattering of terrain interactions, but around the entire map are the salient rules and keywords to get you going. Want to shoot? Want to shoot and then get up on somebody and hit them with the back of your gun, perhaps the most canonically Halo experience imaginable? It’s all around the edge. And because the game is set up on a grid, you’re never measuring anything. You would be startled to learn how much time and how many trips to the book this saves.
This really happened! These were our last two models! We didn’t even set this up!
There’s a lot about this for the seasoned wargamer to enjoy, but for teh nubz? They get the things that made Halo inviting to begin with: a recharging energy shield, and respawns! You’ll figure out how to take them apart eventually, but at the beginning Spartans are as tough as they should be. And even if you lose one, now they’re reentering the board at some screwed up angle your opponent couldn’t have planned for. Weapon pickups and items drop into the field on timers! You can play Oddball, or CTF, or whatever your favorite mode is. The models come preassembled, you slap some Contrast or Speed Paint on these things and you can finish all eight models in the starter box in a couple hours. The box I got for review is called the Recon Box, which doesn’t include any Elites and plays more like a traditional round of multiplayer, but the headroom here is off the charts. They’ve got a year of updates planned, and if good ideas and execution matter at all in this space it deserves to be huge.
(CW)TB out.