If you want to catch up on the previous articles on the models or the marketing click here and here or you could just continue reading, the articles can be viewed in any order. This is the third of three articles on everything I don’t like…
About the games themselves:
Key rules point. X Wing has a hidden manoeuvre dial system (taken from Wings of War), Gates of Antares has a random order dice activation system (taken from Bolt Action), Warmachine has a focus point boosting system to allocate power around your force, if you fail a critical roll on BloodBowl your turn ends immediately, if your system is just a bland series of rolls to hit and damage like Dark Age you’ve lost.
Small numbers on the stat line and smaller dice results. I understand that working out percentage chances with a D10 makes more sense than a D8 but 6 and 9 look remarkably similar and that little line under the number to see which way it is viewed from does not help. Dark Age is again a culprit here with a D20 system that really doesn’t need to be that complicated.
No excessive marking of wounds for each model. If you have to put sleeves around cards and then mark off the boxes with a dry wipe marker it means your combat damage system is too complicated, I don’t mind a few large models needing many wounds or health points but rank and file humans or goblins don’t need this.
2′ by 2′ or 3′ by 3′ game areas. I live in the UK, the UK has tiny, tiny houses which have equally tiny tables and I don’t have room to stick a stick a 4′ by 4′ or 4′ by 6′ piece of MDF down and play on that. I understand that FLGS (or Friendly Local Game Stores if you’re not in the know) have tables that size but squeezing the established gamers off of them is a hard prospect.
Living Rulebook. Rather than publishing a large FAQ for each problem that is found in the rulebook why not keep a cut down digital living rulebook online for an instant lookup. Then set one or two dates in the year to review the rules to cut out the ones that don’t work and / or make new rules official for organised play.
Balance your models. I understand games might be unbalanced, that’s fine, no company can playtest the games more than their fans will put it through, however the idea that the rules need to be changed or FAQ’d because they have made mistakes in balancing the models themselves is literally insane. Again I’m looking directly at GW while I type this but they are not the only ones by a long shot. As a 40k gamer for a long time there have been several eras where individual models dominate the game whist others get left unused, there was an ten year gap in updating the Dark Eldar and Necron codexes the first time round meanwhile Necron flyers, Wraithlords and Grey Knight Paladins have enjoyed spells of domination that only stopped when the rules or codex cycled out or when you dropped £600 on a new army to counter them.
Quickstart rules video. This leads me to a point I have been meaning to make about tactical miniature games for a long time. Why is it so hard to record a video showing off how to play the game online? Typing “Lets Play Deadzone” into YouTube results in a number of videos about the previous edition of the game, however it does have two playthroughs, one from Mantic and one from Beasts of War both of which are extremely bloated and look like they have been done in one take. The Mantic guys make a rules mistake in the first 2 minutes by forgetting to roll the command dice. When I was being taught the basics it took less than 10 minutes including set up. It’s a shame as the quick nature of the rules of this game are one of its strongest points.
Call to action. I want a reason to buy and get involved now. I’ve often looked at various miniature sites and wondered if I should buy their models or games systems and most of the time I think “no, I’ll come back and look at that after I’ve finished project X, Y and / or Z”. Kickstarter gives you an impetus to buy as soon as possible, this is great as the company gets all the cash in one go and can start producing content and the players all start playing at one time once the rules and share their feedback. However if you want to give an added incentive I would recommend what FFG did with X Wing and offer competitive play events with limited edition tokens and cards.
While we are on that subject Fantasy Fight Games has the market nailed down for competitive play, just offer a box of goodies that tournament organisers can buy with limited edition kit in and let them host their own tournaments. Job done. FFG does this 4 times a year but your mileage may vary.
All done, you can go back to what you were doing now.
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