My name's Steve and I'm a wargamer....or am I?Saturday afternoon Ian was good enough to host one of our irregular nerd-fests. Pushing through a mound of spicy pulled pork rolls and nibbles we played our way through the first four Zombiecide missions for a total of five games (one wipeout).
We refer to these as fun games and regularly feature Zombies!!, various flavours of Munchkin, War on Terrpr and other multi-player offerings.
Over the past couple of years I and we have made a steady shift towards skirmish gaming for various reasons, mainly level of investment required based on time to table as much as anything. It seems like board, card and a couple of dice games have become more prevalent.
We get to have fun so are happy enough but have lines started to blur? Do or should we care? New 40k was dabbled with and maintains a presence but Dreadball is club flavour of the last couple of months. Pre 40K it was Mordhiem and Necromunda, Blood Bowl has been usurped.
Kickstarter is full of new shinies competing oh so effectively for our hobby cash. How many of these are full "proper" wargames? Plenty of skirmish and boardgames from what I've noticed but precious little else.
Gates of Antares was one such offering asking for a mere £300,000, as compared to Zombiecide's seven figure status, but didn't make it due at least partly to lack of tangible product. Is a "proper" wargame on KS just too much to produce?So what is a "proper" wargame? One that needs a minimum of a 6'x4'? One with figures that are intended to be painted (AT-43)? Something at least platoon sized?
I'm not sure that I play "proper" wargames at the moment, for a variety of reasons. I'm sure I'd like to, Muskets & Tomahawks and SAGA would fit for me, but I don't seem to mind too much right now.
Should I though? Should you??
GoA was £300,000 but I think it got pulled because it was so unfinished it became a committee game, less about RPs vision and more about pleasing all kids at once.
ReplyDeleteI think that slowly and not by design that club activities have nudged towards board game over war game. Painted armies in 28mm are a thing of the past and the future is only going to see more skirmish based games, less expense and commitment it time or effort, but more focus on the game....