A Fistful of d6's

Let’s have a moment of honesty though: Tabletop War Games are terrible. They’re designed to drain your wallet. New models are always coming out, power creep is beyond real, and you’re often paying an arm and a leg for a model that’s not assembled and will likely never have as nice a paintjob as what’s on the box.  Tabletop miniatures games are also wonderful, and that’s what we’re going talk about here... eventually.

I got into miniatures in high school. My friends and I played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons and the local hobby shop had a sale on a Lord of the Rings Moria Goblins box. I figured I’d give it a shot. I think there may have been a Space Marines or Imperial guardsmen box that I glued together before that for some Rogue Trader games, but I blame the Moria Elves for getting me into miniatures proper.

Painting is a rough experience. First you have to look at the model you’re going to put together, then you decide if it’ll be better to paint the pieces first and then glue (something I never did but have heard stories from on high about) or to just hope you can sneak a fine tip brush into the cracks where elbows and chainmail blur. Then you prime the models, for these gobbos I used the Citadel pot of primer, which is pretty decent for small batches of models but I too would learn the trials of spray primer in time.

I just spent a paragraph talking about how to get a model ready before you even paint. That speaks to my awful ability to write these sort of things (hey this is a learning process) but also, I hope, to some of how rough assembling and painting minis can be.

And good gods, PAINTING. Imagine my younger high school self, with no real artistic talents to speak of, suddenly being mildly happy with how painting a bunch of goblins in shades of green and red with bits of metal. Imagine how clever I thought myself for adding bits of red on the weapons because clearly these goblins had just gotten into a fight with something. That’s how it all started.

Years later and about four different Warmachine armies later I’m pretty tired of miniatures hobby work. You spend hours painting up these models when you could just as easily be spending the time playing with them or doing literally anything else of value. I figured out fairly quickly that time you didn’t spend playing the game was time that other people were getting more experience at the game; getting better than you. 

That’s a thing here, there’s two bits to hobby games like this: The hobby part, and the game part. You can be pretty good at both, but you will rarely ever be the best at both. 

I’m rambling here so let’s move on: Warmachine/Hordes. What a delightful game. Fun lore, good mechanics and a focus on smaller model count. Clearly a game for me as opposed to the Games Workshop offerings. It was, is, was. I’m not sure where I stand on Warmahordes at present. I have a handful problems facing me with that game: 1) I play Blindwater Congregation. A faction within the smallest and least developed faction of the sister game to Warmachine, Hordes. Voodoo gators made for a really fun and flavorful faction for small point skirmishes but... 2) No one really plays small point skirmishes at a competitive level. There’s a lot of good reasons for this, balancing being a major one. The problem is that scenario play favors more developed factions with more options available to them and playing a faction that was more about “RushMurderKillStomp” wasn’t always going to cut it against list with more shenanigans and ranged tricks. I know Gatormen have developed as a faction since I’ve played but that still means more $50+ models I’d have to purchase, paint, and then get stomped on until I figured out how things worked. Also, larger scenario play is a huge time investment compared to the quick and decisive games I enjoy. 3) My new local game shop puts Warmahordes on the same open play night as my current love: X-wing.

So here we go. I’m going to try and not just turn this into a “Why you should play X-wing” so instead I’m going to turn it into a “Why *I* play X-wing” list. In no particular order: 1) The models are pre-assembled, pre-painted, and can be repainted very easily if you want to customize. In spite of this fact they are also about half-2/3rds what you’d expect to pay for a miniature for another game. 2) No messing with rulers for movement. Everything is done on templates, and which ships can perform movements on which templates actually becomes a key of the strategy. 3) STAR WARS. 4) Each ship has different pilots, upgrades and options available to them. Any one ship has a staggering amount of in game customization, several of the options work out in surprisingly effective ways. 5) The largest amount of ships available to any one tableside is 7, and games average an hour tops. 

In short, for cheaper, I’m playing a game with a wonderfully expansive amount of options. I’ll have another post about the problems I have with X-wing at a later time but this write up is already huge.

Here’s the thing I need to stress about tabletop miniature games though, and why I stuck it out with Warmahordes for so long and why I will probably play it again in the future. The communities for these games are wonderful. There’ll be bad eggs in any hobby, obviously, but any wargamer knows how much effort everyone puts into the hobby and is usually open to new players of all sorts coming in. 

Everyone puts in time, money and effort into bringing an army to the table, regardless of what game you play. It’s easy to shame someone for playing a different game because “The rules are bad” or “There’s no community for that game.” That’s rough, don’t do that. What you’re doing is just giving yourself confirmation bias that you’re playing the better game so you can justify having spent an untold amount of dollars in playing it. Just don’t, be a cool dude and appreciate what we all do when we bring stuff to the table and play.