The Hobby That Dare's Not Speak Its Name Aka Wargaming

youtube career innit

Kill Team doesn't look too bad, though I've always wanted to try Infinity. @benjam and I are playing a lot of Blood Bowl, he's painting up all the green-skinned players he can find, and I'm halfway through my Lizardman team Nottingham Rainforest.

Ive still got a ton of warhammer 40k/LOTR from when I was a teenager up my parents loft that i need to get down and sell.

get down and look through for hours, warmly reminiscing, before carefully packing back, replacing in loft, safe for next time

are playing a lot of Blood Bowl

I'd forgotten about that game. We used to play a lot of it(3rd edition), a group of us would have day sessions when I was a kid with about four or five boards on the go at once in a mates house. I had a halfling team, who used to get massively squashed almost all the time, but (very) occasionally I could get my Treeman to throw one of them and they'd survive for a spectacular touchdown.

A classic play.

Start again! The game is still going strong, there’s a new edition out, and a matching cross platform video game coming out in August.

The last game is £6 on steam if you search for a cheap key on steam, we’ve been playing a bit since the start of the year.

Check out the new halfling models, pretty cool.

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lol

Hmmm, miss my old, badly painted ultramarines. No idea where it all went. Still have one piece remaining in the garage. This thread really makes me want to get back into it. Maybe I'll paint the lonely guy and see how I feel then.

I'd quite like to have a go - I was looking at getting some 40K models a couple of months back. I just know I'd never get the time to play them again though.

I'll check out the steam version though when I get my laptop back from homeschool duties - thanks!

If anyone wants some models to practice painting, I’ve got a few skinks and a warhammer armoured knight figure (some promo I was given) that need a home.

Free, just come pick them up from E9.

Ebay is pretty fantastic for bargains, and the 40k buy/sell group on fb

Haven’t done any painting since the move a year and a half ago. But the kids want to try Frostgrave so i guess I’ll be buckling down.

Haha

I guess I’ll be starting with these half painted trees. A bunch of branches seem to have fallen off during the move. Also why did I think a blue-grey undercoat was a good idea?

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though I've always wanted to try Infinity

I've played bit of Infinity about 7-8 years ago and went full into it for a while. My view: Lovely models, great background, huge headache of a game due to the complexity of the interlocking rules each model has, and how they interact.

My last game was a giveup, as we spent 45 mins at the club vainly trying to resolve how a combat worked and not finding an answer.

tbh, in my experience Killteam is a bit shit.

It uses the same rules as fullsize warhammer40k then shoves an unnecessary amount of extra rules on top, that make the game much more random and much less controllable.

In the end, killteam comes down way to much on dicerolls and thusly isn't as fun for me.

If you wish to stick to GW Products, maybe give WarCry a try? I played one game so far and loved it, they really thought about making a functioning skirmisher game here, opposed to an "Age of Sigmar LITE". The setting is Fantasy though, so maybe not your pair of shoes?
The models released for WarCry are also absolutely fantastic.

@Haino on the other hand, Infinity has had a new Edition recently (N4 if I remember correctly) they hugely reduced the weird nested interactions between rules and streamlined everything. They even have a "beginners ruleset" called "Code One" now, which works as a slightly reduced rulesset but with the same principles which you can use to learn the interactions.
I highly recommend it, as Infinity is in my opinion one of the best and most solid rulesets for skirmishers I know.

Thanks yeah def intrigued by War Cry, cheers, will look out for it at the next UK games expo. Blood Bowl is scratching the GW itch very well currently (plus I have a few shelves of normal boardgames I want to play post lockdown), and it’s good to GW have got their sense of humour back. I remember when they changed orcs to be serious, really felt like a bit of a loss.

I also rarely play Warhammer Underworlds, it's different from the rest because it's partially deck building and the objective is to score points by completing the cards rather than just kill everything.

@photoben just pinged me this thread. Oh how I have been through a journey:

It all started with me buying Star Wars rebellion. A friend had a copy and he’d painted up the minis that you get. I remembered that I wasnt bad at painting as a kid and wondered how 40k had come on since I played the first proper boxes game from ‘93-95.

I mentioned it to a friend and he said he still had his old Imperial Guard army in his loft. So we went down to a our GW and tried 8th edition, decided it had streamlined quite a bit of the game and decided we’d give it a go.

£300 and at least 150 hours later I had a painted Tau army.

We joined the local war gaming club and played enough games to realise, it’s still a broken game. It’s like snooker. You can sit for an hour and not do anything but roll saves while your opponent pings unita off the board and rolls 120 dice of fire against you. It’s just dull and there are so many weird combinations of units, factions and weapons that there’s almost always an overpowered side that’ll destroy all comers. Basically it’s not fun.

While we were playing 40k the club ran a blood bowl tournament. And it seemed to have everything we loved: small scale, fast paced and if you play with a timer you’ll be doing something every four minutes. The low model count means you can paint a team in a week instead of months and the game itself is very focussed. Like a lil game of chess with a degree of chance. But most of all it has that very British thing of not taking itself seriously.

I grabbed a box with @photoben and played a couple of games with the club before lockdown and enjoyed it immensely. Since then I’ve been playing online and am painting the models (I’m happiest with my Snotlings pictured) and waiting to give the latest iteration a go in person and online when BBIII is released.

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on the subject of Killteam: I can totally see that being the case @Murphy's_Law. Having seen a couple of games played on YouTube it does seem like it's still more a game of chance than a game of tactics, and that's quite annoying.

Warcry does sound pretty cool though and it might give me an excuse to paint up the Orruk Warboss that I have been hankering after without a use :D

I can definitely see your argument regarding the balancing in 40k. The game balance is a mess at the moment. The different fractions are hugely out of balance and worst of all, inside a fraction there are millions of ways to set up your army going from "this looks fun, but will probably be a little shit" all the way to "I will probably get kicked out of my friends house if I bring this to a friendly game". And it leaves the problem of balancing the game so that both players have fun in the players hands to 100%.

Before I play a game of 40k (and I only play with friends) we both usually go over the lists we bring, point out anything that might be too weak or strong in the current matchup and try to balance beforehand. That, of course, requires you having learned what is good and bad in any given fraction at the given time. Hugely time inefficient.

We usually try to play more narrative games i.e. a hugely blown up version of a P&P RPG, where we are more focused on telling interesting stories with the miniatures than actually trying to play a game competitively.

Then again, I still love the game in spite of all it's flaws...

I gave up on 40K a good number of years ago due to the arms race. Gave it a tentative retry early last year, but it still seemed to have the same problems. A lot of it is finding the right players and all approaching it with a collective "this is what we want out of the game". Spent some of last year building up a small chaos force (building and painting is 99% of my hobby now) and bought the new rulebook as the Crusade rules look like just the ticket for being able to approach the game with a story driven approach in mind.

Think this is still my favourite model I made last year, which is part of that 40k force:

Currently wondering whether to make a fantasy version of the same character.

Warcry - I've got the books for that, but not been able to try it yet. Yet to hear someone say anything negative about it!

that dude is deeply unsettling. Chapeau.

That is ace! Thousand Sons Sorcerer?

A lot of it is finding the right players and all approaching it with a collective "this is what we want out of the game".

100% agree on that. Communication is key. Who would have thought? ;)

Cheers!

@Murphy's_Law - it is yes, from various bits I had laying around unused. The pics don't quite show how big it is, as thats a 40mm base and a normal marine comes to about chin level. Chap has a super crooked spine too.

Got the stuff coming in the post for a Slaanesh conversion in the next few days, which I'm looking forward to.