Editorial: A Return to Confrontation
If there was a hard counter to Games Workshop’s grip on the wargaming community, what would it have to bring to the table? One could, perhaps, argue the game itself is vital… but really, what’s more important than the miniatures?
Nothing.
If that wasn’t true, we’d all be playing board games, ’cause I hate to tell you this but no mini game yet can capture the simple elegance found in the better board games.
Maybe I’m being unfair; maybe it’s a different beast entirely. Regardless, my argument is we’re a community that loves our metal/plastic/resin models…
…so the ‘hard counter’ spoken of in the introduction paragraph would have to be a company that consistently produced better miniatures. Rackham did that.
Rackham was a French company, and its primary contribution to miniature gaming was its skirmish game, Confrontation. As a game there were some flaws, but what attracted our local gamers was the difference between it and any other game out there. As far as I know, it was the first to combine cards and miniatures, in a way that would be familiar to all you Privateer Press junkies out there!
In a way, it combined the best of card games and war-games, with strategy and razor-sharp tactics combining for a true back and forth, one on one slugfest.
Honestly though, the game was secondary to the miniatures, which to my mind remain the best collection ever produced. (If you want to see more, I grabbed these images from HERE.)
Rackham was dabbling with resins long before Citadel; I honestly wonder what its releases would have been like had it remained in business.
What happened? Some bright bulb decided the future of wargaming was in preprinted plastics…
…can you say Whiz Kids? I think you can!
Rackham put everything in AT-43, then made a half-hearted attempt at relaunching Confrontation with its new line – and in effect, ruining everything that made it special.
…
Well baby, it’s back!
Here on Bell, Tabletop Fix posted the news dropped first on the Cool Mini Or Not Forums about the return of Confrontation. From CMoN:
Legacy Miniatures is excited to announce that they have secured the license to the entire Confrontation back catalog, and will immediately start producing previously released and unreleased figures from this amazing and sorely missed miniatures line.
From what I understand, the line is going to be sold exclusively through the CMoN store…
…but is it just going to be the line? Sure looks that way.
I’m excited about this, really… but I have to ask myself: just how much support a dead game is going to generate?
Will the Confrontation-mad junkies band together to revise the ruleset to something workable? I suppose I should mention the ‘powers that be’ – primarily in the form of local tyrant The Master Manipulator (every store needs one) – are doing just that. We’ll follow suit for awhile, lemmings that we are, in the hope of recapturing the magic-that-was.
But that’s small potatoes. So what it comes down to is this:
Is this a big deal or a small deal?
Is my dream of a hard counter to GW just that?
A dream?
(Oh, yea, I almost forgot. This is Brent. Hugs, gropings, Unicorns and all that. Check out my blog, Strictly Average. Or not, your option!)
EDIT: It’s an hour until this article posts, but I noticed Beasts of War has an interview with Legacy today… I think it’s worth checking out!
Here’s the LINK.
