40K Op-Ed: There’s Never Been More Ways to Play 40K
GW just keeps on expanding your choices for playing in the Grimdark – and I think they are all coming to Age of Sigmar one day.
I was going over all the teases and awesomeness from Warhammer Fest and started to jot down just how many ways there are to play in the Grimdark.
So Many Flavors
In the last couple of years, GW has cunningly built game after game that mostly let you resue your same miniatures to play at whatever level of the game you want. Take a look at these:
- Kill Team: 3-10 minis
- Necromunda: 6-12 minis (can technically be reused in AM armies)
- Blackstone Fortress: A few dozen minis. (Characters and some units can be reused in 40K)
- Warhammer 40,000
- Horus Heresy: Age of Darkness (Forge World, many minis are dual-use)
- Apocalypse (Now confirmed to be a different ruleset)
- Adeptus Titanicus (the most varied, entirely separate scale)
This is an ingenious strategy and accomplishes several things.
- It allows people to start at a very low model count and get into the hobby, then move up into the larger games.
- It allows people who “burn out” on one game to stay in the hobby and continue as happy, purchasing customers by merely hopping over to a different system instead of dropping out.
- It allows different gaming genres as a point of entry into the hobby, to open up the 40K universe to a wider variety of gamers. In particular look at Blackstone Fortress, which is a Legacy Boardgame – but acts as a point of entry.
Even way back in the glory days of yore, there weren’t that many different ways to play, and the game was more fragmented. EPIC and Battlefleet Gothic had different scales, while Kill was Team a “mini-game” tucked inside the 40K rulebook, not its own standalone gateway product. Warhammer Fantasy had the short-lived EPIC scaled Warmaster and Man-O-War, both at different scales.
About Age of Sigmar
Speaking of the fantasy side of things, I think we can safely say that Age of Sigmar is headed in the same direction. Already we have:
- Age of Sigmar
- WarCry (this looks an awful lot like AoS Kill Team to me)
- Warhammer Underworlds (a tiny number of models and similar to Blackstone Fortress, it is attractive to boardgame/deckbuilding fans).
I think it’s a solid model to both attract and retain long-term customers and would not be surprised to see the other players in the industry such as FFG, Privateer, Mantic and the others adopting in the future. FFG already offers you a million ways to play in the Star Wars universe, and I bet Warmachine/Hordes players would take to other games set in Immoren that use the same minis, but alternative rules?
~ My question to you, is, are you a fan of the concept, and which scales of play do you like the most?
