Cut'n'pasted to avoid cluttering Scurv's AoS review thread...
I agree with that, but I also think Major Gilbear has a very good point when he suggests that kids like heaps and heaps of rules. I can remember greeting the publications of Ravening Hordes, Warhammer 3rd edition and Warhammer Armies with childish glee - more rules! More rules! It was only when, at the very end of my first gaming "career", I got into Hordes of the Things that I had a sort of epiphany: "This is a far better game - and it has far fewer rules!". Childhood's end?
I agree with it, myself. I only started with 6th ed, but even towards the end of that I was getting frustrated with the clutter of rules.
There's the armchair-neurologist reasoning that children are better at soaking up masses of info when they're forming masses of neural connections, but lack the frontal lobe development to make good judgements with it. Then when the frontal lobe's all grown up, the sheer number of neural pathways are pared right down. You can't have your brain-cake and eat it...
The gameplay of WHFB and especially 40K hook kids with this (that and all the ded kewl wikkid monsters and space mariens and grimdarkness*) - they're much more focused on what might generously be called strategy, and otherwise 'listbuilding' and 'mathhammering', than on tactics. Most of the decisions are made
before the game, totting up stats and points and probabilities and special rules, rather than during.
Compared to the 'deceptively simple' style of rules. The rules are simple, or rather uncluttered and streamlined, not too much calculation and memorisation needed (it's not claims of simplicity, and then dumping piles of cards or warscrolls full of special rules for specific models on you), but the way they might cleverly interact can create complex situations** on the tabletop, that need a little tactical judgement.
If I had to simplify the definition further I'd call these adult games, not as a value judgement, but as a contrast to rules-heavy games, and the general (
general) audiences they might attract, or be built for.
AoS, specifically... from my own viewpoint it's reported advantages seem like the worst of both worlds. It's got simple core rules, in the form of the infamous four pages, but there's no hidden complexity there (if there is, it's hidden
real deep) - it's so bare-bones I almost fall asleep looking at it. Then you have the masses of rules, where most of the gameplay seems to be, in the warscrolls, which doesn't thrill me. Maybe I've just had bad experiences with
stat special-rules card games, but to me AoS seems like a combination of that, and the progression of special rules mania that affected WHFB and 40K. Less about clever maneuvering, more about what models you can afford to bring to bear.
* There's that
old C S Lewis chestnut that some wargamers like to trot out. Usually presented to defend playing with toy soldiers (and rightly so) but I think 'admiration of the grown up because it is (or
seems) grown up' is another of GW's hooks. If different aspects of GW seem less and less 'grown up' to you in recent years, I put it to you that
part of the reason is that you're not thirteen anymore.
** First guy I read, posting about this kind of thing, talked about the difference between 'complex' games and 'complicated' games. I like that.
I agree with all that. I do think, though, that the merits of the "Warhammer World" are slightly overblown. It was never as satisfying or coherent as Middle Earth or Glorantha (the obvious gaming yardstick) or even - I think - the much more lightly sketched Melnibone/Young Kingdoms. I always felt that the WHFRP stuff (Renaissance cities with things scuttling unseen beneath the streets and perhaps just the hint of a hoof under a robe where a foot should be ...) sat very poorly with the garish green orcs and their football-hooligan argot, for example.
After poo-pooing the fake grownupitudeness of WFB, I have to defend it. Or maybe it's not as contradictory as that - I do like the warhammer world-that-was, but I think most of the good background was set out long before I got into the game. (I started an Ogre Kingdoms army, which showed up in 6th ed, but only because I could twist the new fluff to match the old fluff) Then, IMO, GW tried to build on that, not with more intimate detail or exploring the sparser parts of their maps, but by focusing more on massive, cataclysmic, fantasmagorical... and utterly bland, impersonal, inconsequential battles. (Well, inconsequential, apart from the last one)
This is my beef with the new setting, and Pictor's defence of it. It's another progression of the unsatisfying paths GW went down. Fighting off a bunch of orcs from a tiny village might not be much in the grand scheme of the old warhammer world, but to me it feels more meaningful than even a whole continent in a - what, infinite multidimension? - of undefined, undeveloped continents being razed. A million deaths is a statistic...
And like I said, how you gonna raze a continent from a few-feet-square table, in a way you couldn't do with WFB, or any other wargame? If it's because you reached a designated objective point at the end of the game (Token? Scenery piece? I haven't clicked the links yet) I'm not entirely convinced.
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