GORECHOSEN

New GW board game...GORECHOSEN. $60. It's an AoS Chaos arena battle with 4 champions of Khorne. Looks bad ass. I'm sure there will be outcry from board gamers that it only includes 4 miniatures...even though they are 4 multipart miniatures sold separately for like $35 a piece that you would ideally spend more time assembling and painting than you would playing the week's hot Kickstarter title over the next YEAR.

www.belloflostsouls.net/2016/06/gorechos...ewest-boardgame.html

They also just put out a flyer combat game, Stormcloud Attack, but it actually is too expensive...$100 per two model set. The models are awesome and the sets are a value, but to have enough to for 4 to play it would be $200.

This may be too many new gw games too soon. I sense diminishing returns incoming.

Think your painting can keep up with the releases?

Gorechose sounds like it could be fun. One of my favorite things to do when I played 2nd edition 40k was to just roll off battles between big guys.

I think I liked it better when it was a Spartacus Festivus.


I love the idea of Stormcloud Attack and with Brexit killing the £ perhaps it's not that bad a price. Especially if the preorder charges hit when you order vs when it ships

The expansion: GoreNotChosen

I'm all for this new Golden Era of GW. Just got the new Lost Patrol, it's unnecessarily pretty and I'm going to rule that the scouts roll twice the amount of dice they're supposed to (seriously, one d6?), but it's really neat. Can't wait for Calth to arrive. Already eyeing more, though I'm much more into the 40k universe than AoS or even OW.

I've been thoroughly enjoying the GW games. I am seriously considering selling some things to get the 6 Stormcloud ships -- this could be the aerial combat I'm looking for.

YES and it is a golden age...but the thing about it is that these games really aren't like anything else out there. There isn't anything else this direct, this focused and this much _like 1980s/1980s Ameritrash_. These aren't FFG hybrid games. They are old fashioned blood and guts, meat and potatoes fare more concerned with being cool than being balanced.

Every single one of these games hasn't necessarily blown me away with innovative design or with fresh concepts...but they have with how back to basics they are. Movin' and shootin' for the most part but with a couple of super chromed out twists.

Silver Tower is the crown jewel and it is the most complicated (but it's not). It is the best dungeoncrawl on the market. Calth is the game you wish you were playing every time in the past 20 years and wished that GW - not FFG - would make an actual 40k board game. Execution Force with its one scenario (boo fucking hoo) is one of the coolest co-ops ever made, it's basically Metal Gear Solid. Deathwatch: Overkill is a straight up Dirty Dozen style bloodbath- no cover, endless bad guys, hard ass characters. Lost Patrol has brilliant scouting rules (for scouts) and a super tough mission that you can play through in 20 minutes.

But here's the deal. All of these frankly outstanding games are going to get short shrift from board gamers because of the price, because they don't understand the miniatures aspect, because they have an axe to grind with GW, because of the more focused content, because of the "awesome first" design, because of GW's sometimes tone deaf marketing policies, whatever.

Which is a shame because I will tell you straight away that I would rather spend $150 on Calth and be blown away by it from the gameplay to the modeling to the graphic design to spend half that on a lesser game by a lesser company. The models make every miniature FFG has ever done look like a joke. Unlike every other game I own, I actually care about the fluff. I look at them on my shelf and they are like the "special" games now.

But yeah, if you came into games in the FFG/CMON era...I think some of the power of these games is diminished. They are truly old fashioned. And I hope they keep doing it.

As for Stormcloud...I already sold a ton of stuff to bankroll the GW Homecoming 2016...but you know I'm probably going to wind up with them all

There is also Imperial Renegade, which is actually a Titan v. TItan standalone game too.

Don't forget...

After you're done painting and playing stormcloud, Imperial renegade, execution force, deathwatch, etc...

...you're well on your way to owning a 40k army.

The expense is a pretty valid concern, and so is the time taken to put together the miniatures. What you might see as a hobby element adding value, someone else sees as a tedious chore. "Understanding" doesn't really factor into it.

For myself, I made my bed in Shadows of Brimstone, bad minis and all, and I'm going to lie in it. I see the appeal in the new GW games, but I'm not going to dismiss people who balk at the prices as "not getting it." The comment about lesser games really hits home though- I probably have enough $10-$15 wastes of money in the closet that I could have just bought one (or two, or three) of these boondoggles instead. I'd love to play them, but not going to gamble over $100 to find out.

All this is from someone with four 40K armies, two WHFB, three Blood Bowl teams, and I forget even what else (Dark Future!), back in England.

Listen, when Silver Tower came out you might remember that I was talking about making standups or buying a set with no minis. But when I got it, I found that I really liked the modelling part of it and the quality of the figures- the way they put together to the sharp detail level- blew me away. Aside from Space Hulk, the last "real" GW products I had were ten years in the past. Seeing the figures and the quality of the production overall, I thought "OK, this is a $125 game." It is Cadillac.

And I do absolutely think that the quantity over quality, über consumer board gamer brigades don't get it. They are accustomed to a sense of value where a $100 box with 100 bubblegum machine quality figures and 25 scenarios that are really pretty interchangeable is "great". So they don't get that something like Execution Force, where you get 5 REALLY awesome figures _that alone cost more than the full package_ on top of 20 or so Cultists/CSMs AND a really good game is not "overpriced"- at least in comparison to the values of the constituent parts.

To someone that enjoys the modelling and painting, the extra expense buys you A LOT more quality...and having recently painted a lot of miniatures, I can say with experience that difference between a GW miniature- and I'm sure those from other makers- and a FFG miniature is night and day. It's just that board gamers have gotten used to the bubblegum machine figures as a standard.

So I see the complaints on BGG and it is pretty clear that some folks don't get it...I'm not going to defend GW's marketing or its pricing ($15 bags of actual dirt), but based on their pricing their box games are all huge values. Even the Stormcloud Attack boxes save you like $35-$40 off of buying them separately AND you get a game with it.

The biggest hurtle is the modelling. The bubblegum minis in today's board games aren't really 'minis' per say, but pawns. They don't need to be glued to a base or assembled. There's zero work involved. Open the box and play.

Before we even get to the painting...the effort to assemble the playing pieces could be seen as the barrier to entry (on top of the cost).

Heck, until this new era of GW many here poo-pooed the idea of ever assembling or painting a model again.

However, some of us see the modelling as a feature not a bug.

Is this Stormcloud game using the standard 40k flyers or are they scaled down?

Michael Barnes wrote: but based on their pricing their box games are all huge values. Even the Stormcloud Attack boxes save you like $35-$40 off of buying them separately AND you get a game with it.

"These games are fantastic value for money compared to usual GW gouging prices" isn't the ringing endorsement you're presenting it as. And the hobby/chore aspect/debate is already covered- no need to restate it, we got it the first time. Other people don't necessarily share your interests and might see you as just extolling the God-Emperor's new clothes to the unwashed hordes of BGG plebs. You're not buying some artisinal, curated hand-crafted board gaming artifact. You're buying a slightly different box of die-cut cardboard and plastic and claiming some sense of superiority about how astute your waste of money is versus someone else's waste of money.

My Zombicide Rue Morgue box is full of game. The minis are fine for the job they do. I spent 10 years fussing over Citadel/GW miniatures and that's not a hobby I want to pursue any more, and as such, those better moulds of plastic offer no added value to me. The games I loved most from GW were Dark Future and Gorkamorka; both with strong (either built in, or eventually via White Dwarf supplements) campaign narrative potential*, something that Brimstone hits the mark dead centre, for me. Quality of figures totally a non-issue.

I don't know, I don't really care enough to argue about it.

* along with almost endless scope for kit-bashing, the only real part of the hobby aspect I truly enjoyed.