Haterz an Fanbois FTW. LOL!!!!!!1 B-)

You can tell if a person is racist, they generally start their sentences with ‘I’m not a racist, but…’ before saying something racist.  It was this thought that stopped me from starting this post with ‘I’m not a GW hater, but…’.

I would like to make it clear that I’m not a GW hater (or a racist for that matter); I love loads of their games including the 8^th edition of Warhammer Fantasy, I’ve been buying GW products for years, I paint their miniatures using their paints and I play their games in my spare time.  I’ve joined a club where I can play GW games with other GW fans, I’ve even spent three years of my life writing a blog mostly dedicated to playing GW games.  To me GW is one of the best games companies out there and I even divert my journeys up and down the country to pop into Warhammer World on occasion.  I am not a GW hater. 

This brings me neatly onto Dreadfleet, and why I’m not going to buy it.

 

In case you weren’t aware, Dreadfleet is the new GW boxed, standalone, limited edition game, recently made available for preorder.  There has been a lot of love and hate on the internet about this, but one thing that is clear is that people are buying it.  I’m not going to, for a number of reasons, but the main one is:

I haven’t seen any reviews of it

Sure, there are videos out there, lots of pics of the components, even promises of gameplay descriptions.  But no independent reviews.  To me this means that I am being asked to part with my money for a game that could turn out to be rubbish.  I’m pretty sure it wont be rubbish, but why should I buy it when I could spend the same amount of money on a boardgame that has got rave reviews?  If I had £70 to spare (which I don’t) and I had lots of gaming time going free (I don’t) then I’d look at some of the following instead (all available for £70 or less each; all text and photos from BoardGameGeek):

Mansions of Madness: Horrific monsters and spectral presences lurk in manors, crypts, schools, monasteries, and derelict buildings near Arkham, Massachusetts. Some spin dark conspiracies while others wait for hapless victims to devour or drive insane. It’s up to a handful of brave investigators to explore these cursed places and uncover the truth about the living nightmares within.

 

Horus Heresy: In the Horus Heresy board game, the most legendary battle in the history of the Warhammer 40,000 universe unfolds across the razed plains of Terra and in the frozen orbit above. Deadly fighting ranges from the Emperor’s golden Inner Palace to Horus’s flagship, the Vengeful Spirit.  Taking the side of traitor or loyalist, two players control either fearless Space Marine legions or deviant Chaos Space Marines, mighty Titans, Imperial Armies both loyal and traitorous, and a fearsome array of other units, including the Emperor and Horus themselves.

Tide of Iron: (see my review here) Tide of Iron is a game of World War II tactical conflict for two to four players. The components in this base game allow players to simulate the dramatic struggle that took place between American and German forces in Northern Europe during the years 1944 and 1945.

Descent: Journeys in the Dark: Descent: Journeys in the Dark is a semi-cooperative game in which two to five players will take on the antagonistic roles of heroes and Overlord. Up to four players will choose characters with a wide assortment of skills and innate abilities to be the heroes who will explore dungeons in search of treasure and adventure. One player will take on the role of the Overlord and will control the dungeon's many traps, puzzles, and monsters.

Of course when Dreadfleet gets released, it may get the greatest reviews ever, turn out to be one of the best boardgames of all time and I’ll have missed my chance because it sold out.  But I’m not prepared to bet £70 on that happening.

Happy Gaming

Frugalnomics: Increasing Cost, Decreasing Value

Price rises, price rises, all I seem to hear about these days is price rises!  Personally I think everything's more expensive these days, but Dethtron (first and second links) has a point when he establishes that GW's prices are in fact behind the rate of inflation (whether they were marked up to the point of lunacy to begin with is perhaps another matter).  Still, that's not what I'm here to bore you about today.

I have, in the past, been heard to discuss the notions of cost and value; that having low point cost kits and making them both essential to building an effective force and expensive to purchase in terms of real money is the gaming company's road to profitability.  Dethtron has been caught remarking that you don't want your ubiquitous and essentially mandatory METAL BAWKSES, included merely to transport models across the board and provide an additional layer of insulation against the rain of hot lead/laser/microwave death outside, to eat up huge chunks of your army's points that you could be spending on cool stuff.  I say that I prefer spending my money on transport vehicles that contribute something else to the game, hence my love of anything Fast with good guns that can move and still shoot, Land Raiders and even, at a pinch, the Ork Battlewagon, but that's still not the point that I'm trying to make here.

My point is that price increases are only half of the way that gaming companies can, if they so wish, diddle and fiddle you out of your hard-earned wonga.  The other way they get you is by devaluing what you already own.  We are familiar, I hope, with the various justifications for new editions that invalidate your previous rulebook purchases; some of these are more valid than others but I think that by the time you're on, say, the third edition of a game you're either a bad designer or a deliberately poor designer trying to set up pendulum swings and/or release bloat for business reasons (which, as I keep saying but will continue to restate every time lest I be considered a ninny, is a valid business model and not something unethical and vile that it's worth starting a protest march over.  Go on the ones to preserve teachers' pensions instead and at least do me a favour while you're there...).

What some of us are perhaps less familiar with is the really obvious under-your-nose phenomenon that I never see emerging from discussions of How Things Were Better Value In The Mid-Nineties.  Stuff was worth more then.  When I started playing, a Space Marine squad cost 300 points for ten lads before any upgrades.  Buy them a Veteran Sergeant with weapons and wargear, special weapons and a transport and you'd be running something in excess of 400.  With 1500 points established as the Holy Grail of game size, that means an 'army' might comprise three of those squads, the mandatory Captain and, I don't know, a Chief Librarian or a couple of Predators or a Bike Squadron (the New Hot Sexy Release during the month I started playing, sixteen years ago...) or something. 

Third edition 40K slashed the points value of that squad - and it's interesting that we talk about 'points value' as often as we do 'points cost', don't you think? - in half while continuing to present 1500 points as the 'standard' game size.  Suddenly you 'need' twice as many d00dz in order to roll up to your games night, unless you're the sort of person who asks insightful questions like "what's so special about 1500 points anyway?"  The later editions of 40K have been nudging the game toward a sweet spot closer to 2000 while continuing to gently nudge point costs (Ork Boyz dropping from 10 to 8 or 9 to 6 over the course of three Codices, anyone?) to the point where your old stuff, even if still playable, won't amount to what people are conditioned to expect.

Now, lest I be accused of favouritism here, let's take a swing at a couple of other companies.  Privateer Press managed to pull off the double whammy when they released Warmahordes Mark II, changing the entire points system in order to revalue pieces and change the expectations about what constituted a game.  Alas, rummage as I might I can't find any of my Mark I lists anywhere to run an Edifying Comparison, but there was a lot of effort sunk into creating a formula that would unpick exactly how the points costs and values converted between the two systems, and it was at first rather tricky to establish how much you now had and whether you'd been played like a stringed instrument or not - which, a cynic would argue, is what they wanted.  Wyrd, meanwhile, set out with two different game sizes and, while I don't follow the Malifaux gossip too closely, I'd npt be surprised if their first expansion brought with it an emphasis on the larger of them.  Changing costs is only half the game; sometimes companies change the value of what you own as well.

Fifty Ways To Leave Your Gaming Company

Okay, not fifty, but I'm sure Paul and I can manage a few.

Imagine, for a moment, that you're a gamer.  Shouldn't be too hard; you're reading this.  Now imagine that you buy most of your gaming gear from one company, and that that company isn't necessarily offering the value for money you'd expect.  Hopefully, you don't want to indicate support for their decisions by continuing to spend money on their products (we've already discussed how that works) but you still want to play their games.  I have a few suggestions in that line.

1. Know what you want.  What's your actual problem with the company?  Can you continue to play their games in good conscience, or is your seething righteous fury at the injustice they perpetrate too much?  What is it about their games that makes you want to keep playing them?  Is it story, scale, mechanics, funky miniatures, funky gamers, gamer funk or simple habit and ignorance of the alternatives?  You need to know why you're doing or not doing things before you can make an informed decision about whether or not to keep doing them.  If you like sword and sorcery skirmish games, do you really need that huge army of flying space tanks?
2. Stop and take stock.  What do you own?  What is built and ready to go; what has been sitting in a box since New Hot Sexy Release Day and never looked at since; what can work with what at a pinch and what's mutually exclusive?  Work out what you've got, what you can do with it, and how much work and expense it would take to do something with it if you need to make an investment.  I tend to find the people with the biggest dead lead piles and collections of mouldering, dusty sourcebooks are the people who only buy from one company but have lots of projects going on within that - who buy Company X's complete new release every time but never really get very far with it before picking up the next one.  The downside here is that all those projects require ongoing investment, and if you're suddenly unable or unwilling to continue making that investment, you have a pewter mountain on your hands that, in many cases, would embarrass the European Union.
3. Diversify.  Once you know what you're most likely to continue using, sell the rest.  Go on.  Get rid of it.  Use those resources to explore new games and new environments, to boldly go where no nerd has gone before... or at least where you've not gone before.  You're not going to dissassociate yourself from the company if you have no idea what the competition has to offer.
4. Use the secondary market, Luke.  Unless your name's not Luke (metaphorically speaking, that means 'unless you have some pressing need for as-new material', like a wargamer who likes to kitbash and thus won't be as keen on assembled and painted kits), the secondary market is your friend; it enables you to complete and extend projects without directly supporting the company with your own money.  This is, of course, psychological double-talk to an extent - that eBay bargain has, at some point, been purchased from the company who made it, and the money you spend on it will like as not find its way back to them, so this isn't one for the ideologues who've decided that the company is run by Satan and all his little wizards.  If your problem is simply "man, I can't afford the new Cyber-Knights, they are too spendy at umpty-seven pounds for two, but I still really like Star Pogrom and what it's about", you'll probably be more comfortable with this.
5. Avoid prescriptive environments.  Many companies have officially designated spaces in which they control what can and cannot be used there, whether it's "Dungeon Bash 8.4 is the only edition that's on sale at the event, therefore the only edition that can be used here, and official dice, character sheets, measuring implements, status tokens, floorplans and pencil shavings are a requirement" or "you must use branded Nerd Emporium paints, brushes, glues, pins, chewing gum and wishful thinking to build your Cyber-Knights in the Nerd Emporium".  Fie on this nonsense, says I.  Fie on it!  Such policies are nearly always designed to burden the consumer with expensive and unwanted purchases - get out of the environments that force those on you and find or create an environment where you're allowed to do things your own way, substituting in cheaper equivalent miniatures, homebrewed rather than supplemental rules, and materials that don't cost the Earth.
6. Disengage from what you've left.  Try not to get excited about Sexy Hot New Release Day for a game you don't play any more.  Don't let yourself be seduced back in.  Remind yourself why you quit - it doesn't matter how pretty that new book/miniature/dice block/paint-pot/staff member is if it doesn't fix what drove you away in the first place.  Likewise, fight the urge to get into Internet arguments (or, goddess forbid, actual arguments) about how rubbish Dungeon Bash is compared to Castle Brawl, or how Nerd Emporium is secretly controlled by the New World Order.  You're still thinking about something you were supposed to be getting away from, and that's the sort of behaviour that will see you sucked right back in.

Yes, she's lovely, but that doesn't mean she isn't trying to sell you devil droppings in a blister pack.

 For those of you who are still reading and haven't slavishly followed the above link, it might be worth you pointing your browser toward this week's Gaming on a Budget, which has some excellent advice on avoiding hobby burnout and, possibly, avoiding the kind of conditions that lead to you needing this sort of advice in the first place.

How to blog (not very well)

As regular readers know, I like to relax in the evenings and read a few emails.  When I’m not helping out Nigerian Finance ministers or confirming my HSBC bank details (I don’t even have an account with HSBC, but they seem happy to accept my credit card details nonetheless), I like to respond to my fan mail. 

Recently, I found the delightful blog ‘Ninjabread’ hosted by Curis and sent him a note to express my admiration for his efforts (especially this stunning ultramarines comic) and to ask him to ‘plug my blog’ which is internet speak for blagging some free advertising (not to be confused with ‘icing the log’ which I would not ask Curis for). 



Anyway, Curis reciprocated and sent his own electronic note of admiration for this very blog.  So what was he most impressed by?  The hints and tips for money saving?  The wonderful photographs?  The witty insights into the world of gaming? No.  What he admired most was my follower count and wanted to know how I'd managed to dupe so many people.  Bastard.

But anyway, my reply was as follows and I thought any fellow bloggers or self promoters may find it interesting...

My blog has been running for over two years now and the number of followers has grown steadily.  The main method I use is shameless self promotion, posting in various forums ('fora' if you're a pedant) everytime that I post on the blog.

The main site I post on is 'The Miniatures Page' which is where most of my hits come from.  Speaking of which, I use a 'Site Meter' tool on my blog to record the number of hits that I receive and where they come from, so that I can focus on the sites that work.  I've managed to piss off a few people with this method though, as I use their lovingly curated forums to advertise my shoddy blog.  I even managed to get thrown off one message board, though I can't remember which one it was.

Apart from that, the only other method I can think of is following other people's blog, as they often follow you in return.

So those were my tips, I hope you find them useful.  And don’t forget that you can ascribe any success that Curis may have in the future to my mentorship.  I made you Curis, I MADE YOU!

Happy Gaming

To all the Ultramarines Fanboys...

If you got a haircut and it turned out looking terrible, would you go back for more?  Would you think,’He's a rubbish barber, I’ll go back so he can get some more practice?’.  If you went to a restaurant got terrible food, in small portions and they overcharged you, would you think ‘They must need my money to improve service so I’ll go again’? 

I hope the answer to all these questions is ‘No’.  If you get overcharged for poor service, you don’t go back for more and you certainly don’t go around shouting down anyone who says differently.  Which brings me onto the subject of the ‘Ultramarines’ movie, which is overpriced shit.  I think internet etiquette requires me to put ‘IMHO’ or something, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and state this as a fact, rather than an opinion.  It. Is. Overpriced. Shit.  Anyway, I’m not angry with the film or the various individuals involved, what I’m angry about is the chumps out there praising the film that they’ve just paid the best part of £30 to watch.

Don’t think that by buying it you’ll encourage GW to make ‘more and better’ films, you won’t.  I’m going to say this once more, then go off and kick the cat; IF YOU BUY A POOR QUALITY OVERPRICED PRODUCT, THE COMPANY WILL CONTINUE TO MAKE POOR QUALITY OVERPRICED PRODUCTS.

Thank you for your time.