Mini gaming in general has been on a terrible slide in my gaming group for nearly two years now and I fear its about to die. To be honest there are six or so people beside myself in my gaming group (out of about 20 people in the extended group) who are mini game fans. The local mini gaming community is pretty bad, consisting entirely of store trolls and kids ... neither which demographic I have the patience to deal with anymore. So in a last ditch effort to save mini gaming ... ANY mini gaming ... in our group. I'm going to toss a hail marry.
The systems that have the most appeal are Warma-hordes and Dystopian Wars. Two systems does concern me because we are splitting the interest but that is what the group wants overall so I'm going with it. Don't get me wrong there is a GW bent in our group ... but getting 40k/WHFB off the ground has actually been whats nearly killed mini gaming for us.
The scale, investment and scope of those systems is just too big for most of the people in the group with an interest. Getting things assembled and on the table has just proven insurmountable for most of the other people in the group. To top it off 40k scales horribly ... 500 point games suck ... and ya there are some skirmish fan systems out there but they aren't supported, aren't balanced, etc. etc. and there is always an Achilles heal that kills off any effort with the GW stuff with our group. We've tried three times over the past year and each time for one reason or another efforts to as a group do GW stuff fails. The nice thing about both dystopian and Warma-hordes is the buy in is low. 40-50 bucks and someone is in with a starter force. The games play ok at the starter set level and there is no need to immediately jump it up. With GW there is. With Dystopian the painting/modeling commitment is low as well. Warma-hordes is identical to GW stuff in terms of painting modeling really ... but again at the boxed set level.
So I'm making one last attempt. I'm going to try to just put up or shut up about mini gaming. I'm going to focus on the following three projects:
1) Getting a sea board built with a few nice sets of islands done up.
2) Getting two 4x4 tables done and full terrained for Warma-hordes (with like 2 terrain sets for each board).
Once that is done:
3) getting two forces done for Dystopian (Brits and Prussians) and 2 starter forces for Warma-hordes completed. So I can offer a game to anyone even if they don't have minis and don't ever have any desire to buy and paint stuff ... no worries they could use one of my loner armies and have fun on a mini gaming night.
Right now I have no way to really tell when mini gaming is going to be taking place because I won't have my fall schedule until at least next week or perhaps the week after. Its sounding like Monday night might be my mini game night. For those Monday night football fans ... I have no aversion to having the game going on in the background if you want to come over play some mini games and watch the game. But we'll get into that once I know for sure that is going to be the case. Wednesday might also end up being a better day. I'm pretty sure I'll have class on Tuesday and Thursday eve though so likely those nights will be auto-out.
One day I'd love to get back into 40K or perhaps Warpath (mantics ruleset which you can 100% use GW minis with) and warhammer fantasy (or Kings of War.. again mantic system) but that is likely 2012. Its just too big a endeavor all around. Hopefully we find some more people up a Weber this year and bolster our numbers a bit ... that would help.
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