Beaky Space Marines for Kill Team

 My first Kill Team: 1980ies Beaky Marines. Review of the new Kill Team rules will likely follow sometime in the coming weeks. 

Oathmark Dwarf Army and first impressions

My Dwarf Army and some first impressions of the game.

NorthStar Dwarves

Necromunda 2.0: what do we think about it? + 2 updates

In the time honoured tradition favoured by Games Workshop's marketing department GW has revived an old love of mine: Necromunda.

Now I played Necromunda to death around the turn of the century and collected and built gangs and terrain to my heart's content. I still revisit it occasionally and the game is one of my most prized and fondly remembered possessions.

So when a friend of mine asked me to try the rebooted version I was all for it. We played it a few times and I feel ready for a first review. In this review I will -just to be clear- compare this game  to Necromunda 1995 and I will assume you know that game already. If not, check here.

In terms of style and quality of game components GW leaves little to be desired, insofar their product is to your taste. One of the first things you need to know however is that, although the game is still sold in a ready-to-play box with two gangs, the definition of "ready" has changed somewhat. I will get to that.

The gangs included in the box are the familiar burly Goliaths (Bondage SM gay-bar body-builders with guns) and the all-female Eschers (heavily armed 1980ies punkrockmetal groupies).  But they have been completely redone and stylish minis they are!

The clunky 90ies Citadel metals have given way to stylish and elegant plastic miniatures in very dynamic poses.

The gangs include a Leader, a Heavy armed with a Chem Thrower (a 21st century Flamer that is) and a number of gangers armed with an assortmant of autoguns, lasguns, pistols and pointy things.

The boxed gangs do not include Juves, although the rules do.

The box also includes a Rulebook and a Gang book with Campaign rules. The Gang book onlydeals with the Eschers and Goliaths. This is new. If you want to play with other gangs, you will have to buy other books. (Crud...)

The box includes a number of board tiles that serve as an instant wargaming terrain tabletop (and have given rise to the misunderstanding that Necromunda 2.0 is a boardgame: it is not), a number of great looking doors, barricades and loot crates and of course the mandatory amount of dice, rulers, templates and counters.

This playing surface is also the limitation of play in this box. Gangers have not yet learned to climb, there is no elevated terrain and the Rulebook contains no rules for climbing (although curiously a skill for it).

Should you want to play in elevated terrain, you will have to buy another rulebook (Crud again...) and build or buy elevated terrain of course. Lucky me I kept everything.....

Gameplay
Gameplay is quite streamlined compared to the old game.

Major improvement is that gangers now move alternately, greatly enhancing the tactical possibilities over moving your entire gang at once (or at least before your opponent may move.

The Wound table has been replaced with a Wound die, The opposed To Hit vs Strength (or whatever) table has been replaced by 3 stats (Strength of Hit bigger, smaller or equal to Toughness) and things like Ballistic skills no longer need recalculating but are simply the stats you need to roll. The ammo roll is now a die rolled alongside the To Hit die and also indicates multiple hits for Rapid Fire weapons. Bolters still rock. Close Combat is somewhat simplified.

On the downside, Overwatch has been streamlined away as well as an Action (although it is still a Skill available to some gangs) which is a letdown and a loss for the game. It is however easily reinstated using the old rules. The Chemthrower has no comprehensible rules in the rulebook that we could find other than that it "hits automatically" when the template touches the target. What the effect of such a hit may be is left to your imagination. We made up that is is a Toxin Gas of which the effect is described somewhere. Apparently there are more types of ammo for a chemthrower but not (Crud) in this book. Maybe the next one?

As you might have surmised you will need a lot of money to buy a lot of books and a lot of leafing through all these books. Hopefully GW will release a Compendium sometime soon.

Gangs
In the original game the gangs started basically identical. Only in Campaign play would they develop differently. The  new game offers ready-made gangs (and pre-printed cards with stats) to start with. These gangs already are different in that Goliaths have higher Toughness, higher Strength in Close Combat and no long range weapons and Eschers have lower Toughness, higher Speed and long range weapons.

Unfortunately this means that in the confined spaces of the presented scenarios which offer lots of cover the Eschers will ususally lose, as they cannot make use of long range fire and die more easily than their Goliath counterparts from close range fiire or close combat. So I do not recommend the use of the preprinted gangs. It is easy to use identical starting opponents however and they will develop differently when playing Campaigns.

Campaigns
The Campaign system is virtually identical to the old game insofar that it is present. Apparently part of that is in another book as well. I haven't checked.

Conclusion
A mixed bag.

I would immediately reintroduce Overwatch as this greatly improves the game and makes it more interesting. But in terms of game mechanics Necromunda 2.0 is mostly an improved game. Terrain and figures are fabulous and even better than in the old game. Game components look better as well.

The rules in the starting box are incomplete when you use the old game as a reference. They do not offer play on elevated terrain and rules for some weapons are missing. The preprinted gangs are unbalanced. Splitting up the game in a base set, an elevated terrain set and separate gang sets makes it hideously expensive. I would recommend waiting for the inevitable Compendium.

When you want to start with Necromunda now I would recommend it if your budget allows. Me, I am glad I own the old game.


UPDATE 1:
The Necromunda Rulebook appears to have been released already. Unfortunately this does not include the Gang Lists, for which you still need a separate book. This will set you back a grand total of 65 GBP (or 85 Euros) for the complete ruleset alone, which is still quite hefty in my book.

UPDATE 2:
GW also released another skirmish game under the name of Killteam. While the theme and visual design are completely different from Necromunda, the rulesets are actually quite similar. KT also works with small units on small tables, uses all the same stats and rules as Necromunda does with as main notable differences:
- In Killteam you move your entire team before or after your opponent may move his entire team.
- Shooting happens alternately per figure based on Initiative
- KT knows a charge reaction under the name of Overwatch which means you may shoot at someone charging you.

In this respect Killteam and Necromunda seem to be two slightly different variations on the old Necromunda ruleset.

The Paintjobs of August

Last month I didn't do much blogging (none at all actally!) due to a very busy working month. But I did manage to do some diverse painting here and there:

 The Hardshell Heroes and their mentor Splinter made by Greebo Games. 

Bombshell Babes female samurai and Chinese swordswoman

Bombshell Babes swordswoman versus a Wargames Factory plastic samurai. You do have to pay some attention to positioning the parts. The loose legs, torso, arms and head as well as swords, sashimono and such make for a lot of work, but enable a lot of variety as well. Tilting the head a little makes a lot of difference for example. 

On the Web they often look a bit wooden, but I am actually quite satisfied with the results. 

Painting them is a breeze. Detail is excellent and moldlines slight. There is no flash whatsoever.

More WGF samurai cavalry

Below more Wargames Factory figures. These are AWI British, drafted by the Royal Marines 

Incidentally, the Navy officer in the blue coat is a Warlord Games figure originally the giveaway with the Blackpowder Rebellion book. 

Here more Wargames Factory figures (Zulus converted to Pulp cannibals) attack my Marines 

Pirates squabble over loot. Another Warlord Games figure on the right confronted with Musketeers non-Jack Sparrow and two Foundry pirates. 

Some tryouts for a new game, Frostgrave. Vendel Border Reivers flanking old Mercator, a Crisis giveaway of some years ago, 

The bear is an old Mageknight figure, rebased and repainted. 

And we end with four happily quaffing GW dwarves. 

I hope you enjoyed it and that it inspired you! 

GW: guilty as charged? [EDIT] GW 2014-2015 report

No  wargaming blog would be complete without referring to Games Workshop.

The company has as many fans as detractors, but it can hardly be denied that GW has had an enormous influence on the wargaming hobby. Many current wargamers started with GW games, even if they no longer play them. And a large part of the "new batch" still enters the hobby through GW's products. Still any topic dealing with GW in general terms, their products or their policies risks erupting into bitter disputes very soon.

There are as many reasons why this is so as there are people discussing GW, so I will not attempt summaries and analyses. Instead, I will just examine my own opinion. It's a blogger's privilege. 

My first real wargame (as in playing with figures on a tabletop) was a GW product. If I skip Spacehulk, which was a boardgame after all, the game Necromunda was the first tabletop wargame I played. And I played it with all the gusto of a GW noob, buying White Dwarfs, rulebooks, Citadel miniatures and rulers^tm  where I could find them (and if I had the money for them) and painting and building away on my "gangs" and terrain. It was a lovely game, full of athmosphere and supported by great background fluff which I did not even connect with Warhammer 40K all that consciously. We played campaigns against each other for years, or so it seems. I had never played Rogue Trader or 40K so it all looked pretty original to me. 

And before that I enjoyed games like Talisman, Spacehulk, Dungeonquest and Mighty Empires. In later years, when historical wargaming drew my attention, I had uncountable hours of fun with GW Warhammer Ancient Battles and later historical offspring from that game.

So what drove me away?

It was not the periodical re-styling of army lists for Warhammer Fantasy Battles or 40K, always a rather thinly veiled way to get people to buy new rulebooks and miniatures. I never played either WHFB or WH40K because the rulesystem did not really appeal to me. I always considered it a rather simple min-max game that drew a lot of very competitive players, who were not my preferred company. So I never stepped into those but still enjoyed the rest. Price increases are connected to any hobby and when the price becomes unacceptable to me, I just stop and start looking for alternatives. I don't like the sculpting style that much anyway, so it was an easy choice.

Neither was it the "We are The Hobby" approach that attempted to exclude all non-GW influence from any GW game ("kill the mutants!" is not just 40K fluff, apparently) since, well, in the age of Internet it is really very hard not to find other sources for the hobby and even before that I never paid much attention to people who told me how to experience my hobbies. I am in it for the fun, so it is only logical to do as I like playing with the people that I like who also like to do what they like.

Rather, it is a case of murder, committed by GW. Murder, you say? Yes. Murder.

GW was founded in 1975 and I encountered them around 1984 when I joined a RPG group that regularly read White Dwarf and used Citadel miniatures in their games. Around 1986 a game store opened shop in my hometown and I stepped on the Yellow Brick Road and have been on it ever since. It was a halcyon time, where everything was new and fresh and a new and totally innovative game seemed to be published every two months or so. GW appeared an everlasting source of fertile creativeness that just kept on producing great gaming stuff! But over the years that source slowly began to dry up as management gradually took over from game design.

GW started to turn inward. Cost cutbacks started to exercise their influence on the design process. The board games and RPGs disappeared near the end of the 20th century. White Dwarf turned from a more or less general hobby magazine into a GW commercial ad collection. Still the range of tabletop wargames was impressive. But then these too, started to dwindle. More cutbacks slowly pushed them into limbo through the status of "Specialist Games" which increasingly turned out to be a euphemism for "nearly out of print". More and more resources were poured into the WHFB/WH40K lines, reinforced with the Lord of the Rings franchise, which was essentially a simple WHFB-variant with different miniatures. All at the expense of the "non-core lines" as it turned out.

During the first decade of the 21st century GW killed off the Specialist games one by one. Profit maximizing "transferred" them to Forge World where they were very sparsely supported and eventually just disappeared. Gone were Necromunda, Warmaster, Mordheim, Bloodbowl and many others. The entire Historical branch was scrapped in 2012 when GW simply tossed away WAB, one of the most successful historical tabletop rulesets ever produced without even attempting to license it, because it did not make enough profit. It took all the historical games with it into oblivion.

From then on GW completely focused on the WHFB/WH40K/LOTR lines, which were essentially branches of the same game engine-tree and served to sell ever more rulebooks and figures. Or, in other words, GW made a business policy out of endlessly re-hashing variants of the WH engine and the miniatures associated with it and has been doing so ever since. Something not immediately apparent to new players, but painfully clear to all of us who have been around a while.

Remembering their beautiful origins and the many, many remarkable games and game accessories that sprang from the original GW-source, the gradual and total decline of this growth and realizing that nothing really new has been produced by GW for over a decade, leads to the conclusion that GW has murdered Creativity sometime around 2005.

So yes, I proclaim GW guilty as charged. Not for taking our money, not for making a profit, not for attempting to monopolize the wargaming hobby and not for developing devious (well, what's in a name?) marketing strategies.

But guilty nonetheless for developing that vast potential for creating for us so many lovely games and then murdering that potential for the benefit of the shareholder, robbing all of us, old and new gamer alike, of what could have been.

[EDIT]
As an add-on here is GW's Half year report for the latter half of 2014. Revenues sink and profits sink even faster.

Kevin Rountree, CEO of Games Workshop, said:

“Games Workshop’s core business model remains strong. Our current initiatives of ever better weekly new product releases, the low cost one man stores in retail and the stockist programme in trade, are designed to lead to growth. The board remains confident in the future growth and profitability of the Group.”

Time will tell (but I'm afraid it does so already) if Kevin is right....

[EDIT]
Based on GW's 2014-2015 report revenues fall a further 3 million (-2,5%) but profits stay on last year's level. No reassurance, given the significantly lower costs for this last year.

So far, no growth...