40K Fridays - Army Distractions

So I had my plan all set - finish building out and updating my main vanilla marine army - and that had been going well. Then Apprentice Blaster had to get the new Eldar codex. It's very pretty. The twinges start.

I see that shiny new Tau codex and think "I don't have an army wit ha white paint scheme - I bet a white tau army would look really good. "

I take a look at my armies and think "ya know, for all the marines running around the house I do not have any Blood Angels and I do have these spare tac marines ... and a dread ... and an old BA sergeant
 ... hmmmm."


We start planning to play a few games with the new space elves and Apprentice Who wants in and he likes "big monsters". I look over Tyranids but I'd be starting from scratch with them as I have never played that army. Still, they do have the "big monster" thing. I listen to a few podcasts and battle reports and ... they just don't do it for me. Since I'm going to be funding this I need to have some interest in them and I just can't get much going over these guys.

Yep, looks pretty good

I take a look at Chaos Daemons and they too have a lot of big monsters, but they have a lot of special rules, special cases, special everything - if he's going to learn the game I need something a little less ... special. I do have mini's for this at least, but I think these guys are a much better second army than a first. Besides, turning the 10-year-old loose with a Bloodthirster in his first army is likely to get him punched in the face by one of the brothers and nobody wants that.

This brings me back around to Chaos Marines - they have big monsters, from daemon princes to dreadnoughts to the new 'fiends to the dragon. Plus they don't have a ton of special rules, at least not much that deviates from how most armies operate. I have a pretty good sized force I've been building over the years, and I could use some of my spare loyalist marines as well. Rather than starting up Blood Angels, I could just expand my CSM's and split off a force for Who when he's ready. So that's what we're playing this weekend and hopefully it all goes well. Plus it gives me a reason to work on my Chaos Marines some more.


Besides, I don't want any old models in my future Blood Angels army ..

X-Wing Miniatures

(I may be one of the last interested parties to finally pick this up. I've been one of the holdouts on this because the pricing seemed really high, but I ended up receiving it for Father's Day so that makes it OK.)

My space-gaming goes back a long way. Star Fleet Battles was a big deal for us in the 80's (I'm from the "Designer's Edition" generation and stuck with it thru "Commander's" and into the early part of "Captain's") and morphed into Full Thrust in the 90's, then BFG in the early 2000's along with some Babylon 5 Wars and Call to Arms and later some Federation Commander to come full circle. All that experience aside the space thing has kind of quieted down here over the last few years. I have played some Gothic and some Fed Commander with the Apprentices once or twice but that's been about it. We skipped the WOTC Star Wars space game a few years back though I was tempted a few times.

So what makes this game worth picking up?

• Pre-painted mini's - well done and not adding to the backlog!
• It's Star Wars so I know the Apprentices will at least give it a look
• It's designed for short playtimes, looks like under 30 minutes most of the time

That's a pretty strong list of positives. It took about 15 minutes to put the parts together and read the intro rules and then we were zipping through our first game. It feels right and played fairly quick. Thumbs up!

I will admit I am a little leery of all the custom hardware they have for this game - bases, templates, dials are all essential to the game and so this is not just mini's and rules - there's a lot of this other stuff that's needed to actually execute the game. It's not a huge issue, it's just something I normally stay away from when getting into a new game. 

The pricing of the ships still bothers me too but if we take it easy it should be manageable. Only including 3 ships in the box still feels pretty limiting to me. Business-wise I assume the $40 price point was an important target to hit because I would feel better about it if it had been $50 and included 4-5 ships. 

RPG tie-ins? Well, it could be used for a fighter-scale battle as part of a Star Wars game but the ships are fairly fragile so it's a dangerous undertaking as always. It does play fast though. 

I am looking forward to something else tied to it, though not a direct expansion:

More info on that here.

So we have it, we're playing it, and we'll be experimenting and expanding on it as well in the near future - I'll let you know how that goes.

Motivational Monday