Age of Sigmar

17/5/2016:

Age of Sigmar.... It's been a few years now and I still don't know what to think about you.

As a group we dabbled with it at the start, making armies from our fantasy forces and battling out with the new rules. I enjoyed the quirkiness of those silly rules, such as; if you're playing with Settra and you kneel for whatever reason you auto lose. These were fun to read and felt a bit of nostalgia for when GW was less serious. We never really played with these rules, and its not great game design, but its nice to think of them.

Our games just felt like a massive mess, there was no finnesse to them, no artful moving, and a lot more time spent moving individual models. Looking back I feel like we did AoS a disservice by trying to play with a fantasy style army, rather than with AoS designed forces. But we haven't really looked at it since. I think I was probably the staunchest anti-AoS in our group, and not necessarily because I didn't want to play, but that I didn't want precious gaming time to be not taken up with Fantasy. 40k was already eating into our gaming time and we just weren't getting more than a small handful of Fantasy games a year.

The releases for AoS have been nice enough, though small, and the models are really quite stunning. There doesn't seem to be a huge amount of variety amongst each faction. The new method of casting models has turned me off GW a bit, in that they make converting just that little bit harder. The new dynamic models are great, but its a lot harder to hand/head/body swap when a) the factions have such a strong individual look to them, and b) they've been designed to very specifically join leg A to body A. Whereas I used to clip all the torsos, legs, heads and arms off them mix them around, throw in a few from other kits and build my squad/unit/character, now I have to consult the instruction booklet for each model. I don't like instruction booklets.

Also, I didn't feel like I had the energy to commit to a whole new setting. I was heavily invested in WFB and loved the lore, I'm getting into 40k lore. Add in Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Harry Potter and Wheel of time, and I felt like I was stretching myself too thin over so many settings. I also very much liked the low fantasy setting of WFB, stuff like the empire, dwarfs and Bretonnia. Monsters and men. AoS leans so much towards the high fantasy side of the spectrum with infitine realms of magic and such, that it's taking time to get my head around.

I'm not Anti AoS specifically and don't disagree with GW ending the Fantasy setting, results show it was the right business decision.

Our group has been chatting every so often on what to do with AoS, we're thinking if we're going to do it we have to start from the ground up. Build a whole new force that leans heavily into the new realms. Not bring any WFB ideas or plans with us. This is kind of exciting, kind of daunting. There's a lot of reading to do to get my head around what's happening. I'm keen to go conversion heavy, and really make the most of it. Lean into it and don't hold back.