Tuesday, June 30, 2015

Age of Sigmar, Hmmm...

So, the Age of Sigmar rumour mill is now well in to the tangible stage:

The new Box
Others have covered it better and I'm sure if you are monitoring the progress closely there is little more I can tell you.  The new boxed set is looking at being about £75/$125 for 47 minis, a 96 page background and scenario book, and get this, 4 pages of rules!

4 Pages.

Games Workshop are also going off script - for them - by offering the rules for FREE.

FREE!

Games Workshop? Free? 

  
Exactly that.  When did GW ever give rules away.  The information to date is that there will never be a rulebook, army book or otherwise that you need to buy to play, it's all free, downloadable online or provided with the miniatures.

Boxes of models, and supposedly all existing units will have a War Scroll detailing their new unit:

Thus.

There's plenty to note in this, models only have four stats, and then a fixed set of weapon stats.  They all seem to have special rules specific to the unit.  Actually to me, none of this seems very bad.  But there are problems, issues that friendly games may not suffer from but that will make competitive gamers seeking balance furious, and rule exploiting doucebags ecstatic:

  • No point values
  • Units/armies can be of any size
  • You can use whatever you want
So you could turn up for your game with four units of 10 Orc warriors say, and you opponent arrives with 12 dragons in 3 units and a fourth unit of 100 Skaven assassins and the rules would basically suggest that's fine.  I give a fairly extreme example but this seems to be what is causing a lot of nerd rage at the minute.

If you want to sneak peek the rules I suggest you look here:


Whilst the best source right now for other pictures seems to be this Twitter account:


As to the new models, well I always had mixed feelings about the various chaos ranges over the years, but some of the new models look pretty good.
Chaos!
Whereas, I have no love so far for the immortal warriors of Sigmar:
Some of the new Stormcast Eternals - Sigmarines if you will.
These are not humans per-se by all accounts, and look pretty much to be Space Marines for Warhammer, I'm certain that's what GW wanted anyway.

So what do we have?  It looks like a means first and foremost to bring new players into the game with whatever miniatures they have or want to buy.  In short rules to sell figures, not rules to sell rules.  Will it be any good?  Well, I've not had time to read the whole rules yet, but they seem to be a mixure of really simple concepts, elements that could be lifted from any number of contemporary rule systems, and a big slab of random.

But as it seems to be free it'd be rude not to try it, and monitor it with interest in the future...

All will be revealed in this weeks White Dwarf, along with free model too.  Not long to wait now.
Labels: , ,

3 comments:

  1. RAZ01 July, 2015 05:00

    This is a pretty interesting concept. I have serious doubts about how it will work out, but it is interesting.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Phyllion01 July, 2015 20:18

    That's all pretty damn weird. Lots of effort to trademark a load of 'not-elf', 'not-Orc' and 'not dwarf' names.

    And Sigmarines? Oh dear! Just because they're the biggest seller in 40k doesn't mean AoS will instawin, GW.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Matt Crump02 July, 2015 07:42

    Thanks for sharing........not really that precious about WFB although it has been rules of choice for fantasy for some years. I guess the rules and the system are actually not meant for current gamers and collectors. It is all about new gamers and I guess we can hope that one day they will put their orcs down and collect Greek hoplites or WW2.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)