Top 10 Collectable Card Games Of All Time

In the early 80’s there were three games that really defined what would become the tabletop gaming hobby. Dungeons and Dragons, Warhammer 40k, and Magic The Gathering. Magic The Gathering of course is the grandaddy of collectible card games but fast forward over 40 years later and CCG’s have become a sub-hobby all on their own.

I don’t talk about CCG’s very often but in the last decade, CCG’s have gone through something of a renaissance and with each new CCG that has come out, the genre is making leaps and bounds for the better.

In today’s list, I will pick my top 10 collectible card games from the awesome past to the wonderful present. Enjoy the list!

10. Legend Of The Five Rings (1st edition)

Legend of the Five Rings 1st edition by Alderace Entertainment falls into what I like to call the “Hardcore CCGs” category from the 90’s . This was a fairly robust game from a robust gaming era that was very heavy on the theme and backstory and for fans out there, it wasn’t just a card game but much like other early CCG’s like Magic The Gathering, Legend of the Five Rings was a lifestyle game.

I think what separated LotFR from other LCG’s was that it was part of a multifaceted franchise that covered gaming as part of a spectrum. You had Legend of the Five Rings RPG which in the 90’s was competing against heavy hitters like D&D and Vampire The Masquerade. You also had a miniature game line called Clan War which competed against the Gameswork shop heavy hitters like Warhammer Fantasy. Finally, you had a huge library of novels dedicated to the story of this amazing game world, books which when released coincided with card set releases so that when you read a book about a certain part of the history of the game, you then got to play it out in the card game.

Unfortunately despite very modest economic success, Legend of the Five Rings in all its forms was never terribly popular and never reached anything beyond its extremely niche audience.

Fantasy Flight Games picked up the rights to the Legend of the Five Rings and revised the game in a second edition, but this too saw only minimal success and ultimately faded out of existence rather quickly.

This game was made for fans and it catered very heavily to this niche audience. In my humble opinion, this is one of the all-time classics that rightfully deserves to be on this list even if it’s at the tail end. It is an amazingly rich and complex game with tons of great lore to support it and without question, some of the best art ever put on a gaming card. Awesome, albeit retired CCG.

9. Magic The Gathering

I was hesitant to put this one on the list at all because I could file a 500-page novel worth of complaints about it, its design, the company that runs it, and the endless stream of bullshit that makes this a game I have no desire to play at all.

Still, there was a time when I lived and breathed magic and it wasn’t a short time, most of the 90’s by my estimation. Like other games from the 90’s Magic The Gathering was a lifestyle game and equally as all games in the 90’s, it was mostly broken as fuck!

Yet, Magic The Gathering endures and by all accounts it’s still one of the most popular CCG’s on the market today and this has been so since its inception. No CCG ever has nor likely will come even within a light year of the success Magic The Gathering has seen. Magic The Gathering sells more cards in a year than all other CCG’s combined sell in a decade. In a word, there is no such thing as “competition” when it comes to market share, Magic The Gathering rules undisputed.

How? Why? It’s a good question. Mechanically Magic The Gathering has a lot of design flaws that would never be put into a game today. It’s a game where you can build a legal tournament deck in which you can win a match before your opponent ever gets a turn to play. You can build decks that spawn an infinite number of monsters, or do an infinite amount of damage. The amount of stupid shit in this game is endless but I think the reason people like it and perhaps rightfully so is not despite these things but because of them.

There is something uniquely clever to a game that has so much depth and interaction, that if you study it long and hard, you can completely unravel it.

I crap on it, but it is the granddaddy of CCG’s and this list would be incomplete if I did not put it on the list so here it is, but frankly, I can think of a 100 CCG’s I rather play than Magic The Gathering. It does however have its charm, I can’t deny that of all the games on this list, I have played Magic The Gathering the most and so its place in CCG history and this list is secured.

8. Vampire Eternal Struggle

Vampire Eternal Struggle is to me, everything you think you want to have in a great CCG, which results in an overcooked game to a point where the game is nearly unplayable. Its a effectively a game that appears to be designed by Vampire The Masquerade fans that kind of don’t know what they are doing, but fully understand what a Vampire The Masquerade CCG should feel like, if that makes any sense. This was not all that unusual for a card game in the 90’s, making stupidly complex card games was kind of a thing back then, but even so far as complex CCG’s go, Vampire Eternal Struggle stretched the definition.

This was a game that could take upwards of 3-4+ hours to finish a single match, there was a ridiculous amount of rules weight and card interaction and in a lot of ways it mimicked the obscene level of detail that was customary in The Vampire The Masquerade RPG.

As overcooked as it was, however, there was true magic in the way the game executed because it did what White-Wolf RPGs were famous for which was to tell an amazing story. This was a game that even though I haven’t played it for 20 years, I still remember specific matches I had. All-nighters where me and a couple of friends effectively created our own little micro-universe for an evening in the world of darkness.

It was a unique game in a couple of ways. First and foremost it was best played in multiplayer, rather than head-to-head which separated it from most of the CCG’s out there that had modes for multiplayer but weren’t designed for it. The second thing was that you had this amazing world of darkness behind it, a setting so fleshed out and so recognizable to fans that each card had impact and meaning that went well beyond anything you would expect to be able to put into a card. Above all else, however, it was a brutish and harsh – take that – kind of a game, with ruthless mechanics that brought a lot of emotion and player interaction that went well beyond the mechanics of the game, much like the RPG on which it’s based.

This was a fantastic CCG and recently the game was revised and reprinted so it is still very much available today for people to explore. I would caution however that this is a game made for Vampire The Masquerade fans, by Vampire The Masquerade fans. If you don’t know what that is and why it’s awesome, this game is definitly not for you, if you do, you probobly already know about this game and don’t need me to tell you how awesome it is.

7. Arkham Horror LCG

Arkham Horror the card game was released by Fantasy Flight Games in 2016 during a period when FFG was producing CCG’s under the Living Card Game strategy where rather than having random booster packs, you would have pre-constructed expansions. It was also not a competitive card game but rather a cooperative card game in which players would effectively go around a dynamically constructed game board based on a location and solve mysterious while fighting monsters using decks they built.

I own and love this game, I actually think it’s pretty fantastic but generally speaking I also think it has one major flaw which is that it’s a cooperative game where once you complete a “quest”, it’s a bit like a legacy game where a lot of the hype and excitement disappears and the game starts feeling like your watching a scrooby-doo re-runs.

The format just lacks sustainability and while I still love picking this game up every long once in a while and playing a few rounds, it lacks freshness unless you are constantly buying the latest expansions. I did that for a while until I realized that I would effectively play each expansion once and then never go back to it because I knew the story, I knew the mystery, I had figured it all out.

It’s a very fun game mechanically but it almost feels like it would have done a lot better if the “quest” creation was turned over to the community and the game was a digital card game rather than a physical one. If you had an endless stream of new challenges that you could play on a daily or weekly basis, I think the game would have a lot more longevity.

Needless to say, even with this one flaw, I think this is a brilliant game and deserves to be on this list.

6. Warhammer 40k Conquest

I have to admit I only played this game a few times and never actually bought into it and there is good reason for it, but still the few times I played it, it made a big impact on me and I always think of it whenever the subject of CCG’s comes up. Like Arkham Horror this was one of many Fantasy Flights LCG’s (Living Card Games), but it was a 2 player competitive game. I think this is one of the most underrated competitive card games out there today.

The theme and franchise appreciation here is important as the card game and the cards themselves capture the Warhammer 40k universe perfectly but what I think really made this game stand out is that the interaction and speed of play was balanced perfectly. It’s a tight game where players are making impactful decisions with each card play and games are almost always definined by decision rather than deck or card draw, it really is a game of pure strategy and I think that is actually kind of rare in card games. Most CCG’s are defined by deck building as much as strategy but this one is one of those games where what deck you played mattered considerably less than what you do with it at the table.

Above and beyond that however I think the asymetrical factions really shine here, each faction had its own thing going on and FFG made sure every faction of the 40k universe was covered before the game went end of life so its a self contained and very complete feeling card game set. The fact that it went out of print and is no longer supported doesn’t matter and thankfully they printed so much of this game its actually quite easy and cheap to get a hold of a complete collection.

Really fun game, I think this is still well worth getting today even if its out of print. Just a very good, self contained, head to head experience built around an awesome franchise and a great theme. A game made for 40k fans.

The only reason I have personally never bought into is that in my gaming group, at the time, we had a lot of stuff going on gaming wise and it was a rare situation where economically I had to make some tough calls. I regret that, I wished I owned the entire set and plan to some day soon purchase it for my collection.

5. Star Wars Destiny

Heading into the top 5 on my list, it would be criminal to exclude Star Wars Destiny, without question one of the best Star Wars franchise CCG’s ever produced. It suffered from a rather poor business model and went extinct rather quickly, which was a real bummer, but it remains in my collection and I’m to this day always ready to pull it out and play.

This CCG is quite unique in that it uses dice as part of the card play mechanic and it also makes use of a very tight deck which makes deck building a really light element of the game which is great for beginners. That said, I actually think the nuance of this game is difficult to grasp and many veteran card players felt the luck element of this built in dice mechanic made it a less competitive experience. That might or might not have been true, but to me, competitive is not a reason to or not to play a game, I think as long as the game is fun, that is all the juice it needs. Destinty was certainly that.

I think Fantasy Flight Games should have stuck to their LCG model for this game because one of the things that really killed this game is the fact that you often needed 2-3 cards (with coinciding dice) in order to make a certain card playable, this was especially true about heroe’s so what you ended up with is a lot of cards and dice that you really couldn’t put in a deck and remain reasonably balanced for the general power level of the game. This mixed in with the fact that most of the hero/villain cards where uncommon and rares, made collecting the right cards a pain in the ass and more a frustrating than fun experience.

In the end FFG also had a lot of trouble balancing this game and their were quite a few broken and OP cards as well as a lot of junk cards you would never use for any reason. I’m not sure if the issue was with a lack of testing or what but at the end of the day the game did have a few issues.

Nonetheless, I consider this one of the all-time great CCG’s, just a super fun, tight little game that was very approachable albeit probably one of the most expensive to collect, in particular if you were going for competitive play. These days you can still find it in bargain bins and I say it’s still well worth getting a collection going.

4. Android Netrunner

Netrunner is a unique entry on this list for two reasons. First, it’s the only game on the list that is truly asymmetrical, yet managed to be a well-balanced competitive one on one CCG. I can’t think of any card game in the history of card games that does this, it’s a white elephant in this regard. Secondly, this is the only game in the history of card games that I can think of that died at what I would consider to be the height of its success. Quite literally this game got better and better with each expansion and when it was cancelled they had released what I would consider to be the best expansion ever released for the game. How and why it was discontinued is just a complete mystery to me.

The wonderful thing about Android Netrunner was that it was one of those rare cases in which deck building, while important, was not the defining factor for victory. How you used your cards, how you approached each match and your knowledge of the game had far more impact than the strength of your deck. More importantly, it was about the fairest playing field in a CCG ever put out mainly because, like most Fantasy Flight Games of this era, it was a living card game so everyone was building decks from the same set.

I played this game exclusively with the same opponent for several years online using tabletop simulator so I never actually purchased a single card, but I consider those games to be among the card gaming experiences I ever had.

This is an auto-buy in my book, one of the best card games ever made with some of the best card art ever printed.

3. Game of Thrones The Card Game (2nd Edition)

We are now reaching what I consider to be the creme de la creme of card games. Game of Thrones the card game is without a doubt the king of multiplayer games, one that captures its theme with perfection both mechanically and visually.

I love this game, but like many CCG’s I’m a dabbler rather than a committer, but this is more a result of economic self-preservation than anything else. There are many collectible games out there, I buy into and pay obscene prices for many of them, and at the end of the day you have to make some hard choices, one can’t expect to be able to buy into everything.

That said I have friends who went ape shit and we have more than enough cards in the gaming group for us to have an occasional crack at this one and I consider any such opportunity an absolute pleasure.

This is a fantastic CCG that captures the momentum of the Song of Ice and Fire story, ensuring that characters are at the heart of the game, with thematic powers that result in play resolutions that truly tells a Game of Thrones story.

Of all the games I recommend on this list, this one comes without caveats, even if you are not a Game of Thrones fan, this is such a great card game that even without the appreciation of the theme, this is a great design. Good games like this come along only once in a while and they are not to be missed, this is an auto-buy in my opinion for card lovers.

2. Star Wars Unlimited

Star Wars Unlimited dropped like Thor’s hammer into the CCG scene, stealing the show and proving that there is plenty of fresh ideas and new life left to bring to the genre. This is without question my new love. I never thought anything quite as good as Star Wars Destiny would ever come around again and bring Star Wars to the CCG table top, but I was wrong, Star Wars Unlimited is perfection personified.

As of this writing, only the initial core set for the game has been launched with the first expansion only 24 hours away as of this writing, so it’s hard to predict the game’s future. That said, the first release was absolutely perfect blend of deck building, competitive play and precision design. This game is so good and I know I’m not the only one who thinks so because it is absolutely impossible to purchase unless you pre-order and anything that is in stock in seconds after it drops. It’s that good.

I will never proclaim a Magic The Gathering killer, because I don’t think any such thing will ever come along, but Star Wars Unlimited is objectively a superior game to Magic The Gathering in every measurable way, yet has the same addictive deck-building quality and card interaction that made MTG such a landmark game.

I don’t care who you are if you are not playing Star Wars Unlimited, you are missing out on the single best competitive CCG ever made by a massive margin, there is absolutely nothing in the same league with this game. It’s a modern masterpiece.

1. Lord of the Rings The Living Card Game

I will be the first to admit that Lord of the Rings The Living Card Game is a personal taste thing more than a perfectly designed game. This is my number-one choice, not THE number-one game. That honor goes to Star Wars Unlimited. Still, with that said, I love this game above all others for a single, indisputable reason and that is that it captures Middle Earth with such perfection, such epic scale and so much thematic joy through its gameplay and art that I honestly could not bare to ever put any CCG above this one. It’s not just the perfect CCG, its a perfect game.

Like most Fantasy Flight Games, this is a game from the Living Card Era which I think is perfect for a cooperative deck-building game. For me the reason I love this game so much is that it’s every bit as good playing solo as it is playing in a group. Its perfect with experience CCG players and complete newbies who have never played a card game before. Its scalable with quests that take 15 minutes to epic sagas that take weeks to complete. It has deep, strategic deck-building elements or can be used with default theme decks. In a word, every conceivable gaming situation you have, it has you covered.

Love this game, there is nothing in the world of tabletop gaming I can recommend more than Lord of the Rings the Living Card Game. It’s perfect.

    Top 5 Boardgames that were almost great, but had a flaw that ruined them

    I have not been writing enough as of late for this blog, but my life is busy, and writing is a hobby not a job so I often have to take breaks. One type of article that is usually easy and fast for me to write is a top X list, so today that is what we are going to try to achieve.

    This might be a wonky list but I do find that many games out there look amazing, have a cool franchise behind them or just seem like they will be great and end up letting me down. It’s how and why they end up on my shelf and on this list. Today we pick out 5 and talk about them. Here we go!

    5. Crusader Kings by Free League Publishing

    Crusader Kings the PC game is one of my all-time favorite strategy games, I have played it for more hours and years than I care to admit.

    A big part of the joy of Crusader Kings is that you essentially re-write history from the perspective of a single historical person, influencing people and nations around them. You create a legacy over time (a family dynasty) and you try to keep that legacy alive and thriving through your blood relatives, offspring, and noble claims. It’s a lot of fun.

    When Crusader Kings the board game was announced, I didn’t hesitate even for a second, it was on my shelf and the table at the first opportunity.

    From the reading of the rules, the aesthetic, and the very clear attempt at replicating the PC game experience, Crusader Kings the board game had everything going for it and it seemed like it was going to make a nice smooth tabletop transition.

    Unfortunately for all of its mechanics that do replicate the feel of the PC game and capture that experience, the one thing that didn’t transition particularly well and ultimately caused this one to flop is the overindulgence in randomness.

    One of the key mechanics of this game was random draws from a bag to resolve conflicts between players or between player and game, but unfortunately, the impact of this one mechanic simply had too much impact on the game, so much so that it overwhelmed any aspect of a strategy. Good consecutive draws from this bag that was used for resolving various conflicts could and often did result in such a huge impact on the outcome of the game that in the end, that is all the game is. Draw tokens from the bag, do it well, you will win, do it poorly and you will lose.

    It’s really sad because a lot of the mechanics in the game are well thought out, but this random token draw resolution system just breaks it.

    For such an expensive game, I honestly can’t recommend it, but it was quite ok the first couple of plays as it takes time for people to notice the flaw, but once everyone does, it’s a bit like a movie trailer that spoils the plot of the movie. At that point, there is no longer any reason to see the movie, other than just to go through the motions and that is exactly how Crusader Kings feels after a couple of plays.

    4. Archipelago by Ludically

    Archipelago is a game with a questionable theme, colonization, which rubs some people the wrong way. To me, it’s history, and I’m not phased by the fact that the history of mankind is filled with ugliness. I like playing games with a good historical theme and when that is mixed with dynamic world or engine building mechanics, I’m always ready to try it.

    Archipelago promised to be a kind of civilization builder with exploration mechanics built around a dynamically constructed hexagon game board. It had all sorts of clever mechanics, a kind of mixture of Euro mechanics with resource management, and some cool development elements.

    All together the game played quite well and although I will point out that some of the art was unnecessarily extra racist which did not sit well with me, the core flaw of the game was the hidden victory conditions.

    All victory conditions are hidden, you don’t know how to win the game or what to focus on. You find out at the end of the game what the victory conditions are and how you faired. As the victory conditions could be quite varied and there can be odd mixtures of things that matter at the end of the game, who won was completely random.

    It’s about the most nonsensical way of handling victory conditions I have ever seen in any game, it felt a bit like playing chess except that if you get checkmated, there is a 50% chance that you win the game and a 50% chance that you will lose.

    It completely ruins this game and unfortunately, this victory conditions mechanic is buried into the core game so deeply that there is no good way to house rule or alter it without fundamentally changing how the game is played.

    I hope that someday someone with some sensitivity training and some common sense game design experience makes a 2nd edition of Archipelago because I think there is a lot of potential in this one, but as it is, this is a very hard pass.

    3. Exodus Proxima Centauri by NSKN Games

    Proxima Centauri is marketed as “Twilight Imperium Light”, a promise many games make but few deliver. Of all the ones I have tried, only Eclipse The 2nd Dawn for the Galaxy and Proxima Centauri come close.

    Unfortunately, where Eclipse succeeds, Proxima Centauri fails pretty hard in my opinion.

    I will make the assumption that you know what Twilight Imperium is, if not, the basics are this. It’s a space civilization builder that is driven by classic 4x gameplay ala classic Master of Orion in which players are a space-faring civilization fighting for control of the galaxy. It’s a simple enough concept but the one aspect of this genre of gaming is that in principle, it’s driven by politics, negotiations, trade deals, and deception. In a way these games are two games in one, the one taking place on the table and the one taking place in everyone’s head. These are games where an action you take can be seen as aggressive, a pre-emptive strike, or even a prelude to war, and as such players often act in character and respond in ways that aren’t necessarily strategic, but personal within the context of the game’s story that ultimately becomes a sort of made up history between players.

    It’s part of the fun of these games and really at the core of why the fan base loves them.

    Games that claim to be like “Twilight Imperium”, which by all accounts is considered the premiere and undisputed king of this genre of games are making a pretty bold claim and have a lot to live up to.

    The issue with Exodus is that while it has all the troupes of the genre you would expect, in effect that core 4x gameplay, the game gives players no good reason to interact in that all-important diplomatic/negotiation-social interaction space. In essence, you just play the mechanics like you would any Euro game. Sure what people do affects you, but you don’t have enough take-that mechanics or reactions you could take to give the game that diplomatic and political edge or fear of retaliation or consequences to people’s actions created by other players for which Twilight Imperium is famous for.

    Additionally, there are some quirky and very intensive shuffling of tokens that just adds to the administrative end of the game, but adds virtually nothing strategically. It’s one of those games in which there are some great ideas but none of the mechanics are all that refined.

    What is worse is that it’s only marginally shorter than Twilight Imperium, which is important because one of the only reasons anyone ever really looks for alternatives to Twilight Imperium is game length. TI4, for example, takes 6 to 8 hours to play and one of the core reasons why often Eclipse is recommended is that it can be played in half that time with much of that Twilight Imperium core 4x gameplay intact. Exodus can’t even claim that as the game takes a minimum of 5 to 6 hours to complete and commonly exceeds that time.

    In the end, it just doesn’t make the cut as a 4x game. I think it’s an ok game, I’m not suggesting it’s bad but if you are looking to get into the 4x space civilization-building games, Twilight Imperium and Eclipse are superior in every category so I’m not sure why you would pick this one over those two fantastic options.

    2. Kemet by Matagot

    Kemet is, or at least, was kind of a moderately famous game mainly because they had Dice Tower that gave it a lot of free advertisement. I would argue, in its own way it’s a cool, very fair war game built around mythology which I think is a great theme for a war game.

    In Kemet which is a kind of worker placement war game, players essentially build up armies that include mythical monsters and fight each other for control of the map and ultimately victory points. One of the key mechanics is making “advancement” purchases that give you various benefits. Each of these advancements has a color associated with it and a kind of general theme to that color.

    The nice thing is that it’s not a dice chucker so there is a cool card mechanic to resolving battles, so all and all it’s very tactical and strategic. It is great, except for one flaw which once you discover it, the game is completely ruined.

    Spoiler alert, but the white advancement is at least 3 to 1 more powerful than the advancement of other colors. Buy those and you auto-win. If everyone is aware of this, the game is a race to buy up as many white advancements as possible, it is a mathematically impossible strategy to defeat. In fact, if everyone is aware of this flaw in the game, the game is decided by turn order and nothing else.

    This broken mechanic ruins the game once discovered, its a real bummer.

    1. Western Empires (Eastern Empires) by 999 Games

    I’m going to make this short and sweet because I think Western and Easter Empires, also known together as Mega Civilization, also known as Advanced Civilization, also known as Civilization is one of the all-time classic “BIG” strategic civilization building games out there. It’s not just a game, but a staple of gaming history and Western and Eastern Empires are the modern remakes that only make minor adjustments to the original with nicer art and components, maintaining its core, classic formula.

    It’s not just a game, it’s an experience, but it does have one huge fucking flaw (pardon my French but I want to scream it) and that is that the game has player elimination.

    This game was originally designed in the early 80’s and here we are in 2024 and this core, fundamental and game-breaking flaw that will keep this off your table is still built into the game. In fact, Western and Eastern Empires lean into this and have created an official rule on how to “give up and go home” if you’re doing badly in the game.

    The issue is that the game can and does take about 9-12 hours to play, maybe even longer if you combine both games into a Mega civilization for up to 18 players. It’s a major event game which is fine, an event game is an event game, it takes a long time to play because that’s what events are. That is not a flaw, but if 4 hours into the event you can be put in a position where you are asked to leave… hey thanks for coming, go home! Fuck that….

    To me that is just unacceptable, I would never invite people to my house to play an all-day event game and then halfway through it eliminates them from the event because they sucked too much at it. It’s no problem that there are winners and losers, but to get eliminated from play, I can’t get over it.

    I can understand that in the 80’s board game design theory was in its infancy but what a missed opportunity for 999 games to correct what is undoubtedly the most destructive and game-breaking part of the game. I own Western Empires but I know that I will never put it on the table, not as long as this flaw exists. It’s crazy but it’s quite literally a game mechanic that is extremely toxic and rude to the players, aka, the guests at your house that came over to have fun.

    It is the unquestionable king of stupid shit ever put in a game, I can’t believe no one has corrected it over the last nearly 40 years of its existence.

    News: Games Workshop goes woke the wrong way

    I don’t normally do news or politics on this blog for two main reasons, first I usually can’t muster the will to give a fuck about other people’s bullshit, sorry world, I got my own shit to worry about and it’s more important than you. Secondly, almost all modern politics are stupid and wrong on both sides lacking a moral compass, so there is no one to agree with, Liberal Democrats are every bit as corrupt and unethical as conservative Republicans. You are effectively asked to choose between two sides, both run by assholes, both lying and avoiding important context.

    Today I make an exception to my no politics rule and it’s only because my hope is that somewhere out there, perhaps someone working at Games workshop, someone with an actual moral compass and a brain has some influence and can steer their company away from the idiocracy they are heading for.

    My hope is that Warhammer 40k won’t be the next Disney, Marvel or D&D that catapults itself off the cliff of self-destruction in the name of fake morales designed by people who pretend to give a shit for people pretending to give a shit. As a guy who truly does not give a fuck about you, think of this as the only objective advice you will ever get.

    The Fake Woke Drama In Warhammer 40k

    For those of you who play and follow Warhammer 40k, you have no doubt heard about the latest Games Workshop debacle. To sum it up, basically, GW, a company that treats their employees like shit and underpays them (well documented) while obscenely overcharging for their products and taking every economic shortcut possible fucking over their community at every turn (well documented) has suddenly become concerned about diversity in the boys club they created and maintained for nearly 5 decades.

    Their big public”strategic play” to fix diversity in 40k was to add a female character to an all-male faction (The Custodes) and when the community called them on their bullshit, they re-wrote their own history and pretended like “women have always been part of the Custodes” and they had no idea what the fan base is complaining about.

    Now the gaslighting aside which is an issue in its own right, this is about the equivalent of a full nude strip club suddenly changing Taco Tuesday to a vegan buffet because they are concerned about the cruelty of how animals are treated in slaughterhouses. This in a place in which they facilitate vulnerable 18-year-old girls to sell their actual pink tacos.

    Of all the moral concerns one might bring up and wish to address about how Games Workshop operates as a corporation and its commitment to diversity, having more girls in Warhammer lore perhaps shouldn’t be their priority if they are actually concerned about diversity.

    How about instead you make sure that female employees at Games Workshop get equal pay? Perhaps focus on creating a business model that doesn’t exclude poor people who are mostly minorities? How about making sure that when I walk into a Games Workshop store, you have some actual diversity among the people running it? How about simply starting with creating some diversity in your own company so you don’t have only middle-aged white guys defining what diversity means or how its implemented?

    This is the Gender Pay Gap report on Games Workshop from 2022.

    There are a lot of ethical changes Games Workshop could make within its organization to address diversity and ethical obligations if they are actually serious about change. The simple fact that women are not represented in the company and those that do work there get paid over 10% less at GW than men might be a good start. Considering the company has a 70%+ ratio of men running the place with nearly 100% men in the executive branch, diversity at Games Workshop and as a result in Warhammer 40k is impossible. You want more diversity in your game, maybe start by having more diversity in your company!

    Here is my point about the drama and the push for diversity at GW. It’s bullshit, it’s a bunch of virtue signaling while they continue to operate their company as they always have, an exclusive boys club. Meanwhile, they shake their finger at the community and call them sexist because the community gets pissed off about some irrelevant lore retcon and how GW handled its introduction into the game.

    A brilliant political move designed to divert attention, I will grant you that, but, an asshole move just the same, one that doesn’t address diversity in gaming at all.

    The Reality and Problem of Woke Politics in Gaming

    The truth is that the fan base doesn’t really care about the fact that GW decided to add female characters into the lore of the Custodes, this is not at the heart of the problem. Women in Warhammer 40k is neither a problem or a concern for the fan base, they have always been welcome by the community. We love women in gaming, in fact, most gamers will go out of their way to make it as comfortable and pleasant an environment as we can. Gamers are among the healthiest and most forward-thinking people you will ever meet, despite media painting a picture to the contrary. It’s why women are attracted to the scene and why each and every year we get closer to a 50-50 split between male and female gamers in all genres. This happens despite, not because of the diversity push of game publishing companies and despite the fact that these white washed companies continue to maintain their organization as a boys club.

    The issue is that though women are welcomed in tabletop gaming, they have never been welcome by the industry and organizations. There has never been much in the way of complaining that there are not enough women playing Warhammer, least of all by women. The complaint is that women are not welcome to work at GW and the few that exist, do so in low level, limited influence positions. It’s a male-oriented hobby because GW ensures its a game marketed boys and men because that is where the money is because that is who has the most interest in it. It’s really that simple and there is only so much that can be done to get girls and women interested in painting plastic soldiers and playing pretend war.

    GW nonetheless, is solving a problem that doesn’t exist, it’s a problem they invented and are now solving in the most public and loudest way possible to ensure they maximize the internet attention and very much on purpose. The goal very clearly here is headlines, not change.

    The core issue is that this very public forcing of woke politics into the game as a message to create a new truth is a method of narrative control. It’s a way to control the conversation and to paint a picture of themselves as a “morale” company in the eyes of people outside of the hobby while they gaslight the community and vilify those who disagree with them to illustrate their commitment to this new moral direction they are pretending to take.

    The infusion of these politics and the method of injection of these politics is a new practice that companies that have a lot to hide employ to raise their profile, without making any actual change to their operation. By deflecting the focus of the conversation away from reality, into the realm of fantasy they get the headlines they want “Games Workshop goes woke”, but it does not require them to make any internal changes. A practice that has become the new standard for creating positive headlines for a company with an image problem.

    If you want to know how this plays out long term, just look at Wizards of the Coast, the makers of Dungeon and Dragons which has been pushing diversity for over 5 years now using this virtue signaling approach. Their franchise was struggling terribly after releasing an edition of the game that sucked balls and no one bought it (4th edition) and they wanted to push better headlines for themselves for their new edition (5th edition). They however had a major image issue, D&D was seen as a male hobby, because, effectively, it was because that is how the game was marketed for nearly 5 decades.

    They made all manner of gestures publicly to appeal to a vocal minority in the hobby but mostly outside media to garner as much positive attention as possible. In the course of these 5 years, however, Wizards of the Coast has made very little meaningful change in diversity, in fact, the more things changed on the surface, the more they stayed the same internally.

    Below you will find a picture of all the executives at Wizards of the Coast today, the company of diversity and virtue signaling. Yes, it’s just a bunch of white dudes with a few women sprinkled into the mix into irrelevant made-up positions like head of Kids Studio. Not a single dark-colored person in the entire bunch, it’s a White-Male run company. 5 years of virtue signaling has changed nothing about how the company operates, who controls it or who is in charge. Yet Wizards of the Coast wins awards for their efforts in diversity and is praised for it by a wide range of Social Justice Warrior groups. They even invented an entire diversity organization so that they could award themselves titles like “most diverse company of the year”.

    What is the point here? Well the point is that Games Workshop gives zero fucks about diversity, they care about controlling the narrative and message of diversity, and they care about the headlines. You can expect, like Wizards of the Coast and other companies like it, that the company will continue to be the white-male-run boys club it has always been. They aren’t serious about real diversity, they are interested in making sure you think they are.

    You want to be pissed about the lack of diversity in gaming, get pissed about that.

    How to do diversity the right way

    The answer is less obvious and likely unpopular by both the left and the right because it requires that you care less about appearances and more about reality. It requires that you understand that diversity used like a machine gun targeting everything and everyone at the same time, is actually a really terrible and destructive thing that serves no one.

    The problem has been and always will be that anyone who see’s unfairness and demands social justice is easy to manipulate and their targets are always the most obvious places where there is an absence of diversity without investigating why or asking whether or not there is a good reason for it.

    So far as the Social Justice Warriors are concerned, this latest fiasco at GW is a win for diversity. Games Workshop forced a female character in an all-male faction in a fantasy game in which grown men paint and move plastic soldiers around, take that! The fans are pissed off, the SJW’s are celebrating a victory, meanwhile, women got a grand total of jack and shit out of it. Is the pay gap fixed? Are more women working in gaming? No, they are not and the scene is setup to ensure that GW doesn’t have to alter anything at all about their operation as far as diversity goes. They changed some text in a book few give a crap about and now they just became the diversity good guys publicly. The fact that women still get paid 10% less than men and GW is controlled by middle-aged white men, no longer needs fixing.

    Ask yourself, who won here? Did women win? Did diversity win? Did the fan base win?

    Real change takes place when the monopoly on power on the organizational level changes and diversity exists from a natural evolution of the company’s real desire to change, to be inclusive by handing over creative power to a diverse fan base and the audience’s desire to consume the changes.

    The point here is that diversity can’t be implemented through company image and making minor changes to artwork or fiction. Unfortunately the left wants to implement diversity in this fashion strictly because it pisses off the right. This is about shallow political victories which are notably battles fought by two sides mostly made up of outsiders (people who don’t play or give a shit about Warhammer) doing little other than degrading the quality of the franchise and in the end facilitating the destruction of it. When the dust settles, these outsiders will simply move on to the next political battleground, leaving the 40k franchise a pile of smoking ash for the few fans that remain.

    Exclusivity is a good thing

    Games like Warhammer 40k are boy’s clubs because they have been cultivated by boys for boys for decades. This is why 40k is so successful. The people making the game are also the target audience. They know what they are making, who they are making it for.

    If women want to participate in this world, they should be given the opportunity to do so but its important to understand that the reason its a boys club is because women have shown very little actual interest in it. You need female fans that love Warhammer to get involved, they need to help create a version of the game for themselves out of love for the content that they consume, that they nurture. We need content created by female fans for female fans.

    Infiltrating the boys club and trying to turn it into a girls club doesn’t work. Think of it in other areas. Why is basketball dominated by primarily black men? It’s because they grow up with it, they live it and love it every day of their lives and when they become adults they are your super fans and so naturally many of them transition it into a profession. Should we have more forced diversity in basketball? You can’t suddenly say, ok from now on 30% of all basketball players have to be Asian because of diversity. Asian people don’t have the same history with the game, the same culture of playing it every day on the street courts in the sun, they don’t consume it and love it the same, its why they are underrepresented.

    Do you get it now? Warhammer 40k is a boys club it has exclusivity and that is ok. There are lots of things that have exclusivity for good reason. Black History Month, gay pride parades, girls soccer, the para-Olympics and so on. There is nothing wrong with that and that exclusivity doesn’t exist to gate keep people out of it, its simply focused on a specific group of people who it is intended for because it was created by and for them.

    As a straight white guy am I not allowed to enjoy and celebrate black history month? Am I not allowed to go watch the gay pride parade or enjoy watching female sports? Of course I am, but its not really made for me, these are exclusive things designed to create a space for certain groups be it black people, women, gay people or whoever. Its ok, it doesn’t make you a bad person because you want your own parade.

    Well 40k is a boys club, it’s for boys made by boys and that is ok. You don’t need to fix it, you don’t need to change it. Its not broken. Does that mean women are not welcome? Of course not, but it also means you can’t enter this boys club and decide that boys clubs are bad and make it your mission to destroy it and turn it into a girls club. That is unethical and its wrong, your not creating diversity, your destroying something that wasn’t made for you simply because it exists.

    I’m not against diversity, but if your going to do it, let it be a natural evolution. Don’t force diversity into the game for the purpose of showing how diverse you are as a company. You want to prove that, pay women their worth, hire more diverse talented people into the executive branch. Do that and diversity will be born naturally without any effort or publicity stunts required. Diverse creators, will create a diverse game.

    Warhammer 40k: Scratching The Surface

    From my last article you might have guessed that I have now committed myself to collecting, building and painting a Warhammer 40k army with the intent to join my friends on the Warhammer 40k, 10th edition adventure.

    I thought it might be useful to share my experience for those out there either considering joining the hobby for the first time, or possibly someone like me returning to the game.

    I will do things in Chronological order first and foremost, but I have snuck in a few sub-sections where I think they were relevant to the experience.

    Enjoy!

    What got me interested?

    The truth is that I have always had an eye for Warhammer 40k, its one of my origin games. What I mean by that is that, this game, along with Dungeons and Dragons, Zelda on the 8 bit Nintendo and Magic: Gathering are all games that sort of drove my early days of gaming and made me the gaming nerd I am today.

    Origin games are important, they define who we are as gamers and steer the ship. Its a rare case that I meet a gamer who can’t name their origin games with little effort. We all have them. For me, Zelda was, in a word, my childhood.

    In many respects, Warhammer 40k is a nostalgia thing for me and over the years even as Warhammer 40k fell out of favor, as have most of the origin games to different degree’s, its always been on my radar.

    The reality is however that 6th edition was the last version of the game I played. 7th, 8th and 9th edition all, in my observation where unanimously considered problematic. All the people I knew that continued to play Warhammer 40k, despite their participation where not advocates for the game. They all voiced a lot of negative opinions about Warhammer 40k to me, if the people playing your game aren’t advocates for you, that to me, is a clear sign that there is no reason to explore it any further.

    6th edition Warhammer 40k was the last edition I played. It had many very frustrating issues and Games Workshop had a lot of really poor business practices that drove me away into the arms of better games and game companies.

    10th edition Warhammer 40k however has been a very different story. Suddenly people who play the game have become advocates for it and the edition is spoken in high regard among 40k players in my circles. That got me interested enough to explore and ultimately try out the game.

    I felt very strongly that the assessments and reviews of the game were quite on the money, Warhammer 40k was great again and I got very excited about the prospect of returning to one of my origin games and building a new army.

    That is how it started, it was pretty straightforward. Make a great game and you can have my money!

    Early Exploration

    Despite my enthusiasm, I took a pretty cautious route at least, cautious by my definition. After playing a couple of games using borrowed armies I settled in for a lot of reading and research on which army I wanted to play.

    This was actually a lot harder than I thought. In 10th edition all armies are currently indexed, which simply means that most armies don’t have a full codex, having been re-vamped for the new edition and all of their army rules where available online. Suffice to say there was a lot to review.

    My decision wasn’t going to be made based on army strength or current meta, or anything like that. I did however want to make sure that the style of play I prefered was a core function of the army I chose.

    Meta Watch and GW’s commitment to keeping an eye on the health of armies is a great initiative and I’m in full support, but I neither play competitive or even outside of my local gaming circles so this information really neither impacts me or is relevant in any way. It also doesn’t reflect the strengths and weaknesses of armies in my circles which are vastly different than what is shown here. Local metas rarely match up with the official results.

    My prefered style of play was to effectively have a little bit of everything. I wanted good melee options and good shooty options, but I also knew going in that I wanted to have an army with a lot of models. This didn’t necessarily mean I wanted a swarm, but very early on I ruled out elite forces style armies and focused more on armies that would allow me to field more than your average model count.

    Custodes is perhaps one of the most elite armies in the game and they are very attractive, both mechanically and with their visually stunning models. I was tempted, as having individual models that are super bad ass I can imagine is also a lot of fun. I stuck to my guns however, I wanted the table overflowing with my painted models so I had to rule these guys out early on.

    This narrowed my choices down to one of the Space Marine chapters, though this was very tentative and I ruled it out quickly. Orks, which I thought where really cool but a friend of mine was already collecting these so it was ruled out on that basis alone. Necrons I considered, not so much because they were meeting my “more models” criteria but because this was the last army I collected when I quit the game. I ruled them out however for that reason, I had already collected them before and I wanted something new.

    Serious contenders included Astra Militarum, Tau Empire and Tyranids. It was going to be a tough choice but ultimately my decision had a relatively smooth process of elimination. I excluded Astra Militarum mainly because its basically the “modern human military army” and it just didn’t feel science-fiction enough, the models essentially looked like a normal modern army.

    Astra Militarum are really cool, but if you don’t look to close, you might think these were straight out of a world war II miniature game. They are just plain “army dudes” and while I think that is cool, I already actually have armies that look like this in my collection.

    Both Tau Empire and Tyranids offered a lot to like. Tau Empire was about to get its updated codex which would likely include a lot of new models and updates, which was exciting. They also look amazing on the table with a mix of modern, Robotech style models and the primitive but equally awesome Kroot. I loved them and to be honest, I was really close to picking them outright.

    In my opinion The T’au Kroot are the most visually unique and among the coolest looking models GW makes. These guys alone almost made the case for running a T’au army.

    In the end however I chose Tyranids for three core reasons. First and most obvious is that I’m a huge Predator and Aliens fan and Tyranids are an amazing combination of both of those science-fiction tropes. There lore also intrigued, I love Starcraft lore and they had a similar science-fiction look and feel. The fact that they had a newly released codex was also a big factor, it meant I was effectively choosing a fully support army which could not be said about most of Warhammer 40k at this stage in the 10th edition lifespan. The final thing that really tipped it over the edge is that the new crusade rules focused on Tyranid lore and I found that really exciting.

    I have no regret, picking Tyranids was an awesome decision that would turn out to have other cool benefits I would discover later on.

    Buying Into Tyranids

    Unfortunately I had missed the boat when it comes to Tyranids as the Leviathan Box Set was out of stock and would remain so, which most regarded as one of the best starter box sets ever made for the game and it was especially good for Tyranids. I got lucky however and I met a player who had already purchased the Leviathan starter set but he was a Space Marine player and wanted to shake the Tyranids side of the box set. I ended up getting all the Tyranid Leviathan models for next to nothing, leaving me with lots of cash burning in my hands to buy more stuff.

    There is no question in my mind that Tyranids is one of the coolest factions in the Warhammer 40k universe. Ever since their conception way back in the day, I have mused about collecting them, so it’s great to finally do it!

    I decided against however buying a whole bunch of plastic before I have had a chance to actually play with what I already had, as honestly I wasn’t sure what to buy.

    I ended up buying a bunch of painting supplies after choosing my painting scheme (more on that later) and I purchased the Tyranid Codex, The Core Rulebook and the Tyrannic War, Crusade rules supplement.

    These were all great purchases. The Tyranid Codex is filled to the brim with amazing lore, well organized army rules as well as a special Crusade Rules section specific to the army. I know that many people question the validity of purchasing codexes but in my opinion, if your going to buy the army, you should buy the codex. It’s just a really nice to have, its more of a collection and atmosphere thing than a nescessity.

    The Core Rulebook too is kind of a luxury purchase and not a necessity. The Core Rules are available for free online and frankly even when you play the game, using the core rulebook at the table is not really all that practical thanks to great digital support apps. Still I thought this was a great buy, less so for the rules and more so for the lore and atmosphere. It’s just fun to have something to look at when you get that Warhammer feeling.

    Crusade rules have been around in Warhammer 40k for a while, but the reality is that even back in the early days of 40k people would write stories and create campaigns for their battles. In many ways, Warhammer 40k is a sort of tactical role-playing game. Its lore and the story behind the miniature game is absolutely vital to its health and image. It’s why I’m such an advocate for the narrative style of play, in fact, it’s actually competitive match play that is a foreign concept to me.

    The Crusade book was simultaneously the best and worst purchase. Again the expanded lore is so good, the crusade rules are absolutely fantastic, my favorite way to play so for me this was a must have. Unfortunately much of the book (more than half) was dedicated to content that already existed in the core rulebook, like the core rules themselves. I get why this was done, technically I could have gotten away with just purchasing this book without the core rulebook and had everything I needed to play a full crusade campaign. But just be aware that you end up with a lot of duplication between the books when purchasing them. It sort of felt like this content should have been in the core rulebook and in fact, if you managed to purchase the Leviathan core rulebook that came with the Leviathan starter set, this is exactly what you would get. I don’t know why the core rulebook and crusade rules were separated in this fashion in the standard rulebook given that using the Crusade system is in my opinion, a core and fundamental part of Warhammer 40k gameplay.

    Getting Modern Supplies & Picking Paint Scheme

    Most people when they paint their army are going to go with something close to or exactly as depicted for their army to match up with the lore and feel of the Warhammer 40k universe. One of the luxuries of the Tyranid army is that picking a unique, one of a kind paint scheme IS the appropriate lore way to approach it.

    It was a lot of fun to muse about this but ultimately what I wanted to do was paint a Leviathan army, but I wanted it to be more gritty-fleshy-meaty and in some places more colorful. I ended up using the Leviathan paint scheme as inspiration to create a more realistic variant.

    Contrast paints are effectively a magic bullet in the world of miniature painting today. We minimal technique, skill or effort you can create well defined and visibly appealing painted miniatures. With more advanced techniques or combining contrast painting with other more traditional techniques you can create an amazing painted army in a third of the time.

    For that job I chose to do a combination of Contrast Painting, using a blending method, toned down and a bit darker colors with some occasional hyper fluorescent vibrant colors.

    I was easily able to locate all the supplies I needed and I have to say that modern painting is not only much simpler and enjoyable to use. After painting a couple of models I started to get the techniques down and though I made plenty of mistakes, it was very easy to get my painting done in no time flat.

    Small sample of my army. As you can see there are blending effects, a clear dedication to the Leviathan theme with my own little flavor. These miniatures did not take long to paint at all and thanks to contrast paints and basic techniques, it wasn’t really difficult. Believe me when I tell you that I have zero natural talent and everything I know, I learned while painting these miniatures. Its not an exaggeration to say that quite literally anyone can do it.

    My army isn’t 100% done at this point, but other than minor, individual flares, I know I have the method and means to fully paint my army from this point forward and it did not take a tremendous effort to get here. Its a very comforting thought to know that I will be able to paint up my army exactly like I want, get it looking really nice in a reasonable amount of time.

    To The Table and Beyond

    The final step of my journey was to build an army list from my constructed models and get it to the table. Now initially I was actually quite nervous about this. Warhammer 40k is a fairly complex game so far as miniature games go and while I don’t think the Tyranids are a particularly complex army to run, they do have some key synergies and a very defined style of play which requires a bit of finesse and understanding.

    My first game was a 600 point match vs. Dark Angels in which I fully expected to be crushed relentlessly. It turned out that my Tyranids held up pretty well, the game went 5 rounds with a final score of 48 to 46 with Dark Angels coming out on top.

    Dark Angels is another army with a released codex in 10th edition. They look amazing and my friend who is running them, loves them. He is also our best player, undefeated in our circle, which makes this the strongest army in our meta. Not so in the official meta, in fact, many argue they are terrible. Which makes the case that, what is happening at official tournaments and what’s happening at your local tables is not likely to line up.

    It was a tight game from start to finish, with tons of epic moments, terrible loses and heroic triumphs. It was everything I wanted out of Warhammer 40k and more.

    It was a messy game of course, I spent a lot of my time asking questions, looking up rules and trying to remember all the stuff my army could do, but I was fortunate enough to have a gracious opponent who advised me well and patiently let me figure things out. The game took more than 4 hours from start to finish and while I felt that this was pretty long for a single game my opponent assured me that games could range from 2 to 5 hours depending on the point count and circumstances of the game itself.

    This means to me that Warhammer 40k is always going to border on an event style feel, which is fine by me. It means I will probably get to play less often, but the games themselves will be more memorable. More reason while I want to play this game using the Crusade rules. If we are going to spend that much time on a single match, I want it to have meaning beyond the match itself which is exactly what Crusade rules allow you to do.

    My second match was against another novice player running Adepta Sororitas, aka The Battle Sisters. My friend had only recently bought into Warhammer 40k along with me and he only had a combat patrol army, which gave me an opportunity to try out The Combat Patrol rules.

    Another really amazing army, these Battle Sisters look absolutely awesome on the table. Some of the models and the lore behind them especially is bizzare, its some of the craziest shit I have read in science-fiction for a very long time.

    This match up probably would have been a lot tighter had my opponent had a better understanding of his army, but as a new player myself, I knew even less about The Battle Sisters than he did so I unlike my first experience against a veteran player, my opponent was not getting any of the clever advice I was guided by in my first game.

    I didn’t exactly crush him, but the end score was 15 to 35 for the Tyranids which when you get right down to it, meant I had nearly doubled my opponents score. Suffice to say my opponent forgot to use a lot of special rules and strategies typical for the Battle Sisters and I think had he employed some of these advantages the game would have been a lot closer.

    The Combat Patrol rules themselves where really not any different than the standard rules, certainly not enough to make a notable difference from my perspective. The biggest change was to the Detachment rules, which were unique for Combat Patrol for both armies and the units themselves which were slightly altered (In some cases better in others worse than their core rule counterparts).

    There was also a static secondary objective each army chose from at the start of the match, rather than the more dynamic drawn secondary objectives of the full game.

    It was a great match, very relaxed and it gave me an opportunity to try out some new strategies with different units.

    The main take away from both of these matches was that the Tyranids have a lot of flexibility as individual units, meaning their roles aren’t super fixed and this army is also really great a board control.

    I wish I had more, but my experience is so shallow at the moment with this game and this army, that I’m not sure I could come to any further conclusions. I do have some preferences however.

    What I like and dislike about my army

    I’m mostly positive about my army, all my units felt strong or alternatively useful in some capacity. While there are clearly some roles certain units have in the army, I think its big strength is the flexibility of the units.

    For example The Von Ryan Leapers have many useful talents that allow them to serve multiple roles depending on the situation. They can be an advance force to slow an advance, a great melee aggressor, a unit used to steal objectives opponents in their backline and my favorite, a ploy to draw attention away from something else I’m trying to achieve by simply being a menace on the board my opponent must deal with.

    I will say in both games this unit died very early on, so I may not be using it quite right, but I have enjoyed their antics.

    Most of the units have a similar duality.

    There is some stuff that even as a newbie to the game and army I found on. One example that sticks out like a sour thumb is the Winged Alpha Prime which is a fast moving, flying, melee leader unit. The weird thing is that they can lead other units, namely Gargoyles and Tyranid Warriors but they don’t seem to mess with either of these units particularly well.

    He is a poor fit for the Gargoyle unit since the last thing you want to do with those is get into a melee fight, they are a shooty unit if they fight at all. Equally poor are the Tyranid Warriors who have half the speed of the Alpha Prime, forcing it to give up its main advantage, speed.

    Strangely as a solo unit, even at its low point cost it’s not terribly useful. It’s a very strange unit, I haven’t really figured out what I’m supposed to do with as it doesn’t seem to fit any role particularly well, being a stark opposite to the rest of the army.

    Grant it oddities like that are fairly rare, but there are some I think are quite obvious.

    Conclusion

    So far I have to admit I’m really enjoying it and I’m really enjoying the fact that I’m enjoying. What I mean by that is, I think, to some degree, I thought the hype and novelty was going to be short lived and the reality of playing a GW game was going to set it.

    What has happened is that the game has surprised me at every turn.

    The books are great, GW’s commitment to the game is surprising, the game rules are really well put together, with a couple of exception, the vast majority of the units in my army are very playable. Its really well put together product.

    I talked about the expense of the game in my previous article so I won’t re-hash it hear, but he point stands. Its an expensive hobby, but Warhammer 40k has not been more expensive than other games I have collected. Not trying to understate the cost here, its ridiculous, but Im just saying its not more ridiculous than anything else.

    Its been a fantastic trip down memory lane, but that memory has been re-written, revised and re-released. Hands down, 10th edition is the best edition of Warhammer 40k to date. Well done GW!

    In Theory: Warhammer 40k 10th Edition

    Back in 2016 I wrote an in-depth article about getting into miniature paint/assemble war games. This article even after nearly 10 years continues to get regular hits and comments from my readers I think in big part because when it comes to miniature war gaming, very little has changed since the 80’s, to be honest. Sure the quality of the game designs and the miniature games themselves have improved one hundredfold, but so far as advice about getting into the hobby goes, everything in this article still holds up. I wouldn’t change a word of it.

    In fact that article is my mantra when it comes to miniature-war gaming and every time I get excited about a new miniature-war game, I re-read it to remind myself of all the pitfalls of the hobby. In recent years my interest in painting and assembling miniature games was revitalized thanks in part to games like X-Wing being refreshed, the fantastic Songs of Ice and Fire miniature game which I maintain is one of the best miniature games out there today and most recently I have re-connected with Warhammer 40k and the Middle Earth Battle Strategy Game thanks in large part to the new updated rules and modernization of Games Workshop.

    In today’s article, I’m going to talk a little bit about Warhammer 40k 10th edition specifically and why I think Games Workshop and in particular the Warhammer line is really going through a renaissance of sorts and how and why I actually gave up on the game about 10 years ago, but now find myself coming back to it.

    Warhammer 40k In The Past

    I played Warhammer 40k starting with 2nd and 3rd editions and then again between the start of 5th edition through to the end of 6th edition.

    I really enjoyed the game and actually, I look back on these gaming experiences with great fondness but I also recall a lot of frustration.

    This is the first miniature game box I ever purchased, it was colorful, it was exciting and at the time, my friends and I had no clue what we were buying into.

    The great part about the game was that the creative process of getting your army ready was invigorating and inspiring. Painting miniatures is a lot of fun and the entire hobby-craft part of the game was awesome then and it’s even more so today thanks to both the quality of miniatures and supplies, in particular, the quality of paints massively improving over time.

    Once your army was painted and ready for the table however is where a lot of the problems started with Warhammer 40k and ultimately where a lot of my frustration led me to abandon the game entirely.

    For one, Games Workshop was terrible at maintaining the game back in the early editions. They were very anti-online updates, in particular releasing information about the armies so printed books would be left unchanged even if they had glaring mechanical and balance issues for years at a time. I recall some codexes would go half a decade between updates. This meant that if you painted an army, that army would, depending on how long it’s been since the codex was updated, be borderline useless in actual play at the table.

    All that work preparing your army, lovingly painting it only to discover that every unit you have chosen is completely useless and out of date at the table is a disheartening experience, and having to wait sometimes through entire editions of the game to get an update took a lot of energy out of the experience. Often when a new codex would come out for your army, it would be designed to sell those miniatures so then you would end up with an army that is so powerful and unbalanced in the other direction that players would not want to play against you because you had such an unfair advantage. In a way, you were screwed either way. The periods where the game and your army were in a good place, where games were fun to play were few and far in-between.

    After many editions, this problem never really got any better and while I had a couple of fully painted armies, I found myself always playing with an army that was either too weak to be fun, or too powerful to be fun. The balance of the game was just terrible and I eventually gave up on Warhammer 40k altogether for greener pastures. Despite this transition, I always kept up with 40k on some level through other mediums like PC games and I think somewhere in the back of my mind I was always planning to come back eventually.

    What has changed in modern Games Workshop

    In general, three main events woke the company up and made them realize what was important about miniature war gaming to miniature war gamers.

    First was that at the turn of the century, both Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40k were no longer the most popular miniature games on the market. Competition had turned out several very popular games and even at Games Workshop, they produced the Lord of the Rings miniature game later renamed The Middle Earth Battle Strategy Game which sold better than their main franchise.

    What made The Middle Earth Battle Strategy Game unique was that its central focus was on re-creating the many unique battles and campaigns from the movies. The game fully supported (and still does) this approach and it makes this a far more robust and interesting game to play. It also had an excellent ruleset.

    The question was why? The answer was simple. Games like Warmachine and Horde, Star Wars X-Wing and the Lord of the Rings miniature game were all just objectively better games mechanically.

    To this day, ask anyone who plays Games Workshop games which is the best game they ever made, both mechanically, strategically, and narratively and you will get the same answer. Middle Earth Battle Strategy game is still considered to be the best ever made by GW.

    I think at this point, sometime between 2000-2005 Games Workshop realized that while the hobby-craft part of the game they had down pact, they certainly knew how to make the best mini’s in the business, this was simply not enough to compete anymore. You also needed to have a good game, something that makes that hobby-craft effort worth doing in the first place.

    The other thing I think they simultaneously realized is that while competitive play was a big part of the hobby, games like The Middle Earth Battle Strategy Game proved that narrative play, where games are more focused on story’s and events from the franchise played a huge role in what motivated purchases. Essentially, lore mattered a lot more than I think even GW realized even though I think 40k lore was always really great, I don’t think they fully recognized that this was actually a huge driving factor of the games sales and longevity of the fan base.

    The second thing was that Warhammer 40k’s scale was all or nothing. This was a problem for entry into the hobby. If you wanted to play Warhammer 40k, you needed at least a 1,000-point army and most agreed that unless you had a 2,000-point army there was almost no point in playing. This meant that the entry point for Warhammer 40k was a 500-600 dollar purchase with a few hundred hours of hobby craft before you could play the game “for real”. Not a great place for the game to be given the immense focus on streamlining entry into the hobby many if not all other games where doing at the time.

    This is a Tyrannid combat patrol army represents a little less than 500 points worth of an army. To get a 2,000-point army (a real army) you will need to collect and paint 4x’s this many miniatures. That is a lot to ask of a new player.

    Meanwhile, games like The Middle Earth Battle Strategy Game could be played (and played well) on a wide scale from small skirmishes with only a small handful of hero’s to massive battles. This was also true about a lot of competing games like Warmachine for example that was at the time also giving Games Workshop a run for their money on the lore and miniature quality fronts.

    Middle-Earth Battle Strategy Game had scenarios that required as few as a dozen models, to scenarios that would require several hundred models like the Battle of Helms Deep. Players could scale their experience and collections and grow with the game.

    Finally, I think Games Workshop realized that good support with digital releases and making the core rules of the game free was no longer negotiable. The game needed to be supported with regular updates to fix balance issues, corrections, and clarifications to the rules and most importantly they needed to listen to the community and track how the game was being played. Why players where choosing and not choosing armies or certain units and doing something about it in a timely fashion.

    How modern Warhammer 40k works today

    Today the world of Warhammer 40k is very different from where I left it about a decade ago. A lot has changed for the better.

    Combat Patrol & Entry

    The most notable change is the release of “Combat Patrol” a sort of basic version of the game that supports the core concept of purchasing a single box set that is fully supported as a game with free rules.

    Each army gets a combat patrol that can be purchased for around 100 dollars and the combat patrols are pre-constructed, balanced armies designed to played against each other using the same 40k rules you will play later in the full game, but with slight alterations to make the game more streamlined and easier for new players to get into.

    Combat Patrols encourage players by making their collection feel complete and playable as early as their first purchase and that is important for maintaining the early interest in the game and allowing that interest to blossom over time. As far as I’m concerned, this one decision by GW probably saved the franchise because without it no sane person would ever recommend getting involved with Warhammer 40k today.

    This was desperately needed in Warhammer 40k and it has turned out that not only is this format newbie friendly and welcoming for new players but quite welcome by veteran players as well as they allow for much shorter/quicker pick-up games.

    Now I will say that most veteran players will still want to play a minimum of 1,000 points and 2,000 points is still the standard game. Still, it’s nice to know that when you’re starting a new army, you can play a few games with your starting forces as you work your way toward your goal of having a full army.

    Crusades & Narrative Play

    Another big improvement of the game is that Games Workshop has now fully committed Warhammer 40k to narrative play via the Crusade system. The Crusade system is very similar to the Middle Earth Battle Strategy narrative system which allows players to replicate key battles in the Warhammer 40k universe as well as string those famous battles into a series of campaign games as well as rules for creating your own campaigns in which player armies and army leaders can gain experience, effectively improving through experience.

    This mode is supported by “story books” like the Warhammer 40k: Crusade – Tyrannic War which walks you through how to setup narrative battles and long-running narrative campaigns. Crusade mode is also supported in each codex, giving each army unique narrative advancements and campaign styles that can be run.

    Narrative play is just one of several ways to enjoy the game, but personally, I think this is probably the most fun way to play the game as it offers progression, and story and provides relevance to the battles you have on the tabletop beyond determining a winner.

    This is fantastic news for players who are not into the competitive scene and want to explore a less generic style of play with less focus on list building and more focus on creating stories for their games and armies.

    Active Online Support & Competitive Game Focus

    One massive improvement Games Workshop made was committing themselves to not only track but do something about the state of the game at any given moment, not just at the release of a new edition or the release of codexes. Regular updates to the point values of armies based on competitive results as well as rules changes that they track with a focus on ensuring that all armies meet certain win/loss ratios has resulted in a game that is generally far more balanced than ever before.

    This is particularly noticeable if like me you have been away from the game for a few years and are coming back now. In the days when I played, more than half the armies at any given point were objectively and unequivocally broken and unplayable competitively, in fact, many of the armies were so bad that they would be banned from anything but official GW competitions simply because they were too weak or too strong to qualify for fair play.

    The community engagement goes far beyond simply posting updates, but as strange as it may sound, this was a huge leap forward for GW who saw concepts like posting rules online or updates to codexes as a roadblock to profits. I’m glad they have woken up as I believe if it were not for their much-improved community engagement, there would be no 40k today. The absence of digital release was one of the main reasons not to play GW games.

    Long gone are these days of radio silence, GW is taking a very active role in making sure the balance of the game is well taken care of. That is not to say that they automatically succeed in doing so, some armies fall below the ratios while others are a bit too good, but the ranges of balance are much closer and the time to make corrections is much quicker. Generally speaking, almost all armies at any given moment are worthy of competitive play and those that fall behind don’t have to wait for years to be fixed.

    Lore Support and Writing

    This is not a category that will be super important to most players, but many of us are readers and we want/need good lore and good writing to support our experience. The story is a big part for me and I have to say, after reading the core rulebook lore, the codex lore and the crusade lore, I can say unequivocally that the writing for Warhammer 40k is exceptional.

    The Black Library makes GW games one of the most supported franchises in gaming. Your 40k experience can be so much more than just collecting and playing the game.

    Not only that, if you crave more from the Warhammer 40k universe you have the Black Library, a virtual utopia of content that you can endlessly explore. There is so much great work for Warhammer 40k for readers and lovers of lore, that I don’t think it’s overstating it when I say that Warhammer 40k is the single best-supported lore of any miniature war game out today short of perhaps Age of Sigmar which gets similar attention from GW.

    They have done an amazing job supporting the game on this front.

    The Supplies Have Made It Easy

    I’m not sure most people fully realize it but modern hobby-craft supplies that support the miniature game hobby today are overwhelmingly and vastly superior to anything we had 10 years ago. The technology has lowered the difficulty levels of creating beautifully, very professional (looking) armies within the grasp of even the most un-artistic people out there.

    Contrast paints in particular have expedited the time it takes to put a fully painted army together by about 90%. Like, I recall just trying to get a marginally looking army of 2,000 points fully painted would take me a at least 2 years or more of daily work to put together. Today, with contrast paints not only can I do it in a quarter of the time, the result will look like I spent hundreds if not thousands of hours meticulously painting my army. Contrast paints are a miracle technology that has completely changed everything, it has made hobby-craft fun even for guys like me who don’t have an artistic bone in their body.

    These are Tyranid miniatures I painted with contrast paints. Each one took about 15 minutes to get to this level of quality. I’m not saying it’s anything particularly eye-popping or demon award-worthy, but 10 years ago it would have taken me 8-12 hours per mini to get them looking this good and frankly, I don’t think I could get them looking this good without contrast paint, I simply lack the talent. Contrast paints don’t require talent, simply learning a very basic technique. Its….magic.

    Painting miniatures is no longer a roadblock to creating those amazing-looking scenes we see in magazines on your tabletop. I’m here to tell you that quite literally anyone with two functioning hands and eyeballs can create an army that looks like a professional artist put it together for you. I can’t even tell you how many people look at what I paint and question whether I did it myself and when I tell them, hey that took me 15 minutes to do, they assume I’m lying because it seems like it should be impossible. It’s not, contrast paints are basically, magic.

    Is it all Perfect?

    By no stretch of the imagination, there are still quite a few issues in the world of Games Workshop miniature games but I would say most of the issues can be quantified as common problems with miniature games in general, rather than anything uniquely problematic with Warhammer 40k specifically. More importantly, there is more myth and propaganda than reality about the miniature gaming hobby propagated by jaded players who have been unwilling to accept the realities of the modern gaming markets.

    The Cost To Play

    Warhammer 40k like all miniature war games and the hobby as a whole is probably the single most expensive gaming thing you can do. I participate in just about everything from CCG’s, board games, PC and Video games, you name something gaming-related and I’m doing it and there is no question in my mind that the miniature war gaming hobby is the single most expensive thing I do and by a considerable margin. Nothing comes even close, a single miniature army typically costs more than my entire board game collection put together. It’s crazy expensive!

    Between collecting the miniatures to form armies, the supplies needed to get them to the table looking good and the amount of time spent getting everything ready, it’s a financial undertaking that overshadows anything else I can think of.

    I love A Songs of Ice and Fire miniature game, it’s fantastic but to claim it’s cheaper than Warhammer 40k is outlandish. It can be, if you are willing to live with limited list-building options, the equivalent of collecting 500 points of Warhammer 40k and stopping, but realistically most players will collect the shit out of it and the result is the same as any mini-game… a cash drop to make you blush.

    Still, GW has always had this reputation of being overly expensive as a company compared to other miniature war games and as a guy that participates in several, I don’t believe this reputation is deserved or even remotely accurate. Yes, it’s expensive, but no, it’s not more expensive than other games.

    Take for example getting started in 40k with a combat patrol which clocks in at about 1140 Swedish crowns (110 dollars). Compare that to say a Songs of Ice and Fire Targaryen starter set which comes in at 1299 Swedish Crowns (125 dollars). Both give you a basic army to start with but not enough to play the full game. A typical expansion for Tyranids like something big and awesome like a Hive Tyrant costs 450 Swedish Crowns (43 dollars) compared to say The Targaryen Mother of Dragons which comes in at 499 SEK (48 dollars).

    Point is that actually when you get right down to it and you do some price comparisons, GW comes in lower most of the time. A Starter Star Wars Armada core set comes in at 1250 Swedish crowns and a Bolt Action Japanese Banzai Starter Army comes in at 1119 Swedish Crowns.

    Considering that GW products are far superior quality in every measurable way and by a pretty big margin, you get a lot more bang for your buck from them. It’s true that ultimately a typical Warhammer 40k army will cost you more than say a full Songs of Ice and Fire army, but that really boils down to what you consider a “full army”. These definitions get pretty tricky when you start looking at army building and competitive meta’s. I promise you that if you want to keep up with Songs of Ice and Fire meta you will not see any savings between 40k and AsoiaF. My Soiaf Targaryan collection is worth roughly 650 dollars and I’m still missing quite a few releases for it. Anyone who claims playing something like Songs of Ice and Fire, Bolt Action or Star Wars Armada is cheaper than 40k is full of shit.

    Suffice to say it is expensive either way, miniature war gaming is not for dabblers and while I would argue there are miniature games you can get into that can be cheaper if you can live with certain limitations than others, in the end, you are counting your investment in hundreds if not thousands of dollars to fully participate in this hobby regardless of which game you choose.

    You may as well choose the game that produces the highest quality product and there isn’t a miniature gamer on Gods-Green-Earth who could claim that there is a higher quality miniature produced out there than those produced by Games Workshop with a straight face. Miniatures GW produced 10 years ago are of superior quality than anything any company out there is even capable of producing today, let alone the stuff they are making today. No one can compete with GW when it comes to miniatures, no one comes even close.

    Edition Changes & Army Degradation

    One thing that is unique with Warhammer 40k and most Games Workshop games is that they do pretty regular edition changes, typically we get a new edition every 3rd year. The result is that there is a sort of degradation of your forces and books you have purchased.

    What this really means is that some units get replaced, some simply are no longer part of your army codex and over time you will end up with parts of your army you have collected and painted no longer being part of the new edition. The codex itself will also expire as will the core rulebooks and other content purchased that is connected to the current edition. This takes time to happen, usually, something you bought in one edition will still be viable and usable in the next for a while, but throughout several editions, certain parts of your army will simply no longer be part of the modern version of the game and the books will all be essentially made obsolete.

    Many find this cycler process frustrating and understandably so. Imagine spending hundreds of dollars and hundreds of hobby-craft hours to put something together, only to have the company that sold you that stuff, tell you “Hey, all that stuff you have, it’s now obsolete, throw it in the garbage!”

    Conclusion

    I’m a veteran gamer, you would be hard-pressed to name anything tabletop or digital gaming-related that I don’t know about and most of it I will have some level of expertise in. I scuff at complexity, but I’m conscious of it and the reality is that Warhammer 40k, when it’s all said and done while approachable, is a fairly complex game. Not just as a game but as a hobby in general. Its expensive, time-consuming and pretty elaborate on all fronts.

    There are much easier, far more approachable and truth be told, far better-designed miniature games than Warhammer 40k out there. In fact, off the top of my head, I could easily name 10 miniature war games I know are objectively better game designs and I doubt you would find people who would disagree with me, even the most adamant 40k fans. Like it’s not some sort of contested idea or controversial statement, most people know and understand this.

    That said I think what Warhammer 40k does well and in a sense does right is that they don’t make the game experience about the rules, but rather they make the game about the atmosphere and all of the connected elements to that game which combine to make it THE most popular miniature game on the market today and for the past 50+ years.

    It’s a combination of crazy good miniature quality, amazing lore, flexible game modes and epic event-level feel that combine to create a far more robust gaming experience than anything I can think of. Comparing 40k to other miniature games is a bit like comparing car brands. We can argue till the cows come home which car company makes the best cars, but driving a 40k is the equivalent of driving a fuck you looking, Ferrari. Is it a good car? I have no idea, probably not, hell it’s not even practical but you can’t help but smile and imagine what it would be like to have one.

    40k is not the best game, but it’s a game that lives in excess, it’s the 1st class of games, it is crystAl on ice, and it is the one everyone hates because it demands way too much. At the end of the day, all miniature gaming fans that feast their eyes on a fully painted 3,000 point army know.. they wish they had one. That is what 40k is… its excess, plain and simple and frankly, if you can afford it, its fun to live in excess when it comes to your hobby. That is effectively what a hobby is, doing something that is clearly a waste of time and money, but its fun.

    Dedicated To All Things Gaming