Spring Clean Challenge: Every Game is Miniatures Agnostic

Thanks to the Spring Clean Challenge nudging me along, I was able to play all four of the games that had until now been sitting on my shelf unplayed, so we’ll call that a victory for sure. I enjoyed some games more than others, but none of them were bad and each had a unique feature or mechanism to offer.

Although it was the most fiddly, I think Violent Dark was my favorite of the four. It was very focused on a specific theme and mood, and I think that was to its benefit. In the past I’ve always had an eye out for a good generic system that I could use with multiple genres and sets of models, mainly so I wouldn’t have to keep learning new rules sets, but I now stand convinced that the best rules are going to be tailored to the specific setting and genre you want to play out on the table top.

Tribal was the winner in terms of raw mechanics. Its card-based system for moving, fighting and even generating in-game objectives was very engaging. What it lacked was personality — there aren’t really specific factions with different play styles, just a list of skills and abilities that every model has access to, and the period of history the game wants to evoke is very broad, asking the players to supply immersive details for themselves. My objective with Tribal was as a potential alternate rules set for Savage Core, so if I want to continue with that I’ll need to work out ways to import Savage Core‘s abundance of personality.

One-Hour Skirmish Wargames has potential if I want to play out a specific scenario, which I believe is the game’s intent from the start. It might be another possibility as an alternate set of movement and combat rules to try to drop into other games, especially if the goal is to reduce the frustration caused by egregious dice rolling…

I didn’t really care for the game mechanisms in The Doomed, but its system for generating game objectives and NPCs is great. I loved the use of competitive objectives combined with, but separate from, a non-player threat that may force the players to temporarily join forces while they deal with the bigger problem. The ability to tailor the style of game by choosing to play with a conflict OR a threat OR both should make for a lot of variety, and I don’t see why this couldn’t be adapted to serve another game system (perhaps even one of those mentioned above).

I’ll definitely be playing Violent Dark and Tribal again if I can squeeze them into my crowded gaming schedule, and I may well look at swiping some of the conflict and NPC threat ideas from The Doomed. I’m not sure about One-Hour Skirmish Wargames — I do think it has potential, but scenarios for it will need to be crafted with some care and I’m not sure if I have the bandwidth for that.