It's War-Gaming Week at THG...I guess?

We don't get a lot of opportunities to do basic miniature war gaming anymore (this is one of the reasons I'm pulled to games like Valkyria Chronicles, but I went on and on yesterday about that). A lot of our time is taken up by RPG's with board games probably running a very close second. We've got a ton of games we could be playing like Rusted Heroes (a really fun skirmish game we just want to see get the support we think it deserves), War of the Ring, and of course there's always Warmachine/Hordes. We actually have other games that we had a hard time getting into like AT-43 which, although it offers some amazing pre-painted mini's, it just never motivated us to actually play. I still have all my U.N.A. mini's, and to be honest I'm quite happy I hung onto them since pre-painted sci-fi mini's are really hard to come by.

Another game that's starting to slowly entice me is Dust Tactics from AEG (picture borrowed from AEG). I love the aesthetic of AT-43 and am particularly obsessive over alternate world war stuff right now, so of course Dust Tactics is going to pull me in since the art design is basically the same guy who made AT-43 designing awesome WWII soldiers and mechs. Read the article over on the site and pay close attention - the base set includes a board, and it's modular. You know what other games have modular boards and are awesome? Tide of Iron and Battles of Westeros. I really like the descriptions (and speed) of the releases as described by that flyer. Depending on the price for the base set, I may just have to check it out.

The last game I'll talk about today that I never get to play is Games Workshop's War of the Ring (WotR). Sprung from the head wound of the Strategy Battle Game, WotR is Lord of the Rings gaming as it should be - with massive formations of men of Rohan outflanking hordes and hordes of vicious Moria goblins. Everything seemed right about this game including the lack of really thick complexity, but for some reason it's next to impossible for The Bro and I to assemble our respective armies and get in a game of WotR. We have a lot of armies to choose from as well. Although we didn't play it much, we collected the strategy battle game over its lifetime and have thus split our armies up so we each have good guys and bad guys to choose to play from - I have Rohan, Elves, Uruk-Hai, and evil-men-in-general and he has Gondor, Dwarves, Goblins, and Mordor. It just works. However, we haven't had an opportunity to even get one game in of WotR, and this feels like a travesty.

And now, dear reader, you can see where I got the name "Hopeless" gamer from - there are way too many awesome games out there and not near enough nights open to play all of them.