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What have been your experiences in playing GW other games besides WFB/W40K? How have you felt about the rules of these games? Did they exceed you expectations or did they just let you down?

My experience has been good. Most of the GW games that aren't Warhammer-derivatives are really good games. The original Space Hulk, 3rd edition Bloodbowl onwards, Epic: Armageddon, LOTR, Warmaster, and even BFG to a degree are great games with a strong replay value.

The only problem with them is from a commercial perspective: It's hard to sell them as popular miniatures games!

it really has depended upon the game...

Some I loved...Man O War, Necromunda, Blood Bowl

Some were ok...Epic, Space Hulk, LotR, Warmaster

Some left me really disappointed...BFG

But for the most part I would say exceeded expectations

Necromunda is my fav GW game. I also have Space Hulk, Warhammer Quest, have a Blood Bowl Orc team and a couple of copies of Tyranid Attack.

All of them are superior to 40K, even before 3rd Ed came about.

BYE

BFG is great fun, highly recommended.

Necromunda is great as long as you don't allow Outlanders to screw up the balance.

Mordheim is mechanically better than Necromunda, but has similar balance issues with add-on forces *cough*Beastmen*cough*.

Space Hulk is a true classic.

Talisman was fun when I could play for 12+ hours at a stretch. Now, it's kind of dated.

i enjoyed playing LotR for quick fun games as an alternative to lengthy WHFB/40K games for a while, but no one really plays around here...
getting around to selling my armies lol
its a bit childish and simple, but fun to play if you are too lazy for the real deal games
plus they have some sweet models haha
like the balrog and some of the characters

BFG is a great game. Get your group to try it and they'll always find themselves coming back to it. One of the best things about it is that it's fairly self-contained.

Biased for WFB derivities. Warmaster is the schizzle. Mordheim is fun for a night of pints and pretzels and a campaign is fun until a warband pulls away and dominates.

Always wanted to play Man 'O War, but was on a GW hiatus at that time. BFG is a hoot for a night of blowing the crap out of big ships; over a pint, of course.

Now if there was something like Mordheim for 40K. Yes, I know there was Inquisitor, Gorkka Morkka, Necromunda and to a lesser degree Kill Teams, but not quite the same as a 40K-based warband game utilizing all the races.

I enjoy Epic and there's a good review of it at http://dicelikethunder.libsyn.com/

Also BFG (although GZG's Full Thrust has in my opinion better mechanics, BFG does a good job of sticking to the 40k fluff that I love).

LotR of course rocks. The best 38mm ruleset GW have ever come out with. Ever. Period.

WAB is good - its basically WFB without the bollocks.

Necromunda and Mordheim are OK, but campaigns stall in my experience as people get bored and wander off, and they aren't much cop for one-off games.

Inquisitor is nice, particularly if you switch to using 28mm models instead of 54mm. But it requires a lot of preparation time and a GM, so I don't get a chance to play these days.

Warmaster/BoFA. 10mm fantasy never appealed to me. Don't know why, just not my cup of tea I guess. The rules get good reviews though, particularly WM Ancients for which the figures are much cheaper .

Aeronautica Imperialis gets good reviews too. Haven't played it as I think £30 for a set of rules is a bit steep.

When it comes to Necromunda and Mordheim, I've always found a non-participating GM to be of great help in maintaining balance once things get under way.

Gang running away with things? Give the player a special game against souped up Arbites etc to being him down a peg or three. Usuall way to do this I find is to 'snatch' his best Gangers in an arrest, so he has to mount a recuse mission.. The same can apply for Mordheim as well, though you may wish to have something big, nasty and well, gribbly shanghai his guys.

Other ideas to keep things sensible is to allow the newcomer players to only play those closer to their level, and never be afraid to forcibly retire someone's Gang. As others have said, once the initial argybargy is done with, you soon see one (and more rarely, two) Gangs or Warbands start to run away with it. If the new player has to play these guys, do something to balance it out, so that the New guy can get his Giant Killer bonus without getting, well, killed.

Only ones I've had a chance to try are Necromunda and BFG.

LOVE BFG, great game, lots of tactics and thought needed to play. Woudl recommend it to anybody. (unless you want to play Goua'ould... I mean Necrons...)

Necromunda was fun, but I got discouraged the second week I had to completely rebuild 4 gangers due to gaining/losing gangers/equipment. I'm not a terribly fast painter, so having to paint/repaint/convert/reconvert half my force everytime I show up for a game is a bit discouraging.

I do find it entertaining that LOTR, which is still a mainstream, fully supported, sold in stores GW game gets grouped in with all these secialist games though. Really reinforces the quote from my local Redshirt: "Everyone prefers one or the other, some people like Fantasy better, some people like 40K, then there's the 3 people who play LOTR."

Other ideas to keep things sensible is to allow the newcomer players to only play those closer to their level, and never be afraid to forcibly retire someone's Gang. As others have said, once the initial argybargy is done with, you soon see one (and more rarely, two) Gangs or Warbands start to run away with it. If the new player has to play these guys, do something to balance it out, so that the New guy can get his Giant Killer bonus without getting, well, killed.

There was a Necromunda campaign at my local GW not long ago, they addressed this by having a Gang of Space Marines (just a combat squad, nothing insane, like 3500 rating :p) used by the redshirt running the campaign, so if anyone got too far ahead of the rest of the pack, the Imperial Fists had a little intervention.

Haven't played LOTOW or LOTHS yet, but have both sets and am hoping to soon.

Necromunda and Mordheim are both awesome. BFG was okay. Haven't played LOTR but everyone seems to like it.

LOTW and LOTHS use pretty much identical (barring one or two tweaks I believE) the same ruleset as LotR.

LotR is a good game, and I'd play it anytime.

One of the problems with all the campaign-style games is that it's very hard to make it competitive when you have some people playing 6 games a week and others playing 2. I still love Bloodbowl, it's probably my favorite game. I like Necromunda, but never thought the campaign rules were the best (maybe it was just that I always had bad luck). Mordheim was good, but chicks with lasguns >> dwarves with axes.

BFG is a good game, but the original had a lot of charts and cross-referencing, which limited its appeal with me.

Hi all.
To be fair , my gaming group PREFER to play Blood Bowl,SpaceHulk, Dark Future , Man O War, Epic , Warmaster and LoTR than WH or WH 40k.

WH and 40k games seem to be optimised to sell lots of (Citadel) minatures .

From a game play perspective I belive the SGs and old boxed games are far better.

But each to thier own.

TTFN
Lanrak.

my favorite GW games are the "one off" games..

space hulk, necromunda, mordheim, (and to a lesser extent warbands and kill teams), warhammer quest and gorka morka.

as for LoTR, I think it's a tighter game set that allows for much more in the way of tactics and strategy.

Space Hulk. Brilliant game and extremely good first edition rules progressively polluted and ballsed up by additions made to sell more models.

Dark Future and Adeptus Titanicus which came out about the same time were rubbish. I never played them more than once.

I nearly played Blood Bowl (I bought teams for it) but I decided it was too silly. This was first edition. I understand that later editions have improved a lot.

I never played any of the games like BFG, Necromunda or Heroquest that came out in the 90s.

I did play some of the earlier GW games like Judge Dredd and Talisman. Judge Dredd was excellent. A tight set of rules and quality components that made a omplete, fast-playing game in a box. Talisman was another game progressively spoilt by the addition of extra sets for the sake of selling more stuff.

Necromunda: Cool models, shame about the 2ed rules and lack of anyone else putting any effort into it besides me. Abortive.

Inquisitor: Good after a severe rewrite. Solid ruleset once you chewed out the extraneous slowing-down crap, worked well for other settings.

LOTR: Played once, wanted moar dakka.

Space Hulk: Broken beyond belief rules-wise. Marines cannot win. Awesome terrain, though. Definetly a keeper if I can FIND it again.

Lanrak wrote:WH and 40k games seem to be optimised to sell lots of (Citadel) minatures .

I am not a trend setter, so I can't be the first person to have clicked onto this - why are people just seeming to get this now?

BYE

Skorpion wrote:Necromunda: Cool models, shame about the 2ed rules and lack of anyone else putting any effort into it besides me. Abortive.

As one of the suckers who bought the Necromunda: Underhive rulebook, I discovered something interesting about it. It contains every single error from the original rulebook. I mean that. Every single one. Every spelling error, gramatical error, formatting error - all of them. It is quite litterally the original book with House Weapons Lists and High Impact added, and different rules for flamers and Sustained Fire.

The living (now dead) rulebooks improved on this, but I was shocked when the book I bought was essentially a massive copy/paste job (especially as I already own 4-5 copies of the two rulebooks and didn't really need another).

BYE

I've played Mordheim and bloodbowl. Both games were fun at first but quickly lost value as the horrifying imbalances became apparent in each.

Battlefleet gothic was fun but it never caught traction in my area.

Lanrak wrote:WH and 40k games seem to be optimised to sell lots of (Citadel) minatures .

Yup.

And that is why small-model-count games like Mordheim and Necroumunda aren't a GW priority any more.

ShumaGorath wrote:I've played Mordheim and bloodbowl.

What size group were you playing with? Were they open to House Rules? Our group ended up writing a book of house rules for Necromunda to clear up some of the problems with it.

BYE

H.B.M.C. wrote:

ShumaGorath wrote:I've played Mordheim and bloodbowl.

What size group were you playing with? Were they open to House Rules? Our group ended up writing a book of house rules for Necromunda to clear up some of the problems with it.

BYE

The blood bowl league had maybe 14 people. The Mordheim had at its peak probably 15-20. The problem with both though is that winning teams at the start tend to win at the end. There is no mechanic for controlling the upward progression an early start gives you. In Mordheim certain warbands became unbeatable and in bloodbowl certain teams just had a much higher ceiling then others with where they could go with lots of cash. In both cases we used the most up to date books that were out.

Hmm... what we usually do in our Necromunda campaigns is retire gangs that get too big. Forced retirement really. If that doesn't work we'll organise to have two other gangs go after the 'big fish', so to speak.

One great example was a Genestealer Cult that became very powerful, with three Purestrain Genestealers, their Magus (who, no joke, rolled 7 powers when he was generated), two Hybrids, including one who was WS6 A3+1 and another with ten psychic powers, plus numerous Brood Brothers.

Sent the Eschers and one of the Orlock gangs up against it, and threw in a Ratskin Scout and a pair of Bounty-Hunters in for fun. By the end of the game the Cult had been dedimated, with two of the Stealers gone, and some Brood Brothers either wounded so much it wasn't worth keeping them or dead.

The Orlocks were not in good shape either, and with three members dying in that game and most coming out with serious injuries tne gang was retired, but they did their job. Both players had to restart and we avoided having a Gang Rating 3000+ gang running around for too long.

BYE

I've played BFG, loved it to death but it doesn't have a large following around here.

Specialist games in general seem to have a much better head for rules than the flagship games. If only they were better supported, though I think alot of it is that they are marketed toward experienced players/hobbyists who can ad-lib as needed.

H.B.M.C. wrote:Hmm... what we usually do in our Necromunda campaigns is retire gangs that get too big. Forced retirement really. If that doesn't work we'll organise to have two other gangs go after the 'big fish', so to speak.

One great example was a Genestealer Cult that became very powerful, with three Purestrain Genestealers, their Magus (who, no joke, rolled 7 powers when he was generated), two Hybrids, including one who was WS6 A3+1 and another with ten psychic powers, plus numerous Brood Brothers.

Sent the Eschers and one of the Orlock gangs up against it, and threw in a Ratskin Scout and a pair of Bounty-Hunters in for fun. By the end of the game the Cult had been dedimated, with two of the Stealers gone, and some Brood Brothers either wounded so much it wasn't worth keeping them or dead.

The Orlocks were not in good shape either, and with three members dying in that game and most coming out with serious injuries tne gang was retired, but they did their job. Both players had to restart and we avoided having a Gang Rating 3000+ gang running around for too long.

BYE

The leagues I had experience with tended to pop up and down fairly quickly. Usually in a seasonal fashion. So there typically wasn't time to slash the power players from the game, they generally just won the leagues and we moved on.

Skorpion wrote:Necromunda: Cool models, shame about the 2ed rules and lack of anyone else putting any effort into it besides me. Abortive.

Inquisitor: Good after a severe rewrite. Solid ruleset once you chewed out the extraneous slowing-down crap, worked well for other settings.

LOTR: Played once, wanted moar dakka.

Space Hulk: Broken beyond belief rules-wise. Marines cannot win. Awesome terrain, though. Definetly a keeper if I can FIND it again.

Marines can win Space Hulk. The (1st edition) rules are one of the best GW ever wrote. Perhaps you are thinking of a different game.

Space Hulk was fantastic, and the Marines can win. Some missions are more against them than others, but if you feel they are having a hard time, replace a standard marine with a lightning-claws before the game, and when the genestealers start to pile up blocking off the retreat put him at the front let him hack his way to daylight.

Space Hulk has a fair luck element too, if you get good command points and don't jam you stand more than a good chance of winning, get low command points and keep rolling those doubles, and they've had it. But this is all balanced quite well and a good tactical player can often offset some bad luck with the dice.

Necromunda seemed a bit slow for me as all the people were on foot, but it was fun. I played Gorkamorka first though, and that was great. Much lighter in tone than Necromunda it was cartoony crash bang whallop stuff that was good fun for an afternoon. I think I laughed a lot more playing that than Necromunda, so that's what scores for me.

They also did simplified versions of some games, I had Kerrunch (easy Bloodbowl) and Ultra Marines (easy SpaceHulk) which were ok for a young player.

Of their licenced games I've played the Judge Dredd board game, good beer and crisps stuff, simple and suitable for children. The Rogue Trooper game, more complex than the Dredd one but better for it, can be a very tough game too. The Judge Dredd RPG (not to be confused with the board game) was slow and rather hard work, the Doctor Who boardgame was dull, dull to look at, boring to play and seemed to drag on.

One game I always wanted to try was Dark Future and I'd quite like a look at Man o War.

I've played Space Hulk, Necromunda, Titanicus (pre-epic), Dark Future, the JD boardgame, the Rogue Trooper boardgame and the JD rpg.

The latter 3 because I was a 2000AD fan before I knew about 40k.

Space Hulk (V1.0) Awesome game. Still have the tiles, doors, bulkheads, and blips. The stealers and hybrids, and crappy plastic terminators went years ago, though. The stealers were lost during a house move. The rest given away and the metal termies used in their place (from the original terminator box set). I agree, the Marines CAN win, but it shouldn't be a pushover.

Necromunda: Started playing "Confrontation", the predecessor to necro in WD articles. Still have some of the 'Bratt' models. Played necro with a club and we had 6 regular players (no munchkins). Went for 3 years. I then moved away.

Adeptus Titanicus: When it was just giant walking robots with great big guns blowing the crap outa each other. My eldar titan was hated by my regular opponent.

Dark Future: A road-racing/combat game between two groups. The sanctioned ops (bounty hunters) and the outlaws. Very mad-max and an attempt to cash in on the post apocalypse trend. Fun beer and pretzels game.