A time 13 years ago back in the year 2002. Roughly 5 or so years before I knew wargaming was a thing. Being the eldest of 4 siblings at home at the time and the eldest of about 40+ cousins in the area I had plenty of access to smaller children to entertain myself with. My favourite toys used to be army men. The ones made of cheap recycled plastic (I could not afford the vastly superior airfix ones yet):
Over time my collection became vast and contained napoleonics, indian wars, both world wars and modern soldiers of varying colours and nationalities. At my age (6 at the time) playing with toys was of limited fun and thus began the age of wargames. It began with my younger brother and I flinging marbles across our playroom (which was rather long) and had many obstacles and placing of models was highly important to success. Of course back then we had even number of themed army men each. Frequently my french grenadiers of 1815 defeated my brothers cold war style army men which I still found pretty funny.
Now you may be wondering what this has to do with Age of Sigmar? Well after marble flicking became dull despite attempts to spice it up we began to create rules. Everything could move 8cms (inches was not something I knew except from movies) and shoot 30cm. It was a 4+ to hit with +1 modifier for moving and the enemy in cover. So hitting someone in cover while moving was a 6+. If someone was hit they got a 6+ save or died with -1 for a medic within 10cm and -1 for cover. Machine guns fired 4 shots each and bazookas hit on a 6+ but killed instantly. Guns (artillery, mortars etc) had a 5cm area of effect which you then rolled to hit and wound (cant remember the rules we used here). Officers gave a bonus to any roll to your men within 10cm and always gave a bonus against pinning. Pinning was if you got hit and did not die your model lay down unable to do anything but on a 5+ would get back up. Since we had very different collections we ditched the old way of doing it (even collection) and simply included whatever we wanted. I had more men but my brother had a lot of "big guns". I cannot for the life of me remember the vehicle or aircraft rules but we didnt use them often either. Nor do I remember rules for radios, smoke or flame throwers. I think melee was simply anyone within 3 ish
cm got a shooting attack (to represent bayonet) against them. Very quickly we had a working game with just verbally communicated rules.
When I saw the rules for Age of Sigmar it felt like I just saw a game that felt similar to the one we played years ago with Red Coats driving out the Imperial Japanese Army from the garden patch, weathering mortar fire and
MGs to eventually bring victory or when the American Indians allied with the Cold War soldiers to eradicate the Cowboy, WW1 Scottish alliance in the laundry wasteland. Where we simply brought whatever we wanted against each other and had fun (mostly because we had never seen or played a wargame before) and most of the rolling was incredibly basic with little variation. We came across many loop holes and we had to simply handwave a new rule in to deal with it (unlike
GW we didn't get paid for this so it's excusable to have these issues with our rules I think
).
I think this is why so many people consider Age of Sigmar as an amature. Because it has that same feel as a game 2 young school boys would write to go with their airfix miniatures. In fact I would go as far to say that Age of Sigmar would feel like a small step up in some ways (downgrade in a some other ways) to 8 year old me playing crude wargames. We could get anyone our age playing in 10 minutes and they would get the hang of the rules (maybe not know how to win straight away but most of the rules are very fast and easy) unlike most wargames where it takes some effort to learn. No structure or limits meant we could have armies of whatever we wanted made up of whatever we owned so making an army was super easy. Grab whatever we wanted.
Anyway I went to my parents place and saw my 5 year old brother playing with some of those army men and it reminded me of my early days of wargaming which then immediately reminded me of Age of Sigmar. While this definitely has it's charm and like all games has potential for fun I think for most people (kids included it seems here) it gets old very fast and people are left thinking the game could be more. Perhaps
AOS was designed this way? Who knows.
