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Now there's points in Sigmar, my local GW has seen it become the most popular game played, and it has won back some people that had walked away from GW entirely. The game has gone from one or two games a week to around 6/7 a day, all of which have been matched play. From talking to the manager I understand that he has had to increase his Sigmar orders to ensure there is enough stock on the shelves, and from what he understands this is not uncommon. My local club that was completely against Sigmar, due to a demo game in which one player took the game to its competitive extreme, is getting hold of a starter set so they can drum up some interest in it. So I was wondering what the handbook has done for other communities, and if it has all been positive, or if there is some negative repercussions

That's what I've gotten from my two FLGS, One was caught completely off guard and was on back order for a week or so. Both of them have had very good months since the campaign started, and unlike the campaign as a whole, my area has been pretty hotly contested, which has added immensely to the fun.

What has the Generals Handbook done for my local AoS community? I think it might have made one. Before NOBODY wanted to play AoS, but now there is interest. Interest doesn't mean there will be a community but at least a few people are talking now.

So far there is 3 of us, and hopefully get our first game this weekend. Now I need to get started and paint my minis.

No affect at all. It sadly came out shortly after warmahordes mark 3, so it didnt even register. I am still the only AoS player. Dont know how much longer I will last either, downsizing my sets, but holding out hope. I have a color scheme I may try on a stormcast set.

We have a small but active 40k community. The handbook really gave them the familiar tools they needed to get into AoS.

Mostly casual but we still run tournaments, AoS is a seemingly perfect fit for us and we have at least 6 active players with myself looking to get into it as well.

Between the GHB and the world campaign our casual AoS scene has picked up tremendously. There has yet to be ventures into competitive formats using the Matched Play rules though.

Personally it didn't do too much around here yet. We already had a strong group of 15-20 going. The campaign is pretty contested minus death though.

AoS was starting to slightly over shadow 40k. After it 40k's space is a 2 tile table while AoS currently has a 3x2 and 2 2x2 if I remember right. Haven't seen a 40k game in weeks.

AoS went from 3-5 people to 10+ each game night. The traffic on our Facebook page has increased significantly as well.

I feel its a combination of the Campaign and the GHB. The GHB has a lot of the old fantasy players looking into AoS as well.

Sadly My local store just fell to chaos, but we golden hammer bro's are on our way to fix that. On the topic of popularity, AoS has made some serious gains since the campaign and the generals handbook.



It's even stolen some of warmachines steam (pun intended) from their new edition buzz. I love them both, so I hope there is enough market for both.

We have some very salty vets that are ruining it tbh. That includes the store owner.

Sadly if a store owner shows no interest then people feel justified to not play or support it.

The 3-4 of us that do play are having fun without them.

I'd say I'm in the boat of not-interested before, into it now.

I'm trying to grow my army slowly (unlike what I've done with pretty much every other game I've played), but the GHB really pushed me into actually buying models.

The only thing that makes me sad is that I'm planning on using a decent amount of non-GW models for counts-as Witch Aelves (since that kit is a bit pricey), so I'm not sure how much I can play in the official GW stores.

IMHO, in our meta, the General's Handbook and the points system in particular have encouraged a few players to take a 2nd look at AoS.

Atm, it's a case of "let's give it another chance". However, I think the jury is still out.

While our FLGS is very supportive of AoS, going so far as to prepare special scenic tables for our Season of War scenario games, our players have yet to dive into AoS.

I was one of those weary about the gh, I thought it might be a quick fix that would ultimately fail and also ultimately alienate those already playing

I'm happy to admit I couldn't have been more wrong! I see loads more being played, discussed and bought. The shift has been incredible.

Again, my group was slightly different since we had a pretty strong following for a while now, but the campaign did make it more frequent. Speaking of the campaign, my store is very order orientated, and that Slaves to Darkness box is looking mighty tempting...

I know it seems to be popular at the local GW (not sure how popular it was before). However, I also notice that almost everyone wants to play using Matched Play, regardless of the fact it removes a lot of freedom and flexibility.that I felt wasn't that bad with AoS if you weren't being a jerk.

That was to be expected. A giant chunk of players won't touch anything without points.

There are a couple guys here that will do narrative games without points but the vast majority (I'd say about 31 out of the 35 people that go to the gw store and play AOS here) are points-only matched-play only.

 statu wrote:
Now there's points in Sigmar, my local GW has seen it become the most popular game played, and it has won back some people that had walked away from GW entirely. The game has gone from one or two games a week to around 6/7 a day, all of which have been matched play. From talking to the manager I understand that he has had to increase his Sigmar orders to ensure there is enough stock on the shelves, and from what he understands this is not uncommon. My local club that was completely against Sigmar, due to a demo game in which one player took the game to its competitive extreme, is getting hold of a starter set so they can drum up some interest in it. So I was wondering what the handbook has done for other communities, and if it has all been positive, or if there is some negative repercussions

this is pretty much the reality at my local gw as well. there are defiantly plenty of 40k players and most of us gaming AOS also play 40k but we are all about sigmar at the moment. It helps that the manager has been doing nothing but painting and playing sigmar. It is pretty much a points based game right now though. There is a line in the shop of people waiting for a table and often team games to fit every one wanting to play.

This is a good thing. We have some gamey fellows and others just wanting to play fun games. Right now 40k is an after thought.

A few more people playing than before (most of our fantasy players were already converted to AoS), but the games have turned from fun battles (from what I can tell as a spectator) to ruthless min-maxing now points and troops are a thing.

 Drasius wrote:
A few more people playing than before (most of our fantasy players were already converted to AoS), but the games have turned from fun battles (from what I can tell as a spectator) to ruthless min-maxing now points and troops are a thing.

How has adding points changed the nature of the game that much in such a short time? I mean naturally it will balance out armies and give people what literally almost every previous player wanted, which was a points system.

Now we have both, no one is forced to use the points if you want to play the open way.

I wasn't trying to debate necessarily as much as learn how this affected the community. From what I could tell, its what 90% of the population wanted.

Now we have both, no one is forced to use the points if you want to play the open way.

Unless you want to play with yourself then in a lot of cases you will have to use points. Very very very few people where I am would consider no points as an option, and from what I am reading on forums that is pretty much a universal.

It is indeed what the vast majority wanted. But it also does lead to min/maxing very much as thats the nature of the beast.

You can't min/max without points so when there were no points it was basically eyeball it but there was no efficiency coefficient to gauge because there were no limits.

Now that there are limits people are figuring out quickly what is the most cost effective builds. In my area, a chaos player without 6 or 9 storm fiends is very rare, for example, because storm fiends do a ton of damage and for their cost are very efficient at it.

That nearly every chaos player despite main build type are also including 6 - 9 stormfiends is an unfortunate (IMO) side effect of point systems, especially point systems that undercost / undervalue models and don't fix it later.

We had ZERO players within an hour of me six months ago. Since even the announcement of the book, and especially since I got my early copy and began running games for a few stores, we've had maybe 10-12 new players, and more interest.

Its been a huge improvement around here, enough so that I am finding AoS my "main" game. Matched-Play ended up being exactly what my local players wanted/needed.

 Rezyn wrote:

How has adding points changed the nature of the game that much in such a short time?

The answer is quite simple. Math hammer. Now nerds and geeks can prove their superiority over others now.

Also this quote in my sig should explain it.

Auticus wrote: Or in summation: its ok to exploit shoddy points because those are rules and gamers exist to find rules loopholes (they are still "legal"), but if the same force can be composed without structure, it emotionally feels "wrong".

Davor wrote:

 Rezyn wrote:

How has adding points changed the nature of the game that much in such a short time?

The answer is quite simple. Math hammer. Now nerds and geeks can prove their superiority over others now.

Also this quote in my sig should explain it.

Auticus wrote: Or in summation: its ok to exploit shoddy points because those are rules and gamers exist to find rules loopholes (they are still "legal"), but if the same force can be composed without structure, it emotionally feels "wrong".

Or it's made the game more popular because it's actually finished rather than a piece of rubbish and isn't auto win for summoning armies anymore.

The downside is some people are bitter now.

pm713 wrote:

Davor wrote:

 Rezyn wrote:

How has adding points changed the nature of the game that much in such a short time?

The answer is quite simple. Math hammer. Now nerds and geeks can prove their superiority over others now.

Also this quote in my sig should explain it.

Auticus wrote: Or in summation: its ok to exploit shoddy points because those are rules and gamers exist to find rules loopholes (they are still "legal"), but if the same force can be composed without structure, it emotionally feels "wrong".

Or it's made the game more popular because it's actually finished rather than a piece of rubbish and isn't auto win for summoning armies anymore.

The downside is some people are bitter now.

the game was great without points people just couldn't look past narrow view of how wargames should be played

Summoning armies are way too easy to beat I don't know where people get that.

 namiel wrote:

pm713 wrote:

Davor wrote:

 Rezyn wrote:

How has adding points changed the nature of the game that much in such a short time?

The answer is quite simple. Math hammer. Now nerds and geeks can prove their superiority over others now.

Also this quote in my sig should explain it.

Auticus wrote: Or in summation: its ok to exploit shoddy points because those are rules and gamers exist to find rules loopholes (they are still "legal"), but if the same force can be composed without structure, it emotionally feels "wrong".

Or it's made the game more popular because it's actually finished rather than a piece of rubbish and isn't auto win for summoning armies anymore.

The downside is some people are bitter now.

the game was great without points people just couldn't look past narrow view of how wargames should be played

Summoning armies are way too easy to beat I don't know where people get that.

The game was horrific. It took a negotiation to have a game that approached fair. If that was your idea of good then goodness knows what you think was bad.

I liked and still do like aos without points, it's great fun in the situation I am in, can understand how it'd differ for others. Points are grand though for making the game more popular which is good as it is less likely to be cancelled. Fortunately I don't play against min maxers or un fluffy armies, thankfully. Can see how those who can o ly get that sort of game now might dislike the book.

It's a bit sad in a way that the experiment failed, romantic war gaming is dead and gone.

Yea it was a fun social experiment, but it demonstrated pretty much on a global scale where the current modern wargaming community lies in its mindset and what they want, so now there can be no debate or questioning or wondering.

 auticus wrote:
Yea it was a fun social experiment, but it demonstrated pretty much on a global scale where the current modern wargaming community lies in its mindset and what they want, so now there can be no debate or questioning or wondering.

I don't think that's true, I think it just speaks to what people expect out of certain kinds of games.

Stuff like Frostgrave snuck up and carved a surprisingly nice little niche for itself, with (now) three expansion books, and another two on the way, plus a whole model line. And that entire game hinges on fun, interesting, fluffy campaign gaming with a group of friends.

There will always be games of all kinds out there for those who want to find something catering to their specific group's needs.

Its just that in "the" game(s) that aim to be the biggest/most popular, there needs to be a standard mode in place for complete strangers to be able to instantly set up a vaguely balanced game. Launch AoS wasn't that game, and as a result had a ceiling on how popular it could be. Now? The sky is the limit as it hasn't forgone its launch mode for people gaming with friends... It just shores up gaps on the other end of the communities wants.

And yes, people like Davor will immediately cry "Bu... but... power gamers?!?!", but keep in mind he not only wasn't playing the game a month ago, he in fact was posting here how much he hated the fluff, etc... He's gone to wild about the game in the span of time since the ability to discuss it, analyze it, etc... grew massively thanks to the mere existence of this handbook.

pm713 wrote:

Or it's made the game more popular because it's actually finished rather than a piece of rubbish and isn't auto win for summoning armies anymore.

I can say the same thing exactly for 40K right now. I can say the EXACT thing for Fantasy back in the day as well. Nothing has changed. Nothing will change. The sun will rise, water is wet, and someone some where will always take advantage with plastic toy soldiers.

Now that said, are you speaking from experience? Has this exact situation happened to you?