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PhantomViper wrote:


I'll give you an example of a truly narrative game: in Force on Force the units that you an your opponent use are defined by the story of the mission that you are playing.

A pre-made story chewed for you by someone else isn't what I understand under narrative gaming.

 Zweischneid wrote:

Herzlos wrote:

So the reason the 40K rules are good at what they do, is because the designers tell you the rules aren't important?

Not in the "written-in-stone" sense they are used in other games.

Of course the 40K rules are important, but trying to communicate that they are trumped by other, more relevant factors to people who aren't used to that kind of mature gaming and have no experience outside of games that hold your hand for every little step is often abbreviated (and best achieved) by initially communicating that people should worry less about the rules and get the important things right first.

You do realize that it's possible to have a well written, tight, clear and concise rules set while simultaneously having a preface to those rules telling the players they're free to change or modify them for cinematic effect, if they so choose, right? There is nothing mutually exclusive about a strong rules set and a strong narrative experience.

Heck, I'd argue that a strong rules set make it easier for a person to have an outside-the-box rules experience; at least in that case, you don't have to negotiate the basics before deciding what to change for the narrative.

weeble1000 wrote:


Give it up Zwei, you just torpedoed your position and have lost all semblance of credibility.

I have not torpedoed my position.

I have answered question specific to 40K, all of which are admittedly irrelevant to the original topic... e.g. that different games try to do different things (and the gaming-hobby is richer the more different design goals are out there), irrespective of whether 40K is part of that discussion or not.

We can have the same discussion about Chess and Monopoly, if you prefer (and if me talking about 40K keeps people going on a tangent).

Chess is a piss-poor set of rules for Monopoly and vice versa. They simply ain't the same thing. The gaming-world is richer for having both, rather than only one or the other. Hell, I personally own both, and I see no need to ditch one because the other is "better".

 Zweischneid wrote:

Herzlos wrote:

So the reason the 40K rules are good at what they do, is because the designers tell you the rules aren't important?

Not in the "written-in-stone" sense they are used in other games.

Of course the 40K rules are important, but trying to communicate that they are trumped by other, more relevant factors to people who aren't used to that kind of mature gaming and have no experience outside of games that hold your hand for every little step is often abbreviated (and best achieved) by initially communicating that people should worry less about the rules and get the important things right first.

Again, Jervis Johnson, etc.., have frequently and repeatedly used the "buffet" or "spice rack" analogy to explain how the rules for 40K offer players a wide selection of things that player chose (economically and selectively) from in the pre-game negotiation. Approached in this manner, the rules are both "important" and work very well.

None of the other games are "written-in-stone" either, and I've never had to play them as such. The other games though start with a clearer, more balanced playing field where you can modify things if you chose whilst still giving you a good baseline. With 40K you have the opposite approach; where the rules are a barely useable mess requiring you to modify things to get a game to work at all, and this is waved away with the "spice rack analogy". You're essentially saying that the rules aren't fit for purpose, but it's OK because the aim is to discuss which part of the rules you want to ignore before you play. Sorry, but for a £50 rule book I expect better.

There's nothing "mature" about having to spend precious gaming time discussing which parts of the rules you're going to apply tonight, and it makes it an absolute nightmare for pick-up games thus completely countering the reason 40K is so successful; ubiquity.

There are hosts of casual themed games (like Hail Caesar, it's opening pages explain how it's meant to be played with beer and sound effects), yet it's still clearly written and a pretty tight ruleset which allows you to forge all the narrative you want without having to house-rule anything.

 Zweischneid wrote:

PhantomViper wrote:


I'll give you an example of a truly narrative game: in Force on Force the units that you an your opponent use are defined by the story of the mission that you are playing.

A pre-made story chewed for you by someone else isn't what I understand under narrative gaming.

REALLY? That is all that you took out of my post?

I show you an example of a game actively promoting your beloved force unbalance through active game mechanics that reward both players and all that you take out of it is that I was talking about a "pre-made story chewed for you by someone"?

And I wasn't actually. The game comes with a set of pre-made missions based on actual historic battles, but the meat of the rules is concerned with giving the players the tools so that they can create those types of narrative missions and campaigns on their own.

Again, what rules in 40k actively promote a narrative gameplay that doesn't exist in X-Wing as well?

 Zweischneid wrote:

weeble1000 wrote:


Give it up Zwei, you just torpedoed your position and have lost all semblance of credibility.

I have not torpedoed my position.

I have answered question specific to 40K, all of which are admittedly irrelevant to the original topic... e.g. that different games try to do different things (and the gaming-hobby is richer the more different design goals are out there), irrespective of whether 40K is part of that discussion or not.

We can have the same discussion about Chess and Monopoly, if you prefer (and if me talking about 40K keeps people going on a tangent).

Chess is a piss-poor set of rules for Monopoly and vice versa. They simply ain't the same thing. The gaming-world is richer for having both, rather than only one or the other. Hell, I personally own both, and I see no need to ditch one because the other is "better".

Of course they have different purposes, but you've essentially said that 40K is good at being 40K because the whole point is that it's gak and the rules don't matter. That doesn't make it good, it's just an excuse for it being gak. The imbalance and fragmentation make it very hard to play a 40K game even amongst friends in a casual setting, because there's so much modification going on. "Want to play 40K tonight?" "sure, what rules?" "No flyers, fortifications, unbound, Escalation, Psykics, and using the usual house rules?" "wuh? Why are were paying for this?"

@Herzlos

Not in my experience. YMMV.

But as said above, turning this into a "40K-centric" conversation is missing the topic.

Again, different games serve different purposes.

Personally, I know nobody in the hobby who only plays 1 game, because that is the "best" (subjectively or objectively), dispensing with the need for any other game.

Every hobbyist I ever met owned and played multiple, different games, because different games offer different experiences.

X Wing is great. If you haven't tried it, please do.

Just started getting into Song of Blades and Heroes and I like it a lot. Easily my favorite fantasy skirmish game I've played.

Blood Bowl. Our league fizzled out due to a lot of RL issues but I still play the PC game frequently.

That's quite true. I, myself, play multiple games.

However, 40K hasn't been one of them for about 2 years because I haven't liked the last two editions. That's despite having played the game since 1988.

I still play WHFB, though. I actually really like 8th edition, though there are some relatively glaring issues with it, as well, but mostly their balance related, not rules related.

 Red Viper wrote:

Just started getting into Song of Blades and Heroes and I like it a lot. Easily my favorite fantasy skirmish game I've played.

Ok, I keep hearing about this game and I need to know more about it! I have a bunch of Confrontation Wulfen sitting pretty in my shelf that I wan't to plop on a table for any reason...

Are the rules for this in a physical book or are they PDF only? And is the game really as customizable as people say? Could I, for example, build a gang from my Wulfen to use with these rules?

PhantomViper wrote:

 Red Viper wrote:

Just started getting into Song of Blades and Heroes and I like it a lot. Easily my favorite fantasy skirmish game I've played.

Ok, I keep hearing about this game and I need to know more about it! I have a bunch of Confrontation Wulfen sitting pretty in my shelf that I wan't to plop on a table for any reason...

Are the rules for this in a physical book or are they PDF only? And is the game really as customizable as people say? Could I, for example, build a gang from my Wulfen to use with these rules?

Paperback or PDF.

It's a Ganesha Games title. Ganesha produces lots of different games, and there's several expansions for Songs. It is a very customizable system.

Gotta give more props to Malifaux. I managed to learn the game by watching a few people play and a HTP video online by Wargaming Consortium. Never had a question that I couldn't find answered by the BRB I got right when 2e hit.

 A GumyBear wrote:
Gotta give more props to Malifaux. I managed to learn the game by watching a few people play and a HTP video online by Wargaming Consortium. Never had a question that I couldn't find answered by the BRB I got right when 2e hit.

I wish there were some people in our area that played; some of the models look really awesome. I particularly like the guys in the dusters with the flaming skull heads and old style wooden coffins.

Apparently, the company used to be based here in Atlanta, and the game was popular when their developers were here to promote it. At some point, they relocated the business out west, and the local community kind of dried up.

Saldiven wrote:

I wish there were some people in our area that played; some of the models look really awesome. I particularly like the guys in the dusters with the flaming skull heads and old style wooden coffins.

Apparently, the company used to be based here in Atlanta, and the game was popular when their developers were here to promote it. At some point, they relocated the business out west, and the local community kind of dried up.

I agree that many of the figures look awesome, but I will caution you (and anyone else out there), if you haven't bought them yet, keep in mind that they are very spndly, and sometimes "frail".. This is of course, mostly due to the scale used, as it isn't a "heroic" scale.

The plastics are pretty fine and slightly daunting but actually really easy to fit together.

My girlfriend and I have been playing the Batman miniatures game by Knights Models recently and I have to say its a very solid ruleset and insanely fun to play. certainly my favourite as of right now.

The best rulesets right now for me I would have to say are infinity, warmahordes, malifaux and xwing though. really well done rules all around.

 Paradigm wrote:
A hugely open 28mm mass battle game with a strong narrative element and huge amounts of player freedom, combined with a massive degree of variation in and within armies, and that can support small skirmishes to hugely apocalyptic battles.. The reason 40k is the go-to game for most sci fi players is that it offers this on a scale that no one else does.

Nope. 40k is not a mass battle game. Epic is.

A game that lacks command mechanisms and keeps track of the casualties is probably not a mass battle game. A game where you have to keep track of each and every individual move, equipement, wound, where one shot can basically remove all the [insert-equipment-here] of an entire unit is definitely not a mass battle game.

In 40k, 1 mini = 1 soldier, just like in Warmachine, Infinity or Malifaux.

So, yes, when your opponent has 30 guardsmen and 3 Vendettas, he's really fielding 3 planes... to provide support fire for 30 grunts of the Imperialus Guardus.

Picked up a copy of Bushido: New Dawn, and while I have only read through the rules, the seem pretty solid. Need to play a few games after I get some minis for final judgement, but I like what I've read.

Guys.

Look at RULESETS. That's what we're talking about here, not if a game has people with skullguns or laser swords or cyberspace discs or steam powered robots or magic rings.

These games are about moving a token of a given size, according to certain rules, and performing chance-based operations with modifiers based possibly on positioning, synergy with other tokens, and resource expendature to achieve desired results, generally the elimination of other enemy tokens.

In this sense, there's games that are better at this (cleaner ruleset, less ambiguity, less duplicate rules, more meaningful divisions between units, a better field of meaningful decisions to players).


----


Remove thoughts of 'skirmish vs army' from this equation either. Infinity is a game played with 10 Units: You have 10 seperate troops that can climb, shoot guns, jump out windows, toss grenades, lay covering fire, hack planes.

40k is also a game with 10 units. You have blobs that have 10 token-shaped hitpoint counters that shoot guns, hit with swords, etc.

Just saying 'It's an army scale game!' doesn't actually mean anything. Mechanically, both are games with a handful of discrete units.

---

The ignorance by the 40k proponents in this thread in non-40k systems is pretty systemic of gamers who don't have much exposure. Nowadays in the 2010s, we've got such an amazing rennisance of great game design that gives miniatures gaming such a wide range of awesome options. Having a strong opinion founded on ignorance is... well. It's something that doesn't do the speaker credit.

 Killionaire wrote:

Look at RULESETS. That's what we're talking about here, not if a game has people with skullguns or laser swords or cyberspace discs or steam powered robots or magic rings.

It's gotta be the Privateer set. It's extremely tight and I can't even remember the last time I saw two people unable to resolve an issue, usually in no more time than it takes to read the relevant unit card.

For my money I also think it does 40K (and by 40K I mean the original, skirmish level) far, far better than actual 40k. Excluding transports and the larger vehicles I'd say you can make a better, more fluff accurate and interesting version of just about any 40k unit with it.

I suppose if the rules are good, they also allow balanced competitive play, have depth but aren't too complicated, and allow player skill to show through.

While I think that "allowing balanced competitive play" is by no means a necessary component of all rulesets, I do agree with the other two I'll put forth a few of my own suggestions. Some of these are were not released in 2014, but that's a silly limitation anyway since good rules are good rules.

1) Kings of War. This one actually clicks all of the OP's boxes. It's concise and has a ruleset that really rewards good generalship over list-building (though you have a bit of that also). It embraces tactical movement and takes many of the features that other games divide up into faction-specific special rules and turns them into core special rules and mechanics.

2) Song of Blades and Heroes. This game is continually being updated (most recently in '12 or '13) by it's author who gives free updates away to all those who have bought the game's PDF. By virtue of it's unit creation rules, SBH does not guarantee "Balanced competition". However, the unit creation rules are what make it so flexible, and the core ruleset rewards good player decisions. In fact, the gambling'ish activation means that every decision is an important one and makes this still one of the most engaging and fun rulesets I've ever played.

3) Of Gods and Mortals. This Osprey Published, scaled up, Mythological version of SBH is pure genius. To the streamlined SBH ruleset they added a squad mechanic, a simple reaction system and special rules regarding the relationship between Gods, Mortals and Heroes and yet it doesn't feel much (if any) more complicated. It has the same good qualities of SBH and if you stick with the supplied Warband "Pantheon" lists, the game has the potential to be even more balanced than it's forefather.

4) Full Thrust. This is an older starship gaming system, yet it has a superb balance between strait forwardness of play and an appropriate level of detail (more than I usually use). Games with Full Thrust are fun and engaging and rewards those who plan ahead, ALOT. Again, it has a unit creation mechanic that can be broken, but there are also scores of pre-made ship profiles that offer a more balanced play option.

Lastly, regarding "Balanced competitive play", this is a fair goal of many rulesets, but it is by no means the goal of all. Many folks are less interested in whether both sides have an equal chance of winning than they are in how the ruleset handles a various situations for the furthering of a narrative, and/or creating an effective simulation. Many folks are fine with the idea that war isn't fair, but just want a ruleset that plays that out in a pleasing way.

I really love the Warmachine rules.
They manage to capture a wide variety of units with very few rules questions. It covers essentially everything that is in Warhammer fantasy/40k yet does so in a much simpler fashion.

One of my favourite examples in WMH when people ask me 'why is the WMH ruleset 'tight'?' is target vs chosen. In WMH, 'target' means you must have line of sight; 'chosen' does not need line of sight. Thus a spell might say 'target friendly faction warrior model' which tells you exactly how to cast the spell, whereas in 40k there are *constantly* annoying rules (probably 2-3 per codex) where you sometimes need to ask 'does this ability need line of sight?'. Every word in warmachine rules is chosen carefully to mean specific things; move vs advance, towards vs directly towards, +attack rolls vs +MAT, disabled vs boxed vs removed from play; whereas in other games (Warhammer) these terms are used almost interchangeably. About the only real criticism that I have of the warmachine rules is the variety of the caster's feats meaning that coming up against a new caster can be very difficult, and that the rulebook itself is badly laid out.

As for the common 'kill the king' criticism... yes, that is one way to win Warmachine; it is the auto-win condition like tabling your opponent is in 40k. Can I criticise 40k for being just about killing all the enemy? I probably win Warmachine via assassination less than I win 40k by tabling my opponent. The cumulative objective system, having zones vs flags and having control vs dominate actually adds a wider variety of win conditions to warmachine than 40k, which often just consists of keeping some jetbikes/etc alive until the bottom of 5th to turbo-boost on to objectives.



X-Wing is a very tight and extremely easy to learn rule set (my girlfriend knew the entirety of the rules within 10 minutes) but that also comes from it being a conceptually limited game - only one unit type, attack type, profile type, etc.

40k, is an extremely clunky rule set. Still using To Hit & To Wound tables, seriously? Most players know how those tables are calculated and can get by without referencing them, but they really shouldn't exist anymore.
There are a whole bunch of annoyingly similar yet slightly different rules creating weird exceptions. There are a whole bunch of special rules that do nothing except delegate to other special rules - eg, some of the daemon weapons have rules like "Axe of Khorne: Bloodletting. Bloodletting gives the bearer the Rage USR". And there are a whole bunch of special rules that effectively do the same thing that could be easily accomplished by stat line improvements - eg, basically every single 'this unit is fast, but in a uniquely different way than that other unit is fast'.


I really like the Dust Warfare rules - IMO, that is the game that 40k should be now.
Deadzone rules are decent and easy to pick up, but there is an annoying amount of referencing tables to see when you do/don't get bonus dice.

 prowla wrote:

I wanted to make this a 'rule set' question, as asking for 'best games' would mean considering a ton of things like quality of miniatures, depth of fluff, amount of players etc. Instead, I'm hoping to examine just the rules, on the basis of how fun, balanced and well written they are. I suppose if the rules are good, they also allow balanced competitive play, have depth but aren't too complicated, and allow player skill to show through.

Force-on-Force..... oh wait. That doesn't allow balanced competitive play because it is designed for mission specific games. I question your criteria.

Also, how is this thread different than a "best game" thread?

 Easy E wrote:


Also, how is this thread different than a "best game" thread?

I think the thread is supposed to be about the rules, just the rules, and not the whole package, including community, play aids, cost, accessibility, etc. and so forth. Just rules in a vacuum...ostensibly.

The current Hobbit ruleset is pretty tight, and games are great fun...too bad hardly anyone plays except for the hardcore Tolkien fans, cuz its a great system from top to bottom...I'd say I can only think of 1 real complaint.

We've been having alot of fun playing ancient-medieval historicals using Hail Caesar rules, which are worth checking out if you enjoy historical gaming.

 jasper76 wrote:


We've been having alot of fun playing ancient-medieval historicals using Hail Caesar rules, which are worth checking out if you enjoy historical gaming.

I'd be very interested to hear your impressions of Hail Caesar. I've heard a few good things about it, but don't know much.

Force-on-Force..... oh wait. That doesn't allow balanced competitive play because it is designed for mission specific games. I question your criteria.

That will change in the work in progress second edition of the game. Ambush Alley has decided that they are limiting their market by not including provisions for point based "pick up" games in their products. My own set of 19th Century Colonial rules (look for it later this year) will be the first AAG game with a fuly developed points system. Future products will probably follow it's lead.

AAG's games will never be designed specificly with tourny style play in mind, but they will be more pick up friendly in the future.

(full disclosure, I'm a bit biased as I have written two books for AAG)
I fully agree that Force on Force certainly needs to be on a list of one of the best current systems out there today.

TR

Here are some good rulesets so far in 2014 the way I see it:

If you are looking for a clear, tight, and concise ruleset with good balance and excellent community support from the authors, than Warmachine/Hordes is the one that takes the cake.

Looking for a fluid and dynamic skirmish game with a great amount of depth and simulates a fire fight really well, Infinity is the one for that.

If you want rules that that are easy-to-learn but the hard-to-master and Dogfighting, then X-Wing is great for that!

In order:
Infinity
Warmachine
Malifaux

All three of those have tight rulesets with lots of deapth and strategy and lots of character and fluff behind them.

Would love to hear some more detailed opinions on

Mercs
Warzone resurrection
DZC
Dark Age