Monday, November 16, 2015

How I enjoy playing Age of Sigmar without using a points system

As I have wrote previously I prefer to have some type of quantitative method to compare and contrast competing armies' relative strength. Models and units relative strength is something I would like to personally analyze in the future. Nevertheless, I have enjoyed playing Age of Sigmar games without the use of points. How I have enjoyed playing Age of Sigmar is based on gaming etiquette that I think most people should know and/or learned as a child. This post list how I enjoyed the game and, based on my experiences with the game, how I planned to introduced Age of Sigmar to my nephew and niece (they wanted to play Age of Sigmar since they saw me unpacking my miniature collection from storage).
  1. Play Warhammer Age of Sigmar (AoS) as an entirely new game that uses the same models that are used for Warhammer Fantasy (Fantasy). If I want to play a game similar to Fantasy, I can try Kings of War or just play 8th edition. My nephew and niece have not played Warhammer Fantasy or any other competitive tabletop war games.
  2. Start playing AoS with someone you never play against with small forces only. There are over 400 pages of warscrolls at the release of AoS. This is good as it allows people to immediately play the game with most of the miniature collection they have accrued for previous editions of Fantasy. This is bad for a new game that basically have no restrictions to what you can field. For my nephew and niece, I was going to let them start playing with a starter box-like army--1 general, 1 wizard, a unit of 10 close combat infantry, and a unit of 10 long range infantry. They look at my model collection for the 15 classic Fantasy armies and pick which group of miniatures they found to be aesthetically pleasing to them.
  3. Play several games with the same army and discuss with your opponent about game balance. Adjust armies based on discussion. For example, the player that loss more games gets to add more models/units to their army (or the player that won majority of the games leave some models/units out of their army). For my nephew and niece it does not matter if one of them won with better tactics or with a stronger army. The one that loses more get to add models/units. For example, after 2-4 games playing with the same army:
    1. Both of them won the same amount of games, both of them get to add more models or another unit to their army.
    2. If one of them lose more games to the other player, then the player that lose more gets to add more models/unit to their army.
  4. Instead of increasing the size of your armies and playing the same battleplan, sometimes we choose to play different battleplans with relatively even armies (based on the past games we have played). Or we start back at point #2 for different battleplans.

2 comments:

  1. An option you may have missed is to allow the losing side to bring on more units on turn 3 or earlier from the edge of the board.

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    1. Might be something my group will try to play in some scenarios. Sometimes it would be hard to tell who would be losing so better to let the game finished and trash talk afterwards for rematches and what else afterwards :D.

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