Age of Sigmar

[Balloonacorn]

Last gameday a few people were playing AOS and it really appealed to me. Fantasy Battle was my first love of GW and seeing that Maw-Krusha got my juices flowing.

My question is this: How stable is the game? Is it about to go through a new edition (like 40k just did)? Are the battle tombs going to be updated soon. Is it in ascendance? ... decline? How many play locally?

I don't get out much so I really don't know.

[Karantu]

Age of Sigmar isn't as popular as 40k is both globally and locally but there still are a decent number of people who play it as far as I know. In our local group Dave, myself, and a few of the Japanese guys play it and I think Jye is going to be dipping his toes in too. The game system is pretty stable and it probably won't be getting an edition update for at least an year or longer and even if it did its probably not going to invalidate everything. Other than that its not as bloated as 40k and is still getting pretty good support from GW.

I recommend downloading the app (just look up Warhammer Age of Sigmar app) if you want to check out the different units since the warcrolls should be free. Other content like faction abilities and points are behind a paywall though.

[The Other Dave]

It seems to be very strong worldwide - a new edition just came out, like, a year ago? So there shouldn't be an update for a bit, and it seems to be widely regarded as being in a very good place, rules-wise. They seem to be updating battletomes on a rolling basis, it's a bit weird, but in general most of the "established" factions will probably not be needing a new battletome any time soon - I hear rumors about Sylvaneth needing an update, but who knows. That said, as Karantu says, the free app will provide you *almost* all the information you need to play, and certainly will get you started for demo games. (You can actually see points in the free version of the app, IIRC, there's just no army-building function so you'll have to do the math yourself. I don't have my iPad on hand to double-check, though. But it's a really good app. Edit: Ah, nope, I was wrong. No points values, but OTOH battlescribe is a thing.)

The 1000-point "meeting engagement" game mode is also good fun, so it's not too hard to pull an army together and get playing. The WarCry -> Meeting Engagement -> bigger games progression is a lot cleaner than it is for 40K at the moment, to be sure.

[Balloonacorn]

The 1000-point "meeting engagement" game mode is also good fun, so it's not too hard to pull an army together and get playing. The WarCry -> Meeting Engagement -> bigger games progression is a lot cleaner than it is for 40K at the moment, to be sure.

Why "meeting engagement" and not Pitched Battle?

[The Other Dave]

The 1000-point "meeting engagement" game mode is also good fun, so it's not too hard to pull an army together and get playing. The WarCry -> Meeting Engagement -> bigger games progression is a lot cleaner than it is for 40K at the moment, to be sure.

Why "meeting engagement" and not Pitched Battle?

Mostly 'cause it's got some wrinkles to make smaller games more interesting and less liable to devolve into "scrum around one of the objectives," including staggered deployment and bespoke missions designed around smaller game sizes. But pitched battle would also work fine!

[Karantu]

Personally I don't think there's anything wrong with starting with pitched battles since there's less rules to remember and the missions can be interesting enough in 1000pt games. It all depends on the sort of experience you're looking for though.

[Balloonacorn]

Personally I don't think there's anything wrong with starting with pitched battles since there's less rules to remember and the missions can be interesting enough in 1000pt games. It all depends on the sort of experience you're looking for though.

I looking to:
1) try the system
2) roll lots of dice
3) cast magic and don't worry about plasma weapons

[Karantu]

We could probably figure something out sometime. I'm probably going to be too busy next game day with 9th coming out (plus I have a game of Titanicus lined up since before the apocalypse). Maybe Dave could give you a demo game? Depending on how much stuff I need to bring I might be able to lend you some Lizardmen though. Or you could even proxy models from another system if you just want to try out a small game. If Dave's busy too I'd be happy to do a demo game in August.

[The Other Dave]

We could probably figure something out sometime. I'm probably going to be too busy next game day with 9th coming out (plus I have a game of Titanicus lined up since before the apocalypse). Maybe Dave could give you a demo game? Depending on how much stuff I need to bring I might be able to lend you some Lizardmen though. Or you could even proxy models from another system if you just want to try out a small game. If Dave's busy too I'd be happy to do a demo game in August.

July I'll probably be 40K all day too, yeah, but we could certainly try to throw something together in August. I have more than enough goblins to do a 2-sided game of stormcast vs. them too.

[Balloonacorn]

I also wanted to play 40k this gameday, if I can figure out the new Cursude rules. Plus I might be plying Blood Bowl. So August or later sounds better to me. My biggest problem is waht faction too play. There are no ugly armies in Age of Sigmar.