Monday, December 5, 2011

Monday Night Mordheim: A Thought On Returning

So...I'm back, well and truly back. I'm going to leave the last thoughts alone. Man, I got some wicked invective there, didn't I? Some would say it shows great passion for the game, or rather games I was talking about. That is a point, but I find it to be something else. Sometimes I get very angry. I don't like being angry. That's something I like about Mordheim, its a rare jewel in the wargame market. It doesn't piss me off every time I play it. There's a number of different reasons for that, and I'll probably get into them all eventually, but first off I want to talk about one in particular.

The Uniqueness Factor

The thing is that in a good wargame, every distinct group of warriors plays sightly differently. At first glance this does not seem to be the case in Mordheim, almost all of the human warbands are remarkably similar. That is true for a bit. What makes Mordheim different, though is not what you do like the others, but what you do that's different. HA! Bit of faux-zen there for you.

At the end of the day, everything in Mordheim should balance out. That's the thing, every game has a base line, a standard so to speak. Everything should be built up or deconstructed from that base line. In Mordheim that base line is the Human Mercenary. So it stands to reason that the majority of things in Mordheim are remarkably similar.

However, its the deviations from that baseline that make the differences in the warbands. It's the models and rules that are unique to a warband that makes it fight so differently. There are similarities, but that is as far as it goes, similarities.

Warbands are each unique, not just from each other warband, but after the first game, each warband is unique from others of its same type. I love that uniqueness. I know that if I play Jim with his undead, it would be a completly different game then if I were to play someone else with the undead. That is what makes the game one of my favorites.

On the other hand most other games don't have that. While I love me some 40K, most lists are fairly similar, and they play in an almost identical way. WHFB is worse, 'Line up and march Forward!', at least with 40K there's something more tactical then just putting down a list. I've played Maulifaux, and I've enjoyed it, but the list is pretty much dictated to you, and you can't really even customize a particular model. Don't get me started on other games. Mainly cause I don't have enough information or play time under my belt to really make comments (I could if I wanted to though).

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