Monday Night Mordheim; KISS Keep It Simple, Stupid

Welcome to Monday Night Mordheim, finally. It seems to have calmed down a bit at work, so I'm able to do a bit more creative non-work. Going to gab a bit to set things up and then get into the topic at hand, which is sorta typical of me.

Thing is that we have a new person in our pod at work, not in our department, but short on chairs. She's kinda fun. Reads some fantasy, wants to be an Astro-physics person. Now, me being me, and she being bored, I gave her the Prism Pentad novels from Dark Sun setting. Then she started reading the D&D 3.0 rulebooks we have lying around. In turn she lent me the first two Dresden Files books, which I was totally unimpressed by, I told her that it was like reading someone's solo Mage; The Ascension campaign. Then she started reading the World of Darkness books we have sitting around. So she has read a bunch of rulebooks (which in my mind is boring as shit).

I sat there and looked at the volumes of rules she's read through, and I'm sitting there thinking, this is such a huge amount of random crap. I love those games, but damn, I've been playing them for decades and I am still learning new rules. I think that is one of the reasons I love Mordheim so much. Mordheim plays by the greatest rule of them all 'KISS- Keep It Simple, Stupid'.

I could teach someone to play Mordheim in two settings, maybe four hours total. I really thing that the best rule to illustrate this is the Hiding Rule. Hide is not something in most other wargames, but it is executed so easily.

If no one can draw Line of Sight to a model after it moves, you can declare it hidden, and then you have to be within Iniative inches to see them. There's more to it then that, but it in essence, that's it. Nice, simple, clean. There's nothing to it.

That's the beauty of Mordheim, a game changing rule described in a sentence. The entirety of rules is in one book, and most of that book is options. Not hundreds of rules, not thousands of variations. Mordheim is a simple system, and yes, it does have its cracks and loopholes. In the grand scheme of things its a gem of simplicity, and a nice break from those other rules heavy games.