Penny Arcade - Comic - Skirmish, Part Four
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Penny Arcade - Comic - Skirmish, Part Four
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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I bought one of the Space Marine starter kits. I got some paints and tools. I got some codexes and general rulebooks, and I read them.
I both painted my dudes and read the books.
...but I've never played the game.
A miniature never played is like a dick never ejaculating. Like, what’s the point?
It's still a dick. You just have it. And most of the time you keep it in your pants, never to see the light of day.
I'm not playing minatures with you.
But it never gets seen or touched or brings excitement it’s just a thing not a glorious expression of your will and being.
Maybe you take photos of it?
In my case, I really want to play the game.
It's mostly a matter of the fact that my friends bailed on me. We all decided to get some figures, learn to play, learn to paint, and then do that. We got the first 2 steps done. Then one friend was like "assembling, gluing, and painting isn't for me" so he backed out. Then my other friend got a new job and his schedule changed and interested just kind of dropped. And anyway, now I have a small army, it's mostly painted, and I've devoured the Space Marine Codex and also the general rulebook.
Granted, this has all been a few years ago. I think it's 4th edition. I'm pretty sure a 5th edition has come out since then. I haven't looked.
Haha. Ha. Hahaha. You wonderful, innocent soul...
In all seriousness, the game is currently on it's eighth edition, with each edition necessitating, at a minimum, a $60 rulebook and $40 codex, and no guarantee they won't release a new edition three months after the last codex for the previous edition released. And, of course, the looming possibility that the bigger, stronger Marines that got introduced with this edition are, in fact, intended to phase out the standard Marines over time and turn existing Marines collections into a curiosity on the shelf.
That plus the ~3 hour play time and the three jobs you have to hold to afford the models makes it very difficult for me to find enough times to play to justify the cost I've already spent. But when you can get a full day set aside, and a friend with a well painted army who likes the game for the same reasons you do, a drawn-out, laid-back narrative game with fully painted armies and terrain is a great experience.
No minis to buy, assemble and paint.
You need another unit of _____s? You click the 'build' button, and a few seconds later, you've got another squad ready to serve THE EMPRAH/WAAAAUGH/the Greater Good/etc.
EDIT: also, the machine spirit handles all of the dice rolling, movement, adjudicating LOS, etc etc etc.
Then again, I'm sure that some would say that all of the above (including the model-prepping) is the whole point and fun of the game, so... *shrug*
Buy one source book (and the inevitable expansions), and then you’re set - all of the setting, none of the painting
40k is on 8th edition now.
That said, it's one of the best editions of 40k, and it is the most popular it has been in a long time.
You should see if you have a GW or a FLGS with a scene in your area.
Edit:
Loving RPGs or Computer Games because it means you don't need to buy, build, or paint minis means that the hobby just isn't for you. It's only a hobby you should get into if you enjoy building and painting miniatures. Personally I get just as much joy out of scraping moldlines, assembling models to give them character, creating paint schemes that tie in with the backstories I've created for my army and so on as I do from playing the game. If your goal is just to play a game, yeah, go grab a boardgame or a computer game. You have to enjoy building and painting models for the hobby to make sense.
What is the state of WH40K computer games? I thought GDW tightly controlled computer versions of tabletop WH40K. It seems like a game very well suited to a computer version, but I thought GDW doesn't want to cannibalize the sales of miniatures and rule books. While there are lots of games in the WH40K universe, there isn't a game that replicates the base tabletop game, right?
As a big 8th edition 40k fan, I don't think it would make a very good computer game.
Endless Space and Civ5 are very fun computer games that would be way too complicated as board games. Catan and Puerto Rico are very fun board games but as computer games I think they'd be too simple. There's something about playing in person and the physical pieces that makes board games match up to much more complex computer games in enjoyment.
So 40k, by virtue of being a simplified table game in addition to having a pretty substandard ruleset, would not be that great on the PC. But there's something about a table full of well painted terrain and minis that makes an experience that is better than the sum of its parts. Do other wargames have better minis and/or rules? I am sure they do. But 40k is what I have, and it's what people play, so that's that.
I might sound really negative, but I still get a ton of enjoyment out of it, warts and all.
Well, let's put it this way. What if you didn't have it at all?