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× Talk about the latest and greatest AT, and the Classics.

Old Game Workshop games, which ones to check out?

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29 Apr 2012 13:16 #124111 by Erik Twice
I have started to notice that old GW games have quite a reputation and it's not just Blood Bowl or Space Hulk that still see play after so many years and that's a quite good indicator of a good game to me. So, tell me, what old GW games are fun to check it out?

Warlock is attracting me because it's one of the inspirations of MTG and people say it feels more like a Wizard duel. But there are no reviews and the comments don't really say a lot, so I don't even know how the game works or if I should just try to look for a copy of Steve Jackson's Wizard instead. Any thoughts on this?

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29 Apr 2012 16:40 #124121 by Dogmatix
Wizard will likely be cheaper and easier to find but I haven't played Warlock, so I can't really comment there.


I'm a fan of Block Mania w/expansion and Railway Rivals [yea, it was a GW title for a while]...

Of their hex-n-chit type wargames, the original Horus Heresy seems to work much better than the FFG reprint but it's still just a hex-n-chit wargame. Battle for Armageddon is more fun than Doom of the Eldar...

Curse of the Mummy is nice to look at--and that's about it. Chainsaw Warrior isn't as terrible as BGG would have you believe, but that's not saying a whole lot. It's still pretty weak a solo game.

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29 Apr 2012 22:53 - 29 Apr 2012 22:54 #124131 by Mr. White
If you're a fan of 2000AD comics, the old GW games are pretty much your only source. In order my favorites are:

BlockMania (w. MegaMania) - still a top 10 game for me. There's no other game like it.
Rogue Trooper - sorta like Talisman, but you can play encounter cards on each other and when eliminated you 'join' another player, so still in the game.
Judge Dredd - really basic game, but good to wind down an evening with some laughs.

Beyond those, I felt the best were in order: DungeonQuest, Warrior Knights, Talisman, Fury of Dracula. These were all redone by FFG and you may or may not like their offerings better. For example, as a whole, I prefer the FFG Talisman to the GW one, but the GW DQ to the FFG one.

Blood Royale is a distant mention as I had some friends who liked it, but I always preferred Warrior Knights.
Last edit: 29 Apr 2012 22:54 by Mr. White.

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30 Apr 2012 14:29 #124180 by Rliyen
GW games I'd recommend

Block Mania/Mega Mania
Dungeonquest
Talisman
Battle for Armageddon

GW games to avoid
Rogue Trooper - Love the comic. The game? It's eh...
Judge Dredd - Used to play the shit out of this. Then I got Block Mania, which is 100x better and is a better flavor of 2000AD than Judge Dredd.

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30 Apr 2012 14:47 #124182 by Matt Thrower
Depends if you're interested in the reprints or not. For my money, most of the GW games that have reprinted are as good as, or better, than the originals. The original SH rules are better than the reprint but you can use either version of the rules with either game so that's not a great loss. Do track down the rules to the Deathwing expansion if you only own the reprint though: they have customisable army lists, which are great.

The one exception is Fury of Dracula. I maintain that the original is better than the FFG reprint. It's less strategic, sure, but is much simpler, much faster playing and much more atmospheric. That's enough to outweigh the increased depth IMO, especially since the atmosphere is such a big thing with the game.

As others have said, Block Mania is worth your while.

Battle for Armageddon and Warhammer Quest have a pretty exalted reputation but I haven't played either. I have a strong suspicion that WQ is nowhere near as good as some people think it is.

Some of their miniatures games are pretty good too, and don't necessarily require a huge investment to play if you're at all interested in going down that route. Necromunda, Mordheim and Man O' War spring to mind.

I'd leave the rest alone.

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30 Apr 2012 15:30 #124191 by DukeofChutney
I used to play warhammer quest quite a bit.

Theres a number of things you can do with this game. It can be used as a straight descent like boardgame where you draw random rooms and corridors and go kill stuff. Its quicker but rather random and less indepth than descent.

You can easily design your own scenarios but not knowing whats around the corner is the main draw for the players.

Or (and this is what my group mostly did) you can run it as a GM'd simple dungeon crawl, where one player designs the dungeon and throws in various challenges and the others play the quest. Like a very simple version of DnD. IN many ways DnD can be more or less played as a miniatures game these days and is probably better. Descent has the vs mechanic more balanced but it takes forever and is set in the turd that is terreinoth.

Personnally i liked warhammer quest, but i wouldnt pay a lot for it. You can fairly easily build a home prew version anyways.

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30 Apr 2012 15:47 #124199 by mjl1783
Don't let the reputation fool you; a lot of the old GW stuff is not that good, and the ones that are good are all pretty deeply flawed. Also, just about everything worth playing from them has been reprinted by now.

Talisman is obviously a classic, and needs no further explanation. In fact, if you don't like that one, odds are pretty good you're not going to be crazy about many of the other GW games. Ditto for FoD, but the FFG version is better, even if the fixes they came up with are cumbersome and game-y. I don't care for DungeonQuest, but I'm sort of in the minority there, and the game is quite fun given the right mood. Warrior Knights I only played once, and wasn't crazy about it. It's pretty dry, and there's a lot of chrome in there that doesn't seem to add much of anything to the game, although I've always suspected that it's one that would grow on me with more plays. Kings & Things is a riot. The fact that most of the gaming population continues to ignore it only reinforces my opinion that most of the gaming population is no fun. These are all pretty solid choices that are in print, or at least, shouldn't be too hard to get.

From there, the pickin's get pretty slim. I agree that Block Mania is the best of what's left. It's a really off-the-wall, yet inventive wargame considering when it came out. I will, however, say that it can be a real drag if one player keeps getting violently raped by the random elements in the game. This will happen frequently, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it when it does. It's less of a problem in a multi-player game, but then you need an expansion and the game is pricey enough as it is. Rogue Trooper is a decent adventure game, especially if you dig the RT setting, which the game does a good job with. The endgame totally blows, though. Dragon Masters is pretty good too. It's a really early version of that ultra-minimalist epic conquest thing similar to a Small World or a Nexus Ops. I haven't played it in a while, so it's possible its been aped by newer games at this point. Battlecars is a more playable Car Wars, with a heavier emphasis on the shooting mechanics. Unfortunately, you don't get quite enough stuff in the box to do everything you'll want to do with it. Advanced Space Crusade... don't even bother with Space Hulk if you can get that one for $100. It's so much better.

What's left of what I've played is mostly pretty crap. HeroQuest and Space Crusade are kids' games, and if you've got kids, maybe they're worth your time, but there's really no game there (and don't think Advanced HQ is going to do much to turn that around). Curse of the Mummy's Tomb comes sooo close to being a good game, but the endgame is even more idiotic than in RT. Judge Dredd has some neat ideas, but it wouldn't take too much modification to turn it into Munchkin: 2000 AD. Warlock of Firetop Mountain we played once, waaaaaay back when. I can't remember anything about it other than that it was stupid and we never played it again. Lost Patrol is more or less an OK solo game, and since it's impossible to find, it's hardly worth the effort. If you didn't play Chainsaw Warrior back when it was new, don't bother. There's nothing worthwhile about it now outside of nostalgia.

Warhammer Quest is a fucking terrible game. I don't know what the fuck anyone with two brain cells to rub together sees in it. You sift through a big box of tiles and minis, arrange all this shit on the table, and... roll dice. What's that? You like dice? Me too, but that's all you fucking do in this game. You might as well just play Yahtzee or something. Hell, you'd might as well just get a bucket full of dice and sit around rolling them for no reason. Put some fantasy miniatures on the table to look at while you're doing it, and there you go. Fuck Warhammer Quest. Seriously.

I never played Warlock, Valley of the Four Winds, or Super Powers. I hear good things about the first two, but not that good. Dark Future's rulebook reads like a more complex, yet less realistic Car Wars, so I'm not sure I'm going to be too bummed about not getting to play it now that the one guy in our group who owned it traded it off. Never played the trio of 40k chit wargames they put out. They look kind of cool, and also too expensive. They also did a bunch of "junior" versions of games like BB and ASC. I haven't played all of them, but the ones I have are pretty much just simplified versions of games that didn't really need simplifying.

Everything else they did aside from straight-up miniatures games were magazine games, or totally obscure stuff like Oi, Dat's My Leg! Can't comment on that stuff other than to say I've never seen a rat's ass given for any of them.
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30 Apr 2012 15:55 #124200 by Dogmatix
I dunno. I think Warhammer Quest is very good for what it is, but it's somewhere between a Dudes in a Hallway and a skirmish minis game. If you go in expecting Space Hulk, you're going to be disappointed as I think it's more bookkeeping-intensive and just feels like a minis game. However, when compared to, say, Mantic's new dungeon-delve/spaceship-crawl games (Dwarf King's Hold and a new Dudes in Space game that just came out this week), it doesn't feel nearly as much like a ruleset designed just to sell minis.

I kind of think WHQ is what Descent wanted to be, but I find WHQ more interesting for its simplicity and randomness. Descent is almost certainly a more well-realized/well-rounded game, but I just don't care for it as much. That said, there's nothing "modern" about WHQ....

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30 Apr 2012 16:22 - 30 Apr 2012 16:27 #124202 by Mr. White

I will, however, say that it can be a real drag if one player keeps getting violently raped by the random elements in the game. This will happen frequently, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it when it does


I dunno about violently being raped. You may not get the best hand of cards, roll many command points, or have a strong chit draw, but all of that seems to even out over the course of a game. I don't think I've seen a session where one player simply couldn't do anything all game.

Regarding WHQ, the problem with that game was that for all it's campaign rules, the game only came with bottom tier villains. You get bats, spiders, goblins, orcs, and a few minotaurs but beyond that you're left proxing everything or dropping cash on GW minis. Oh yeah, they included stats for every fantasy model in their citadel line, but that's hundreds if not thousands of dollars.

Like the other games of it's size (ManOWar, Necromunda, Blood Bowl, Mordheim, etc) you weren't getting a complete game in one box. They were more entry points to systems. For that reason I always excluded these type of games when talking about GWs 'boardgaming' past.
Last edit: 30 Apr 2012 16:27 by Mr. White.

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30 Apr 2012 16:39 #124205 by Bulwyf
For my money the best of the old GW titles are Fury of Dracula and Battle for Armageddon.

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