Season of Bore

We've moved on from our Season of War: Firestorm campaign, quite a bit more quickly than we'd expected, too. The effort at Games Workshop's current Age of Sigmar campaign system lasted a whopping two of our mega-sessions, and we realized halfway through the second that we were probably done.

What gives?

None of us thought it sucked, but it was just lacking something. Peter at one point said that the campaign portion of the mechanics should be the best part, something to look forward to between games which serves as a kind of grand strategic reward. He's right. Some of that is the middle-aged Mighty Empires player in us, but Firestorm didn't have enough mechanical doodads to make the between game stuff much more than a chore.

Basically, Firestorm is too abstracted. There's a kernel of a good campaign system in there, but mostly it's just looking at a hand of cards. A hand of cards, incidentally, which is really easy to mix up with the general deck as you upgrade, which more than one of us did. That necessitated going through the entire deck going, "Wait, did I have 1 Build Point or 3 in my deck?"

We also very quickly ran into a problem with the victory conditions. Briefly, everyone has 3 secret objectives given to them at the start. These can be accomplished during battles, granting extra VPs; everyone who achieves them puts them into a pile, shuffles, and redraws (there's exactly enough for 3 each in a 4 player campaign).

The big problem is that they're so asymmetric that some are trivial to fulfill, while others are incredibly difficult. This caused two problems when I grabbed the three easiest (extra VPs when I beat someone with more points than me, extra when I kill the enemy general, extra when I control 3 territories). I did the first two in my first game, against Philip's giants. Scott's were the incredibly difficult ones to do, with one of them something nuts like control 6 or 8 territories, and he smashed Peter in their first game. So my hand, and only my hand, went back into the pool. I drew them again and immediately accomplished two of the three again in my next game.

This meant I was building an insurmountable lead, and not even slowly. By the end of the first weekend I was sitting at something like 10 or 12 VPs to Scott's 5. Added to that, it dawned on us that Philip was going to Oxford for a year in October, meaning there was no way for anyone to do the more difficult territory holding objectives. It just didn't flow the way we wanted to.

So we've turned back to normal games of 2k points. Peter's done some amazing old school High Elves, I got a mess of Idoneth Deepkin for my birthday, Scott's looking at Dwarves, and Philip's head has been turned by the new Stormcast (he wants them to be early Catholic saints and we say go for it).

After a big birthday session of Age of Sigmar Normal Style, we're going to take those new armies and do some more Path to Glory. I don't know that it's the best way to play AoS (Peter's starting to think so), but it's a whole lot of fun and it absolutely is the best way to ease into a new army.

As for bigger campaign play, Peter's got a wild idea about three Mighty Empires boards with realmgates linking them. Real old style, with city building and baggage trains and all that stuff. It's long tail, but the gears are turning.

We'll have some Path to Glory stuff later, as well as rules for Philip's Giants and Gnomes army and Peter's unified High Elves. --Ian