@dracs – thought of the Dreadfleet Chaos Dwarf sub too. Might have to pick this one up to add to my 28mm CDs; not sure what as though…maybe Iron Daemon or Skullcracker. ?

B&B – whooop.

Hobbits & Harlequins sounds like a fun game – needs to be made now. ?

I prefer Midget Gems and Sports Mixture to Haribo myself.

The perfect game…not sure what my perfect game would be, so I’ll just go with something I’d like to see; I’d like to see two games that are connected actually, a skirmish game and a rank and file game. This is drawing on what I would have liked to see happen with Warhammer rather than AoS; you have the skirmish game which can be played with a box or two of troops and a hero as a starting point/low points games, with rules that are manageable as you add in more stuff until you get to the point where all you have to do is add a war machine or wizard or the like and suddenly you have a small army for the mass combat game. And because at this point adding more stuff to your army would start to bog down the game, the mass combat rules would allow you to continue to grow the army and have it all still be able to be played with at once. Thinking about it, I suppose I’m thinking of something akin to the relationship of LotR:SBG to WotR, except with better rules for the mass combat side of things.

As for actual rules/mechanics, not sure all together. I think for a start moving awa from d6s to d10s to give more variance, so instead of say an orc, an elf and a man all having the same strength, they could have orcs as S3 and elves and men as S4 (or vice versa depending on whether these are Tolkienian or Warhammer orcs respectively). Ben bringing up using the other types of dice such as in B&B does make me think that could be an interesting idea to bring in somehow.

For stats I think following a similar stat line to WH sounds like a good starting point, but maybe doing something like splitting Leadership into two stats, Leadership and Courage. The reason I’m thinking of this is to allow more varied/nuanced representation of the psychological side of things, specifically making a clear distinction between discipline and bravery. So for example, a human militia might have above average Leadership, but below average Courage, representing the fact that they’re reasonably well trained, but not particularly brave, whereas orc berserkers would have low Leadership and high Courage, reflecting that they’re undisciplined and difficult to command but very brave. Depending on situation is which test you have to take, eg restraining pursuit would be a Leadership test while charging a group of trolls would be a Courage test. I’d also like to have units breaking like in WH rather than just going ‘poof’ like in KoW because I like seeing units fleeing on the tabletop and it adds in an additional risk element for those relying on frenzied and I’ll-disciplined troops (eg the aforementioned orc berserkers on seeing a unit of human militia fleeing getting distracted and chasing after them rather than holding position or manoeuvring to flank non-fleeing units).

For the mass combat game one idea I’ve had is maybe splitting the difference between WHFB and KoW when it comes to casualty removal, so instead of removing individual minis like in WH or trading woulds against the whole unit which serve as Ld modifiers like in KoW, you have units comprised of bases of multiple minis (sorta like WotR come to think of it), and wounds are tracked against bases and once all the minis on a base have been wounded, you remove the whole base.

For cover (especially in the skirmish game), what id like to see is something similar to LotR where there’s a chance to hit whatever is providing cover. Not sure how to handle this but do have a couple of ideas: a) cover provides modifiers to the to hit roll and if a ranged attack misses but would’ve hit without the modifier then it hits the cover (eg say you normally need 5+ to hit and you are shooting at something that gives a -2 modifier, then on a 7+ you hit the target, on a 1-4 you miss and on a 5 or 6 you hit the cover), or b) cover gives a save and you take the cover save before rolling to wound, and if the save is made, then the cover is hit, and you roll for each thing in the way so can take multiple cover saves (eg you’re shooting at a cavalry unit behind a hedge and an infantry unit, each of which gives a 5+ save, then I’d roll a save with 1-4 missing the hedge and a 5+ hitting it, then I’d roll a second save for the infantry with 1-4 hitting the cavalry and 5+ hitting the infantry, then we relive hits against both units).

Another thing I’d like to see is a de-emphasis on named characters; I’d like to see the mainstay be unnamed/generic characters rather than big names appearing in every army at every points level (eg avoiding cases where Emperor Bob is leading a skirmish force of a few farmers, a knight and a handful of mercenary crossbowmen).

And thinking about things, if the skirmish rules are tight enough you could add a third level, bringing in elements from games like Mordheim with injuries, XP, etc for a more intimate warband level, and because it’d be working off the skirmish rules it’d be easy to slot in stuff from the skirmish game so you can put a warband against generic troops/monsters for scenarios/Dungeon delving as well as the standard warband vs warband games (and possibly you could go the other way and add a warband to your skirmish army for one off games to shake things up there).

That’s all I can think of for now.