Cult Of Games XLBS: What Old Games Would You Dig Up?
December 6, 2020 by lloyd
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![Warcradle Studios Reveal TINY New 10mm Festive Marker! [Updated]](https://images.beastsofwar.com/2025/11/christmas-kyle-main-600-338.jpg)
hello everybody. happy sunday
Happy Sunday!
I want Warhammer, Mordheim, Warmaster and Battlefleet Gothic back!
Today’s show touched on something that often makes it’s way into my thoughts about wargaming, and that is what makes a wargaming success story.
There are a few factors that seem to make or break a game; the miniatures, rules, setting/IP, the number of factions, game balance, the scale, gamer zeitgeist, nostalgia, the cost and the time investment. Ultimately though the biggest factor is the community.
The miniatures have to be at least good quality. Today there is such a high level of competition in the market that if your miniatures aren’t good enough or too expensive an alternative will appear pretty quickly.
The rules are a strange one. They seem to be less important than people think but having said that they need to be at least good or will be dumped for something better. A game with great minis and poor rules will find their minis being used with a different ruleset (eg GW minis in KoW). Look what Bolt Action did for WWII wargaming!
I have yet to see a wargame with less than 4 factions survive. The reason I suspect is that a 2 faction game is effectively something somewhere between Chess and Stratego.
Settings/IP can be very important BUT…. Some IP’s make great books/movies/computer games but lousy tabletop games. Halo was a great example. Also the IP rarely saves a game if the rules are lacking. A great example is Star Wars. Great IP but an ‘all conquering’ game like 1st ed X-Wing goes from hero to zero with an edition change. Proof that great IP can be brought low very quickly.
Game balance is obvious. Scale, not so much. 28mm is obviously the most popular scale, but for bigger battles smaller scales are better suited to the game. Even then though there’s a point when people tap out. For example I doubt there’s many people gaming at 2mm.
The gamer zeitgeist is the strangest factor of success. As a former retailer I watched crap games become community favourites overnight while great games died on the shelf. One of the strangest things is the way the zeitgeist hits designers/developers too. One day there’s no rules in a setting, a week later there’s 10. I watched Ancients survive for years on 2-3 rule sets. Then there was literally 9 new rulesets released for Ancients in a single year.
Nostalgia. I suspect it’s saved GW on a number of occasions. Todays episode was effectively a stroll down nostalgia street. How many mentions did Man O’ War get? I even got a dose of this this week when a friend insisted on using his Middenheimers from Mordheim in Warcry using the Cities of Sigmar lists. I already get asked to play Mordheim regularly as it is. How many Old-Hammer groups are there on Facebook? Squats, Zoats, Bloodbowl, Necromunda, Harry the Hammer, Warhammer Old World and I doubt GW is even close to done with it’s stroll down memory lane.
The time investment is massive. I think it was the reason why X-Wing took off. Cost is a factor however I’ve watched gamers effectively offer to move into prostitution for the latest shiney.
Finally the community. No better example exists than Bloodbowl. A game decades deader than the Emperor of mankind, keep alive in their hearts. Now it’s back and getting regular love.
I’d argue that Xwing suffered from the Nintendo Wii effect.
FFG like Nintendo underestimated who was actually buying.
I’d argue that the vast majority never bought more than the core set and only a small minority was dedicated enough to buy into the system as a hobby.
As a result the next release (Wii U) was pretty much dead on arrival.
Halo could have been good, but it suffered from the lack of (interesting) factions and an advertising campaign that forgot it needed to convince console gamers to play with things that required work. Never mind that when it was released Halo was nearing the end of its life already.
It’s the XLBS SHow……Happy Sunday fellow CoGs!
on a personal note….I found a youtube video that explains things over there on those islands that OTT calls home. If anyone else is confused check out this video. (and if the information inside the video is wrong, please let me know!) https://youtu.be/rNu8XDBSn10
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Congrats to the Golden Button winners! All well deserved and earned. 🙂
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A game I’d like to see come back would be “Babylon 5 Wars” or simply (B5W) by Agents of Gaming. Great physics application in that game.
Except some people living in Northern Ireland consider themselves Irish and not British
Had to stop 30secs in …..jesus wept
@lloyd, you’re thinking of Lucy Worseley (sp?) who did “how Edwardian houses kill” show.
Netflix have a new film coming out called The Dig which is about the discovery and excavation of the Sutton Hoo burial mound . Ralph Fiennes is starring
There is also a show called Romulus made by Sky Italy and all the actors are speaking in Archaic Latin
HAPPY SUNDAY!!!!
I quite like Warpath. It has some interesting mechanics
A Happy Sunday to you all hope this finds everyone safe and well ? impeccable hat Lloyd. I’m looking forward to seeing the Wargame Documentary film might try and do that this evening. I did archaeology in college and met Tony and Mick and they are cracking blokes. The other chaps I really enjoyed meeting were the two men in a trench and at Drumossie Moor of all places but time team was a must. I admit that the model side of my hobby was a handy companion to recreating Roman villas and such for college projects but I don’t remember any military finds except in Cearleon outside Newport but the stretch to get things correct in archaeology has certainly influenced my hobby. I didn’t think much of Barbarians.
I’m very much looking forward to the relaunch of dystopian wars and I’m hoping that Warcradel can carry through the lines of Lost World as it comes under the Wild West Dystopian age. I think armoured clash in 8mm will scratch the Epic itch that never left and honestly I’d rather support Stuart and the guys. I also like how they plan for a boxed set of factions I can just pick up and build upon like the posse factions in Exodus. I’d may like to see Warmaster but there’s enough alternative minis out there to support a game if I get hold of a rule book.I try very hard these days to fight nostalgia pangs, it’s like the toasted sadwhich machine I got for a birthday, really wanted one because toasted baked bean sadwiches were SO nice as a kid. Used it once or twice and realised its not as great as I remember it’s frankly rubbish and messy so it sits on a shelf in the back of a cupboard. I’m very glad I didn’t go in to heroquest for the same reason.
@ands . Google Wamaster Revolution
Thanks @torros will go over and do that now thanks for the heads up ?…….exactly what I was looking for thanks again
Gerry is right Man O War was pretty poo it was more unbalanced in regards to this new fleet is so much better than the previous releases than even Battlefleet Gothic was
Happy Sunday!!
Tour of Duty was a 2016 book. ‘Nam was the book in 2017 that updated it and covers all the factions with unit card sets for each.
Battlefront position ‘Nam within the Team Yankee sub-brand, which has of course recently focussed on updating to WW3: Team Yankee. Within that they have the Warsaw Pact/ NATO conflict which has been revisited first in the product cycle, we can expect the Middle East to be revisited next (as they can re-use models) and I wouldn’t be surprised to see ‘Nam getting an update following that.
https://vietnam.team-yankee.com/ still has models, starter boxes, rules etc available.
I always felt than ‘Nam was more ‘men on the ground with support’ rather than ‘tanks with support’ that the FoW core mechanics have generally favoured. That has shifted to mixed forces with the latest rulesets, so it will be interesting to see what they do with ‘Nam in this WW3:TY cycle.
LOL.. I was looking at the ‘Nam book and 4 Huey’s on my painting desk, when Ben mentioned ‘Tour of Duty’..
David’s original vision for Home Raiders was to have this 1:1 scale game for a younger audience that could be played on the coffee table (no special scenery needed). The ‘cutesy’ factions worked with that concept, although I’ve never really got the Penguins. The rules attempted to be young-user friendly with loads of icons, but somehow became a bit inaccessible to me. Might dig it out later…
When talking about Smog, were you thinking about Infamy:The Big Smoke from https://infamygames.com/ ? Tesla, Baker Street boys etc… Website appears broken this morning.
They were two different things, coxjul. The original Smog setting and minis didn’t have a game associated with them, and were a larger scale (40mm I think, but possibly 54mm). Infamy was different setting and minis (although both were fantasy steampunk so have a lot of similarities).
Would FoW Vietnam just mean walls of tanks in SE Asia instead of walls of tanks in Europe and the Middle East?
yup, I’m looking forward to Warwick Kinrade’s Nam game due next year
Speaking of wargaming TV, does anyone remember a short series presented by Edward Woodward “Battleground” with, I think one of the early wargaming drivers, Peter Gilder? I’m guessing it would have been the mid/late 1970s?
Yeah. Good stuff. Most of its on You tube now
yes, excellent series, I introduced Aurorainbag to it a couple of weeks ago. Rewatching it now with the snooker masters on I was struck by the camera set up and voice over commentary by Ed.
It’s like they built straight onto the snooker table and all the cameras were left in situ
Happy Sunday Cogs!
Wow, gold button! What a great way to wake up on a Sunday! Thanks a lot for the kind words.
To fess up: I didn’t actually use contrast paints. The non-metallic is actually an Army Painter Shiny Silver with a matt varnish on top (and a toned down dip in between). I found that emulates the non-metallic quite nicely. As for the bases: I accidentally discovered that after one layer of (I think) Mournfang Brown over white the bases looked wooden and decided to stop, because I liked it.
congratulations and thanks for the clarifications otherwise we would have just made up an answer ourselves and then argued over which of our ideas was correct
as is tradition!
@lloyd I have halo ground command and I find it a good game but it needed some tweaks here and there.
Yes Anish Kapoor prevented the world from using Vanta Black, and he’s a notorious aresehole. Stuart Semple makes the black 3.0, he’s working on a white one too at the moment. His pigment powders are pretty interesting too.
Yay the XLBS Show.
It’s three sided it’s Martians?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijPeKgL22n8
They look very borrowers @lloyd
I was on time team when I was 11-12. I was part of a young archaeologist club …and I got some screen time 😉
An interesting show guy’s
Dropzone ain’t dead, just taking a long time to get back on its feet. Hawk’s internal collapse was pretty absolute, TTCombat have only just about got the whole range back into production. They were heavily invested into bringing back Carnevale at the time and couldn’t do everything at once.
One for your redirected games I would suggest Liavathons, great models not bad rules, but due to problems with model suppliers it just died.
00:00 mornin’ possums… sort of. 2:25pm already
01:00 @lloyd infested by Justins anime stuff? 😉
02:30 Scully McCabe!
07:00 “You’ve got wood!”
09:00 Is that movie available on DVD anywhere? I want that!
11:55 “FREUDE SCHÖNER GÖTTERFUNKEN” *boom* “TOCHTER AUS ELISIUM” *boom* – and people wonder why we (Germans) can’t get away from the “evil person” cliché. ‘SPLOSIONS!
14:30 Killer wallpaper from space!
20:00 reclining hair line… take that though and look at some older BoW videos 😉
27:00 Saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagaaaaa.
29:45 Bolden Guttons!
30:30 Yellow and white being hard to paint… humbug! 😉
32:00 dirty Stormtroopers… @brennon have you watched the Mandalorian? So many dirty Troopers 😉
42:25 “It’s not always a hole LLoyd” said Ben, grinning smugly XD
50:05 Wrath of Kings – so gone it’s 401 (unauthorized)
1:12:00 crocked fingers make Lloyd go “EEEWWW!!”
1:26:00 “Gutenborg – We will add your technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will be preserved by us. Resistance is futile.”
1:28:00 YOU’LL NEVER CATCH US ALL!
1:40:00 At this point in time I don’t want anything back… either it’s disappointing, gets milked (looking at you Hasbro) or simply isn’t interesting me any more…
And now: more cake!
Well ive been absent long enough! My apologies fellow cultist, life has been busy! Will try to get more back into the cult over the holidays while im lounging in Cookstown Northern Ireland visiting and quarantining!
Im sure you guys know tue game im going to bring up. Has to be War of the Ring. I know we are not suppose to pick GW games but that is my absolute favorite game of all time! Super easy to play but hard to master. It just needed some small tweaks to make it better for matched play and i think my written house rules fix that with just one page of adjustments. I know they will probably never revitalize it as we have discussed that mass battle games are all but dead. Oh well i can always dream!
@silverfox Still plenty of people playing them. Never give up the faith
Another great episode. Always fun to listen to chatter on the ebb and flow of the industry.
As an insider to the “collapse/disappearance/lack of support” for Wrath of Kings and Dark Age, there was certainly some truth to what Gerry was saying about CMON not understanding the development cycles and maintenance of an ongoing concern like a wargame. The “2nd ed” of Wrath of Kings wasn’t really a second edition, but rather an opportunity to start releasing the second batch of minis that had been designed/developed for the game. I use the word batch very deliberately. They were all designed concurrently, some two or three years after the originals.
However, rather than WoK and DA dying due to the glut of other games, I know they died because of “mismanagement”. As they were starting on their upswing, the VP of Sales (very much focused on selling board games as one-off things) actively worked to ensure distribution to stores was hampered. We weren’t allowed to talk to distributors at all, and were reprimanded if he felt we might have done so. One of the salesmen who opened up a distributor in the UK and Europe was fired the day after he worked out their first order which would have seen a considerable amount of the second wave get to gamers, and that position was never filled again. The VP didn’t understand wargaming, or painting minis, or the potential for it, and flatly refused that any company could make money selling wargames and their associated minis, despite being told about Games Workshop and their success repeatedly. Each of the three owners had a different agenda, which was why this VP was able to get his way.
I would LOVE to see/be involved in returning Dark Age to a place of prominence in wargaming, but I know that it needs another decade in the wilderness before store owners would give it another chance.
But, if you love “dead wargames” you might want to check out a new podcast from some friends of mine called The Dead Wargamers’ Society, and the talk about dead wargames and ways to keep things active. In episode 2 they cover Eden, episode 3 they talk about Guild Ball, and in episode 4 they talk to me and we touch on Dark Age:
https://www.facebook.com/The-Dead-Wargamers-Society-112779620623694/
HAPPY SUNDAY…..
Specific to Vietnam, I’d rather play it as a skirmish game. That doesn’t rule out 15mm but it does rule out FoW multi-based infantry sands. There’s a Vietnam port of Bolt Action in an old(ish) copy of Wargames, Soldiers and Strategy and I’d use that to get started.
One I’d like to see return is Panzerfauste – fantasy WW2. There were Orc Brits, I think dwarfs were Germans and my favourites the Finnish trolls (including a watering can for the water-cooled MMG). I hovered over my shopping basket for those trolls countless times and still kick myself that I don’t own then.
Happy Sunday folks.
I enjoy The Last Kingdom for what it is,give it another chance @avernos,it’s not all bad.Games i’d like to see come back ( with the older rules updated rather than completely re-written ) include Mordheim,Battlefleet Gothic and,interestingly enough,Wrath of Kings.I loved the mini’s for WoK and remember watching @warzan go all googly-eyed for the Pigmen ( iirc ).
I’ve long felt that when it comes to miniatures games that the behemoth that is GW just sucks the oxygen out of the room and prevents many sci fi games from being successful.
At the same time I think that Kickstarter also created so much diversity that many games get lost in the deluge.
For historical gaming, the issue is murkier. On the plus side, you can use your WW2 minis with any rule set you
like. But there are so many rule sets it’s difficult to find a big enough community to support a particular game. I also suspect, but cannot prove, that a lot of historical gamers game at home instead of clubs or local game stores.
Another issue with historical games is certain topics, like WW2, suck up a lot of the community so that it’s difficult to find traction for other historical eras.
Given all the above, I’m personally very excited to see MERCS coming back. Nifty little game with some cool aesthetics. The plastic push fit minis weren’t terrible but they could use some improvement. But the game itself was and is fun, so I’m loving it.
Games that I wish could be killed and then resurrected as a better version would be Wild West Exodus. Great mins, excessively convoluted lore, but the 2nd Edition rules took a decent game engine and added unnecessary junk. Would’ve been better off tweaking the 1st Edition rules than adding more mechanics on top of the core engine. Konflict 47 is another. A weird blend of Bolt Action 1st Edition and Gates of Antares, it would’ve been better as a supplement to Bolt Action or just gone whole hog and made it just like Gates of Antares.
@lloyd I’m going to disagree with you on the Home Raiders. I like the penguins, they tickle my sense of whimsy. But I also like the gremlins and Lilliputians as well so I got all three. But that’s one I definitely want to see back.
“Lloyds slowly turning into a furry” – so when will you be teaching him Burrows & Badgers @brennon ? ;p
Does anybody know wheter Miniature Wargaming – The Movie can be bought in Europe? Whenever I try to buy it, it says: “not available in your region”, “creditcard from an American bank is required”,…
I saw something on the website stating that it was due for release in the UK in 2021, so I suspect that it will be the same for the rest of Europe.
Its only available in the US at the moment which is a little disappointing. Spring 2021 fir the UK which by when I will have forgotten all about it
OK, I’ll have to be patient. 🙂
What I am really noticing here is that a lot of these old games are taking on too much at once. Its hard to support both a game system and miniatures. What you are finding more often now, especially with the 3D printing, is publishers making rules sets without miniatures and sculptors making miniatures that can fit whatever rule set that you prefer.
The rise of game systems with miniatures apart from one big company and a few smaller companies efforts is a very recent thing within the history or wargaming
Before they did Hell Dorado, Cipher Studios had Anima Tactics. We had a small, but fairly active group at our FLGS and were sad to see the game stop being supported. It’s weird that it didn’t take long for the group to stop playing: apparently we were being fueled by the release of new minis.
Warmaster Ancients.
Ohhh. Halo was going to be so good. I bought everything that came out for that game. I wish they had the flyers. Than I could play the game as it was intended.
For me the 15 mm was the thing that made it different from 40k.
Such a shame that it is gone.
I got into A song of ice and fire now. I hope they keep making that for a long time. Bring out the Golden Company with elephants. I hope.