Reply To: Is it time for some more critical analysis of rule sets

[blinky465 17028xp 9]

Interestingly, I caught an old video recently (from about six/seven years ago) of a baby-faced Warren, being talked through how to play a game on Youtube. The game was played with stand-up card tokens and looked like little more than a field with some troops in it. But the focus was on the *game* and how the rules were used to evoke the battle(s) being played out on the tabletop – the minis (when they arrived) would be the finishing touch to the cinematic experience, not the be-all-and-end-all.

Fast-forward to the latest OTT video of Hunger Games:Mockingjay, where Ryan and Gerry both appeared disinterested in both the game and the “fluff” and just went through the motions of opening a box, taking out some miniatures, cooing over them (without fully understanding who they were, what they represented in the game world, how they fit in with the rules etc) and I too thought “I think I preferred the older, less “corporate” style videos that showed us how to play games.”

There’s been a flood of releases recently, which focus solely on the miniatures. Sure, the minis look great, but there seems to be  a factory mentality of churning out any old thing, in order to make use of a licence/franchise; the same kind of mentality that results in Doctor Who vacuum flasks and Spiderman travel clocks – the content is almost irrelevant, so long as there’s just something to hook the franchise characters onto, to get a product – any product – to market.

I loved the Beasts of War site and the transition to OTT has been interesting to watch. Something has changed – the site has a very different focus to the early days; I still quite like it, but more indepth review of products, games, the rules and mechanics (why we would enjoy the *game* rather than *look at these cool minis*) in place of disinterested 8-minute unbox-and-forget type snippets for the social media crowd are preferable to me too.