Is it time for some more critical analysis of rule sets

[limburger 22321xp 0]

I’d say OTT/BoW always say what and how they feel about the games they play.

@mkultra99 please do post a full review of SPQR because I do want to know more details than ‘we didn’t like it’.

Any actual info on why you thought Tanks:Modern age was bad would be useful as well.
I dislike blanket statements like “game X sucks”, because they don’t allow me to judge if the flaw bad enough for me to skip buying a game.

I’m no fan of pointsvalues for wargames, because there are factors (like deployment, terrain) that can turn a high value asset into a 1 round paperweight. As such I doubt that a game like Tanks could ever be balanced when both helicopters and tanks are used within the same battle. I also suspect that the tournament packages take this into account somehow.

I’m not in favour of (unmoderated) user reviews, because based on the things I see posted as ‘reviews’ on Steam the vast majority are either whiny wimps (I died so the game sucks) or fanboys (it’s my favourite developer so it’s 11/10). And that’s without even mentioning the review bombing which happens when good games get bad reviews because of something that the developers/publishers did.

Part of the challenge for this for OTT will be the simple fact that there’s no way to track if the person posting owns a copy or has played it for X hours. In theory they could track users who have bought games in their webshop, but I suspect that requires updates to the GDPR statement and that’s assuming the systems can be linked at all.

[phaidknott 7250xp 0]

I think it’s fair to say that the most BoW can do as far as a “review” is an objective one (or this is what’s in the box) along with a brief “gist” of how the rules operate. In this day and age no content creator can afford to alienate their source material by offering a critical review.

Alas many companies have grown lax with their quality control in rules writing (even GW with their massive budgets can’t do a reasonable job), as “we” the customers have just grown used to it.

The Lets Play is probably the nearest we get to a rules review, but these are usually taped after a practice game (or two) and if it’s with the rules creators they can easily explain any shortcomings as to the interpretation of the written rules. As I said before, the big box starter sets with minis along with the rules review is going to focus on the contents of the box, and a review of a rule book alone will focus purely on the rules (although BoW don’t seem to review many stand alone rule systems other than Rich’s Chain of Command).

Warlord have done Beyond the Gates of Antares (which is a GREAT set of sci-fi rules), as well as SPQR, so you couldn’t just say all their rules are bad. But I don’t think there’s ANY site on the interweb that does critical rules reviews for miniature wargaming (you can’t afford to cut yourself off from you supply of content to cover), and the only critical reviews you do see are just within individual blog sites giving a personal viewpoint of the rules.

But is it just due to the fact that these “rules” companies just don’t send out review copies (or would a video of a book just be too boring to watch)?

Perhaps one way would be to start a Rules “wiki” on the site with a thread for each ruleset out there (suggested by the community by one user sending in their personal review), with a thread below for others to make later entries with their opinion on the matter. The problem is the website navigation on how to find things at a later date (and even if BoW did all the hard work setting this up, would we the viewers actually use it frequently and continuously?)

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