When I was a wee lad I spent a summer designing a board game. It was horribly complicated and while I thought it was amazing my friends found it exhausting. Years later, a much smarter board game friend of mine explained to me that the advent of computer games had changed board games forever. My complicated game no longer had any place in the board game world because all the detailed mechanics and calculations could be relegated to machines. Instead, the truly great board games were the ones that provided deep strategy with a simple rule set.
I've always wanted to like 40k. I really have. I've even painted some of the models because they are gorgeous, but I've always hated playing. It's a constant stream of remembering which units have which gun and what number out of the hundred dice I just rolled counts as a hit and worrying whether it will still count as a hit after my opponent and I roll three more times for this attack alone.
I didn't get into Runewars for the miniatures (although the Rune Golem did help). I got into the game because every article on game-play I read made me more and more convinced that FFG had created a miniatures game for the new age. An accessible, dice-light miniatures game with deep strategy. It's a game I can teach in half an hour and play in an evening, but I feel like a god d**n general the entire time.
Leave your armor tables and dice calculations to the computers, I'm playing Runewars.
