Dominion Strategy Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Pages: [1]

Author Topic: Tile based miniatures  (Read 758 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

popsofctown

  • Adventurer
  • ******
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 5477
  • Respect: +2860
    • View Profile
Tile based miniatures
« on: August 25, 2016, 02:33:01 am »
0

So there's this genre called miniatures games.  They are called miniatures because several of the pieces needed to play the game are small representations of larger objects, without abstraction apart from the size (and material) (whereas a settlement in settler's of Catan is also smaller than a settlement and a Dominion card called Woodcutter is also smaller than a man that cuts wood but those things are not shaped like the things they represent as part of the abstraction.)

There's a certain type of person where that alone gets them going.  And then the opportunity to paint things that are small get them going.  I'm not one of those people. 

As a necessary condition to make a game out of the miniatures, there has to be some kind of rules.   98% of the time the rules govern how the miniatures kill eachother (if anyone knows of a noncombat miniatures game that's intriguing).  Those rules tend to make a pretty interesting strategy game.  Not really because the genre demands it, most of the genre's audience seems to be all about that, you can see the stitches on the 4 inch soldier's jacket and paint them yourself.  But it just kinda happens as soon as you start trying to make the size of the minis realistic, pretty much.  I tend to like the kind of strategy that emerges and find it decently interesting.

Most miniatures games use measuring to determine and govern these rules.  For one that's tedious, for two it leads into very awkward officiation issues, even in a friendly game, where a nonzero amount of generosity can occur choosing around an obstacle or something.  I'm most interested in the subset that does not accept that design issue (it has advantages, but not enough).

Really I have only gotten to play one tile based mini game, one my friend has gotten me into, called Star Wars Imperial Assault.  It's an FFG product, which would be my least favorite thing about it, I'm not excited by a couple of their business strategies and practices.  But it's a pretty fun and interesting game.  There's so many chess moves in the course of a game that it feels like you can customize a list of which units to use and get a bunch of things wrong and then win anyway just because you moved one square left at the right time.

This thread is for offering to play me at Imperial Assault on Vassal, telling me whether Heroclix is actually bad or good, telling me about lesser known tile based miniatures games because I'm not really aware of them, agreeing with me that a tile based miniatures game that somehow revolved around playing cards from hand to take pretty much all your actions would be awesome (imperial assault goes halfsies on that idea, shame), and discussing whether tile based miniatures as a genre will live or die.

Huzzah!
 
Logged
Pages: [1]
 

Page created in 0.107 seconds with 20 queries.