Warhammer 40k and Football share the most similarity in their execution of the game. I think this is likely due to the fact that they are both attempting to simulate certain aspects of war itself. One similarity is that they both capture the tactical aspect – making a series of short-scoped decisions that get your closer to your goal while keeping your opponent away from theirs. Continue reading Warhammer 40k is Basically Football, Part 3
Just as football is built on its community, so too is Warhammer 40k. In both cases, fans of both games spend at least as much time talking about the game as they do watching or playing it. The reason for this is that they both contain aspects that make great conversation: shared context, lore, and drama.
Shared context is what gives any two football fans in the U.S. the ability to talk about football with each other. There is a shared jargon, knowledge of how the game works, and familiarity with various teams. Each of these things allows a much simpler communication between fans and makes for better storytelling; if you’ve ever seen a football fan try to explain an awe-inspiring moment in a game to someone who doesn’t know the teams or the rules, you know what I mean. The same is true of Warhammer – a story about a unit failing their morale check on a critical turn is just as exciting to someone who plays Warhammer 40k as an interception in the last quarter of a football game is to someone who watches football. Continue reading Warhammer 40k Is Basically Football, Part 2
Quite often, I end up explaining my hobbies to my friends and coworkers (though not often to my family, since they’re a lot of who I play with). Warhammer 40k and other miniature wargames I think are the hardest to explain since the hobby is so broad. It’s not just playing a game with miniature figures (which is actually a fraction of the time I spend with the hobby), so I’ve often tried to explain it more holistically. Ian and I hit on an explanation recently that I found entertaining – Warhammer 40k is basically football.
In football, you have your home team, or, more precisely, the team that you like to rout for. There are lots of things to distinguish a team: what city they herald from, their team colors, the temperament and fame of certain players or managers, their wins and losses each season, and their rivals. In Warhammer 40k, there are just as many things that may make up an army. For instance, an army us usually chosen from a faction, which can be loosely correlated to where the army heralds from, and describes what kind of alien they are. It sometimes, but not always, also comes with recommendations for what the team colors are. Continue reading Warhammer 40k Is Basically Football, Part 1
Thanksgiving is coming soon, so I’ve started to think about my list for this year’s Thanksgiving Warhammer 40K Apocalypse game. I still have some models to put together, but I also need to figure out how I am going to create my list this year.
A while back, I created my own Warhammer 40K army list creator database in Microsoft Access. This was a great planning tool for me as it allowed me to pretty easily select squads and equipment and it would compute points for my army. It also allowed me to print out easy cheat sheets with model stats, weapon info, etc. so that I could come to the table prepared to play. Unfortunately, the biggest part of creating this database was actually data entry – I had to enter in the point costs for each option under each unit profile; this meant that the database was tied to my codex, and became out of date as soon as a new code was released. Additionally, since data entry is the most annoying part of any programming project, once it’s out of date, I am not very motivated to update it. Continue reading Thanksgiving Apocalypse Game Preparation
I’ve been playing Warhammer 40K now for a few years, with my main activity being army building. That may seem a bit lame, but I find myself enjoying collecting, assembling, organizing, and painting an army somewhat more than I do actually playing the game. However, I do find that I have missed our Thanksgiving Apocalypse game, as it used to give me better opportunity to put the “organizing” part to work, which was always a lot of fun for me. When I built my first initial armies, I used spreadsheets, like many others, but, for me, it became very quickly apparent that Warhammer 40K really needs a database if you want a tool to do the heavy lifting for you.
Continue reading Spreadsheets and Databases – Part 2: Warhammer 40K