Are licensed games getting out of hand?

 I can't be the only person in this hobby who struggles with licensed games, right?

Okay, let's back up a second. I'm not saying games that are using licensed IPs are bad, although some are. But it's not the fact they're licensed that makes them bad, is what I'm trying to get at here. I think there are several that are pretty solid, actually.

But holy shit are there just a ton of them, or am I imagining things?

Star Wars: X-Wing
Star Wars: Armada
Star Wars: Legion
Star Wars: Shatterpoint
Marvel Crisis Protocol
Judge Dredd
A Song of Ice and Fire
Star Trek Federation Commander
Doctor Who
The Walking Dead
Batman
Harry Potter
DC Universe
Heroclix
Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game

And those are just the ones I can come with off the top of my head that are still in production. That doesn't include shit like the Marvel Universe Miniatures Game, Star Trek Attack Wing (which I'm fairly certain is no longer being produced?), the Star Wars miniatures game from either the early 90's or the one produced by Wizards of the Coast in the early 2000's, Mars Attacks and so on. Nor does that list include upcoming stuff, like the new Star Trek: Into the Unknown. I also didn't include stuff I don't know the status of Like the various Alien miniatures properties because that's just a clusterfuck of absurd proportions.

So it's not just me, yeah? Also, those first five games I listed are all made by the same company. And this is just miniatures games! The list would go on almost until the end of time if I included card games and board games.

I've played my fair share of these: X-Wing, Batman, Crisis Protocol, Middle Earth, I've played Legion and gotten demos of Armada and I had a good collection of Heroclix stuff back in the day along with stuff for the WotC Star Wars game. I'm not intrinsically opposed to licensed games, but it is starting to feel like they're everywhere these days. Maybe it's just because Star Wars is basically a license to print money and Asmodee hopped on that shit real hard. 

And you'd think I'd be into this, right? I love Star Wars, Star Trek, Batman, Marvel and Middle Earth. And I love miniatures gaming. And I've had a good time playing most of these games. So why don't I love them?

The answer is simple: they don't excite me, and I feel too constrained. I feel like I'm being leashed, creatively, and that really sours the mood for me.

What do I mean by this? I mean that these things exist in the world with specific styles and looks, which means when it comes time to start painting models I feel like the decision has been made for me. I know, on a technical level, that I can paint my shit however I please and nobody can really stop me, and that should be enough to push me on in painting. But all it takes is that one dude, and we know the exact mouth-breathing neckbeard I mean, to give me a hard fucking time because I decided to have some fucking fun with my miniatures that I paid for to immediately put me off the whole damned thing. That may sound petty, and it probably is, but I don't want to have to deal with that. 

And often times I find myself just not liking the official colors, or wanting to deal with obnoxious colors. For example: Galactic Republic in Star Wars: Legion. Clones wear white armor. Why? Because George Lucas really wanted to hammer home the lazy ass imagery and make sure nobody missed his brilliant foreshadowing. But white is a massive pain in the ass to paint, even doing it the quick way of just using some white color primer it's still annoying to deal with if you have to touch stuff up.

Marvel Crisis Protocol is the same way. I feel caged. Iron Man is red and gold, no exceptions. And again, I could paint him green, but I don't want to get a lecture from some turbo-nerd about "not respecting the source material" or some nonsense.

Compare this to something like Battletech. That games gives you basically all the freedom you could ever want. I can paint my mercenaries any color I like, and nobody can say a damn thing about it not being "lore accurate." Hell, I can even paint canonical units in various color schemes and just say it's camo for a certain environment and people would go "yeah, that tracks." Even the biggest Battletech nerds won't bat an eye at my Free Worlds League (PURPA BIRB!) being painted in arctic camo while being part of the 3rd Free Worlds Guard. It just doesn't happen.

That's the crux of the problem for me: I like to think of myself as a creative person. I want to create my own stuff (within reason, obviously) and games like Battletech, Heavy Gear, Relic Blade, MERCS, Grimdark Future and so forth give me that freedom. Even heavily character centric games like Bushido don't really try and pen you in. There's the "official" studio paint schemes, but nobody in that community gives a shit if you want your Prefecture of Ryu guys to be wearing green because it's your favorite color.

I just don't feel like you get that in licensed games. At least not if you don't want to be accosted at some point. And while yes it is easy to tell said turbo-nerds to fuck right off, or say things like "if the company wants them to be a certain color they can sell them pre-painted" and go about your day, it just isn't worth the fight for me.

I also feel like the companies making the games are sort of locked into a corner. They can't just create new shit, generally speaking, because it sounds dope. I don't know if every unit in A Song of Ice and Fire appears in the books (I only read the first one, and hated it), but I do know that Disney has a pretty tight yoke on Star Wars and Marvel and thus the poor folks at Atomic Mass Games have to have everything they propose quintuple approval and verified by Disney because it can go into production. And sometimes, like with Middle Earth, they can bring in stuff that was in the books but not the films (hence why that game has so many characters that never appear in any of the movies). But overall, it ends up feeling like all creativity is being dictated somewhere else.

Maybe I'll get over it and just go wild. Legion is a solid game, I've found myself looking at A Song of Ice and Fire (based on books I hated and a 28mm mass battle rank n' flank game with model removal?!) and Middle Earth constantly calls to me because there is some freedom there with the lesser seen stuff like Harad, Far Harad, Corsairs and even something as major as the Dwarves of Khazad Dum since we never see any of them in the movies.

But for me, games that give me that freedom to create and sort of do my own thing will always win out. Letting me spread my wings just a little bit more will endear me to a game far more than name recognition ever well.

First Impressions: Relic Balde

 Look at me doing something other than complaining!

Yes indeed, I got together with my good friend Troy to try out a game I've been super interested in for a while now: Relic Blade. All the models here are Troy's, so admire his paint work if you so choose.

Relic Blade comes to us from the mind of one Sean Sutter and his company Metal King Studios. It's a 28mm fantasy skimish game in the truest sense of the term, and it simply slaps.

This game is basically everything I want in a miniatures game these days. It's easy to learn, there's plenty of tactical options, the rules aren't a muddled nightmare, it understands basic 21st century game design and has a stupid amount of charm. It's so clearly a labor of love for Mr. Sutter, and because of that the game oozes with character and love like few others I've seen.

Anyway, Troy and I did a normal 100 point game. When building a warband you pick which faction you'll be playing: Advocate or Advesary. Yeah, there are only two factions in the game. But don't let that fool you, each one has sub factions, sort of. Really they're just themed boxes you can buy to get you on your way towards playing, as anything from each faction can run together. Thus it's entirely possible to have a warband with a dragonman cleric, a wood elf archer, a gnome riding a magic carpet and a Persain themed goblin. Yes, those are all real things in this game.

Characters have their stats: action dice, movement value and armor. They also have a series of actions they can do, which tell you how many dice you need to do said action along with target number, damage modifier and any special rules. All of this plus more is brilliantly conveyed via the stat cards which feature the game's beautiful, almost comic-book styled, art from Mr. Sutter.

Sheer beauty.

When a character activates they get a number of action dice (in the example above the Cleric of Justice gets four) to do what they want to do. Moving, attacking, special abilites and objective actions all require the use of AD. This is a brilliantly simple system that doesn't get bogged down in pointless complexity for the sake of complexity. There's no bullshit for the sake of artificial depth, just solid and fluid mechanics.

The forces move towards the objective.

The game, rightly, uses alternating activations, so player involvment is constant and you can try to react in something more akin to real time. And since the average game will feature somewhere between four and six models a side things go by at a good clip. Relic Blade is also played on a 2x2 table, so it doesn't take up a ton of space or take long for the carnage to begin. This also leads to games not lasting all damn day, so being able to squeeze in several games in two hours is a real possibility here.

Once models engage in combat with each other they can start using attack actions. These will show how many AD they take to preform, and the faces shown on the dice on the card are the target number. If you manage to roll the exact faces shown you get a critical hit. Crits come in three flavors based on number of dice being rolled: one, two of three. Each increases the damage potential. Characters can use a focus action to add an extra die to an attempt, which is the only way to reach three dice since nothing has an inherent attack that rolls three dice.

The Battle Pigs swarm the objective, and promptly forget it exists.

If you hit you roll a d6 and add the attack's damage value to the roll. Now, if you score a two die crit you get +1d6 to the damage roll, and if you manage a three die crit you get +2d6 on the damage roll. So it's entirely possible to roll three dice for damage, adding it all together plus the damage stat of the attack. The defender also rolls a d6 (or 2d6 if they used an action of gain a dodge token) and add their armor to the result. Whatever the difference is is how much damage is done to the defender. The game can be brutally savage, and it's not uncommon to see guys getting one shotted. My Thief and Cleric of Justice got dropped in a single attack from a very angry swine.

The scrum that quickly ensued.

I really like this level of brutality, it reminds me of Dark Age which was probably one of the most punishing miniatures games I ever experienced because even your super high cost awesome dude coule get dropped in one shot from a scrub with a bit of broken pipe. It rewards smart gameplay, and I love that.

Another thing I really appreciate in Relic Blade is how many abilities require die rolls. It gives a real sense of characters actually having to concentrate and try to do stuff. There are some innate abilities that don't need die rolls, but the ones with the bigger impact do. For example, my Wild Elf Druid could turn into a bear. Yeah, she could just turn into a giant fuck off bear and start mauling people. This still required her to try to do it, and the first time I attempted it I failed and burned two my her four AD that turn which put her in a tough spot when the pigs came gunning for her. But when it does succeed there's a real sense of joy, but maybe that's just because she became a fucking bear with which to initiate the aforementioned maulings.

Hibernation time is over!

Relic Blade also features a campaign system, but we didn't play with any of that so I can't really say how well it works. Troy assures me it works quite well, and with the short length of games he says a group can, given a day, play an entire campaign in five to six hours.

There are also rules for wild creatures based on the type of terrain you're playing on, allowing fey spirits, giant lizard monsters and skeletal pricks to show up and start attacking both warbands. On top of that there are optional rules for playing on grid maps, which I think is brilliant if you, like me, want to play at home but don't have terrain. It gives you choices, and that's always greatly appreciated.

The models are also beautiful. They have a nice old school charm to them, and the parts counts are kept to sane levels (that's a post for the future, trust me) with many being single piece. And if you don't like the official models, for whatever insane reason, you can just buy PDFs of the various stat cards and use whatever models you want. So, if you already have a good sized collection of fantasy stuff that could easily slot into the roles of some of these characters and you don't want to add more models to your horde then you can still play without needing to buy more minis.

Now, I always like to bang on about how no game is perfect, every game has it's flaws. I got to tell you, though, that Relic Blade is damn near perfect.

The flaws it does have, in my opinion, are that the critical rules can be a bit wonky to understand at first, especially for three die crits. They aren't terrible, but the first few read throughs I found myself going "wait, what?" a few more times than expected. It works in practice, but it is just a little weird. 

By also only having two factions it can sometimes feel like warbands are a bit of a hodge podge, and it would maybe be nice if there was some sort of bonus for running thematic warbands to encourage a sense of uniformity. Not a deal breaker, and the flexibility is great, but if you're the tpye of person who needs stuff to feel unified then the small selectiion for some of the subfactions may leave you wanting.

My last "complaint" is that some of the upgrades feel either crazy situational, or really limited. For example, my Cleric of Justice had a piece of equipment that gave him extra armor if he was critically wounded (the little box on the damage track with the shattered bone), but he got dropped in a single blow so that simply ended up never applying and being a total waste of points. I'm sure in cases where your cleric character doesn't get bitch slapped with a halberd it can be useful, but it does feel a bit too easy to circumvent. And other cards just don't seem vesatile. That same card can only be used by clerics if I recall, and as far as I can tell that is the only cleric model in the whole game so far. Another example is the Wild Elf Geomancer from the Wilderkin box set. The box comes with a handful of cards that can be used by wizards, but they require a rock spires, and only the Geomancer can summon rock spires thus far so the cards might as well just say "Geomancer Only" on them.

But, these are also incredibly minor and petty nitpicks that in no way detract from the overall awesomeness of the game. And with the range ever expanding (and a new Kickstarter project on the way to help with that) my complaints about the cards may be undone. Hell, I'm only nitpicking because I feel like it's my job to do so. 

This game is still the closest to perfection I've ever seen in all my many years of gaming and reviewing. It does just about everything right, from the rules to the atmosphere to the art style. It's a stellar game dripping with charm and clearly maxed out its charisma, and it is simply pure. The amount of passion Mr. Sutter has for his game, his world, is totally invigorating and a breath of fresh air in an industry where the big dogs all feel like the same thing with a slightly different hoodie on. 

This is why I got into gaming, games like this are why I got in so deep and why I eventually became a journalist. It's people like Sean Sutter, with that heart and soul, that give me hope for this niche little hobby. It's games like this that remind me why I try to spread their gospel across the land. Because they're good, and they deserve all the attention because the person making them cares.

So yeah, I suspect there will be more Relic Blade in my future, so you may well see some unboxings of various models here. Until then, I encourage you to be not afriad when wading into the waters of miniatures gaming: expand your horizions and check out more of the games my small studios. Be like bear...

BEAR FEARS NOTHING!

Let's talk about scale

 I feel like this shouldn't be such a difficult conversation to have with gamers, but apparently it is. The discussion of proper use of scale in miniatures games.

As a gamer I live by a pretty simple creed: the bigger the battle; the smaller the miniatures. I'm sure I'm not the only persomn who feels this way, but I will admit that I, what with my limited space for stuff in my apartment, may fall on the more extreme end of the scale. To me, the moment a game demands I have more than a dozen or so dudes I start asking about the scale of the models being used. Now this isn't always the case, as I do play Grimdark Future at 28mm. generally speaking, though, I don't want to need a ton of 28mm+ dudes to play a game that could probably work just as well at 15mm.

And this isn't to say that 28-32mm is bad. It's just that that scale works best, in my opinion, for skirmish games with small numbers of models. Look at stuff like Relic Blade, MERCS and Bushido: these are all skirmish games with low model counts of usually between four and six models per side. Relic Blade and Bushido both play a 2x2 table, while MERCS caps you at five models and plays on a 3x3. And it works there. 

Where that scale stops working so well is when you want to do big battles. Games like Warhammer 40k being the most egregious offenders with not only large numbers of models on the table, but then needing large models as well. Again, I play Grimdark Future (the suprior alternative to 40k's drivil) at 28mm and yes I'm aware of that making me something of a hypocrite. But I stand by the fact that anyone who bought Apocalypse sized shit for 40k pissed their money away. 28mm scaled titans? Yeah, nothing about that sounds smart to me.

To continue on the Games Workshop bashing for a second, remember Warhammer Fantasy? Remember how in 8th edition it was giant units of 50 models and then single units of giant models? That was fucking idiotic, and just plain bad game design. Tables were sparsely decorated with terrain because you had units with front facings of 400mm in some cases. 

And yet we know GW can do games at the proper scale, as both 40k and Fantasy had properly scaled games in Epic and Warmaster respectively. By being 6mm and 10mm they could capture those epicly huge armies without it being a clusterfuck needing massive tables and an entire weekend to play three turns. And those games got shitcanned, and instead GW kept pushing bigger and bigger models into their core games because people kept buying them because...actually I don't know why. I guess because big = cool to some people?

And what kills me is that companies are still not understanding proper scale!

Lets take a gander at Conquest: Last Argument of Kings from Para Bellum Games.

This is considered a starting point

It's a mass battle, rank n' flank miniatures game. Now, they did mkae the right call in the newest edition to do away with the stupidity that is individual model removal, but there's something that doesn't quite come across in the picture which is the biggest flaw in the game. Those regular infantry models? 38mm. Yep, they made a game at 38mm scale. Not only is this bullshit because nobody else uses this scale (and this is something I meant to bring up in my previous post about proprietary nonsense), but it's jsut a nonsensical scale. And then you want a mass battle game out of it? 

Who thought this was a good plan?

But people love their giant models, I guess. Probably why I still see people asking when they're getting a fucking AT-AT in Star Wars: Legion.

Wait, what? You want this in Legion?

No, this couldn't possibly be a problem

let's do some math here, if you don't mind. According to Wikipedia, an AT-AT is 22.5 meters in height. Now, Legion is 35mm scale (god dammit, is anything in this game normal?). If we use a base 1.8 meters for the average height of a human male, that means that an AT-AT, to be in scale, would be the same height as roughly 12.5 dudes. That's 437.5mm if I'm doing my calculations right, which would convert to 17.22 inches. That's damn near 17 1/4 inches in height. That's insanely impractical as a gaming piece, not to mention it'd be closer to 18 inches in length. Even on a standard 6x4 table it would be nearly half as long as the table itself. 

And people think this is a good idea? If you want a cool AT-AT model just buy a model AT-AT that's not going to be bigger than some dogs. 

And if you think I'm being unrealistic with my math, consider this. In Empire Strikes Back we see an AT-AT step on a snow speeder. Now, we have a model of said speeder in legion already, so we can get a pretty decent account of the size we're looking at here.

And this may be slightly smaller than the game's scale

That model is on a 100mm base, and it takes up basically the whole thing. Now, here's a still from Empire of one being stepped on.

Crunch

So each foot of the AT-AT would be, roughly, the size of that speeder. And it has four of the fucking things.

"Just scale it down to fit the table better" I hear some hypothetical reader say, but then what's the fucking point? You'd have to scale it down so much that it basically stops being an AT-AT at that point and might as well be some original creation that just happens to resemble an AT-AT. 

And it's not just Legion that this comes up in, I've seen people say that they'd consider playing Battletech if it were 28mm instead of 6mm.

Now, Battletech is one of my all time favorite games, and aprt of what makes it work so well is that scale. At 6mm the game functions correctly, allowing big stompy robots on reasonable sized tables with tanks and jet fighters to boot (and infantry to step on like above picture).

So let's do some more math, using this official poster from Catalyst Game Labs to give us an idea of size. It's worth noting that Battletech has been crazy detailed about all sorts of things with the mechs, but one thign that never seems to be consistent is how big they should be. It actually bugs me a bit becasue you can tell me exactly how many rounds of autocannon ammo a mech can hold, but not how tall it should be? So this is the closest we have to anyhting officially giving heights of various mechs.

At least it's something?

According to this, and apologies if it's hard to read, the Atlas, canonically the tallest, non super-heavy, mech as far as I'm aware, comes in at 14.85 meters in height. So using our 1.8 tall meter human as a standard this thing would be about 8 1/4 people tall, which when converted to 28mm would be 231mm in height. That comes to just over nine inches tall. Again, not even sort of practical as a gaming piece.

But maybe I'm being a dick using the biggest mech, so let's look at the smallest mech on that sheet: the Commando. It's about 12 meters tall, and is the lightest classification of mech in the game. How big would that be in 28mm scale? About as tall one of these.

28-32mm pilot for scale (seriously, what scale is 40k these days?)

Knights are, from what I can find, between 9-12 meters tall, so a light mech would be roughly the size of a 40k Knight model at 28mm, and that fucker is on a 170mm base.

Being 6mm allows the game to have some breathing room, while letting the mechs be the focal point without getting into stupid huge territory.

This is one of those game design 101 things: scale matters. it's why By Fire & Sword works, because it's 15mm it allows for big armies and units without sacrificing the gameplay. Same with Flames of War. Imagine trying to play a game of Bolt Action that replicated the size of an army in Flames of War. You'd need a tennis court to play it on and still have room to move stuff around with any sense of tactics. Even Warlod Games, notorious for trying to do all history at 28mm, has acknowledged that sometimes you need to use smaller models to accurately portray big battles and started giving us their Epic Battles stuff.

Games insisting on being 28mm+ when it serves little practical purpose just baffles me. Sometimes it may be out of the hands of the designers (such as licensed games like Legion), but when it's an origial thing I just don't get it. Is it jsut because that's what GW does? Stop trying to be like GW, it's not worth it and you'll never likely pull in enough of their brainwashed, sunken cost fallacy spouting sycophants to make it worth it.

Scale matters more than some people seem to understand. Big models can be cool, when done right and used sparingly (see Bot War combiners), but when it comes to making a game the practicality of these items being pieces for a game played on a limited table space needs to be taken into consideration. If shit gets too big, it stops being practical and, also crucial, affordable. If Atomic Mass Games did put in a to scale AT-AT, you think you'd really be buying one? It'd probably be $1,000. Hell, the not to scale Super Star Destroyer in Aramada was $250.

And it's not even like detail of the models is an issue, you can get insane detail on 15mm stuff these days, and the Warmaster community is showing how detailed to can make even 10mm models with 3d sculpting and printing. 

I think that's enough for today, apologies for this being such a long winded rant but I really needed to get this one off my chest. So, my fellow consumers, jsut remember to think practically about games in the future, and how big they really need to be.  

How Much Proprietary Is Too Much?

 So full disclaimer here before anyone decides to come kicking down my door: I am not inherently against the use of proprietary items in games. You may have guess that from every single game I've done unboxings and first impressions of thus far. All of them use something, and I've never thrown a shitfit over it.

That being said, is there a point when it becomes too much?

Now I want to clarify something, when I say proprietary items I don't mean basic stuff like stat cards or upgrade cards or tokens. Those are all pretty essential and not really a deal breaker for anyone as far as I know (although I am firmly in the "offer stat cards for fucks sake" camp). When I talk about needing proprietary items to play a game I mean specialty dice and the likes.

I think that these types of things can be done well, and correctly. In games like Godtear, Oak & Iron or Warhammer Underworlds the special dice and such used don't bother me in the slightest becasue they are, by and large, self contained games. And in all three of those cases, buying a starter set just makes sense (especially for Oak & Iron). Obviously they can be expanded with new champions/ships/warbands respectively, but by being that sort of board/wargame hybrid they feel less...manipulative. This also applies to something like X-Wing, or at least did when I played back after Episode 7 came out. I bought the starter box, but only had three ships I didn't want to worry about. yeah I bought an extra pack of dice because some of the combos got a little crazy, but it was largely self contained.

And that brings us to another Star Wars game, and probably the most egregious offender of too much proprietary in my opinon: Legion. You may recall that I quite enjoyed my game of Legion way back when, and I still maintain that it is a solid enough game. I get why people like it mechanically, although I think it should be 15mm, and if asked if someone who enjoys Star Wars and wargames should look into it I will absolutely tell them yes. But it does go fucking mental with the proprietary stuff. Basically everything in that game is proprietary: the dice, the movement tools, the range rulers for shooting, even the god damned bases aren't standard sized. Yeah, the normal infantry are on 27mm bases. Who does that?

And to make it worse, as I mentioned in my first impression post, if you buy a starter set (over $100 investment, mind you) it doesn't even get you enough dice to actually play the game proper!

This gets you three more of each type of dice

It just baffles me how anyone could think this was the best way. And it brings me to my main issue: what does it add to the game? What does not using inches for measurement add to the game that the special tools do? The only thing I can think of is that it means no conversions in countries that use the metric system. That's not enough to justify it for me. What do the dice add? Nothing to real value in this nerd's opinion. It just lets them have different levels of dice, which could still be accomplished by just using a tiered dice system and letting people use the piles of dice they likely already own.

Again, not a bad game, but it does, to borrow one of my favorite British terms, absolutely take the piss.

It wouldn't be so bad if things were easily converted for those who don't want to spend money on extra stuff (i.e. anyone who maybe wants to start by buying one of the battle force sets that don't come with range tools or dice), but it seems even that doesn't work. The shortest movement tool is roughly 3 inches, for example. Not exactly 3 inches, but roughly around that mark. 

Now this probably all sounds like someone who hates proprietary items in games, and as I established I'm not one of those. So let me talk about two games I find myself quite enamoured with that use proprietary items: Bot War and World of Twilight. 

Bot War uses non-standard dice. Okay, not great because again it would be nice to have to keep track of a separate pile of dice, but whatever. Here's the difference, and where I really draw the line with Legion: one pack gets you enough to play a normal game. 

Five of each dice and some energy cubes

If you don't want to buy the two player starter, this is a whopping $15. Bam, done. Compare that to the Legion dice pack, which retails at $18 and doesn't give you enough dice to roll a small squad's shooting without having to re-roll at least one die. Now, there are the rare few models in Bot War that have stats that will require you to roll more than five dice, but I think there's a total of four in the whole game.

Lord Humongous here being one of the rare ones (and he stands at over 5 inches tall)

So that dice pack is, generally speaking, enough to play the game comfortably. And that's the key thing to me: I want to have to buy as few things as possible to enjoy the game. Obviously with a platoon scaled game you need more models than you do a skirkish game, but I want to keep the extra purchases of non-model items to a minimum.

The other game I mentioned as being a good example of proprietary is World of Twilight. Brief aside: World of Twilight is one of the best games I've ever played. The rules are solid and innovative, they're fun as hell and the game packs so much charm per square inch that it verges on creating some sort of singularity. It's an absolute fucking disgrace that more people don't know about it. Go check it out, for the love of god.

Now in World of Twilight combat is handled in a unique fashion. Each model as a combat score, and when fighting you take a number of combat stones equal to your combat score and choose what you will allocate to attack and what you will allocate to defense (Bushido does a similar method using dice, and is also awesome). The game also uses a random activation system akin to Bolt Action, but there are two activation tokens that denote when combats are fought (outside of special abilities that let you initiate one out of turn). Sounds like you need a ton of stuff to play, but it all comes in one easy to use package.

And for the low price of ten quid (or roughly $12)

But all of these things can be substitued pretty easily if you don't want to make that extra investment (although it's dirt cheap). Combat stones? Use coins, heads are a success and tails a failure. Activation tokens? Use different colored dice, it's not like we gamers are in short supply of a variety of dice. So these extra things aren't actually required to play the game, although for the cost the official stuff is great. 

This brings me to the point I made earlier: these things feel like a new take. Special dice for the sake of special dice? I'm a little iffy on. If the game does other things right then I'm willing to let it slide, for the most part. But in World of Twilight the core mechanics are so unique and different that you can't really replace them with a normal dice roll. I suppose you could do 1-3 is  fail and 4-6 is a success if you wanted, but seeing how you use a d6 to make Tough rolls it could get confusing quickly. But becasue it does something different it doesn't feel like as much of a copout, you know? Why does a game that uses dice need special dice? Does it, really? 

Again, I'm not against these types of things at face value. Legion is a good game, Crisis Protocol is a good game that suffers from the same design philosophy, I'm sure Shatterpoint is fun. But I'm getting to a point where needing tons of extra stuff for a single game just feels like a way to gouge me. If things were cross compatible it'd probably sting a hell of a lot less. 

A game can do proprietary right, and many games do. But the best way, if you ask me, is to keep it to a minimum. And if your core mechanic is going to require something special, make it available in a single purchase. Games like Bot War, World of Twilight, even MERCS show that you can have a gimmick without going overboard. And I think more games that want a gimmick that requires special parts need to keep that in mind.

Less is more sometimes.