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Author Topic: "Brave Little Belgium " Undone by the Wit of "The Dice Tower"  (Read 36013 times)

Barthheart

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Even GMT has heard the siren call of big bucks with it's non-wargames....

Like everyone here I have more than enough games to last me to my last breath so I'm not so worried for me. And there are still slow trickles of gamers coming to wargaming... I've been helping at least two to understand LnLT games. Wargaming has been "dying" for a long time... and will continue to do so for a very long time yet.... until the PC crowds get at it....

But none of that is any reason for any of us to give up on it. Enjoy the hobby any way that pleases you. It lots of fun AND you might actually learn something.  :)


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mirth

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Even GMT has heard the siren call of big bucks with it's non-wargames....

I'm all for it if the non-wargame stuff sells well enough to help subsidize some of the more niche games.


Quote
Wargaming has been "dying" for a long time...

40 years at least

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Bison

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The zombie games probably let them keep the lights on. The Napoleonic 20 series is good and it looks like they condensed the series into 3 game sets which is nice. The Fading Glory reprint from gmt is really good but quality control failed notice misprinted counter sheets. GMT never corrected the issue. Frankly we been blessed with a glut of game the past decade so a slow down now or later is to be expected.



mirth

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Frankly we been blessed with a glut of game the past decade so a slow down now or later is to be expected.

Yep and I don't see it slowing down all that much. Compass, for example, is publishing games at a blistering pace right now.


There are also a lot of options in the minis realm. Tons of new rules (looking at you Osprey) and lots of smaller companies putting out some gorgeous figs.

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panzerde

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Yeah, I'm not one for buying into the hobby dying at all. I just don't see Origins and GAMA as being the place to experience it.

There are plenty of people who are interested, and there are definitely new players. We're a niche hobby. I'm totally cool with that. I also agree that we're seeing some great new stuff from great new designers and companies. No one is going to get rich off of this niche hobby anymore, but there are people that can live off of the earnings.

There's zero point, though, in trying to reach out and "recruit" the other sorts of boardgamers. The ones that will develop an interest will show up. The mass aren't interested - and that fine. There are a minority who are outright socially inept and hostile. They ruin it for everyone. Just like some hostile grog types ruin it for everyone.

As for zombie games...the less said there the better.

I actually don't really like games.

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mirth

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There's zero point, though, in trying to reach out and "recruit" the other sorts of boardgamers. The ones that will develop an interest will show up. The mass aren't interested - and that fine. There are a minority who are outright socially inept and hostile. They ruin it for everyone. Just like some hostile grog types ruin it for everyone.

I completely agree with these points. I'm all for making the hobby accessible and encouraging new players, but I don't expect it to ever really have mass appeal. We're an odd group who like some combination of history, modelling and gaming.

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bbmike

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I'm gonna keep believing companies are going stop making wargames and continue to buy just about everyone I see while I still can.  :D

"My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplace of existence."
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mirth

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I'm gonna keep believing companies are going stop making wargames and continue to buy just about everyone I see while I still can.  :D




Being able to Google shit better than your clients is a legit career skill.


Bison

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Recruiting is critical to maintaining and growing a player base. It can occur in many ways but getting the games out on the table with new people is important. Everyone who plays war games was recruited into the hobby somehow. I was first exposed to war games at the bookstore with Avalon Hill and a friend’s dad who played Risk with us. Later I taught myself and several friends Guns of August and Bull Run.



mirth

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Mine was Axis & Allies with friends who were a few years older and thought it was fun to "teach" you how to play the game by beating the piss out of you. The rest of my buddies and I bought the game, taught ourselves how to actually play and then kicked the crap out of the older guys.

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Cyrano

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We absolutely need a proper definition of “death” and “dying” for this to be useful and I may be a pessimist...actually atypical for me.

If it means “no moar wargamez”, well, of course not.  Certainly not in the next decade or so as the tweeners (Baby Boom to “X”) age into retirement.  We’ve got money and will spend on teensy print runs that our era makes possible.  We are better off than our older brothers and dads.  And, in fairness, we’ve been lifted by the tide of hobby gaming.

I think, however, that we’ve been dispatched by the mass market to a cul-de-sac.  I’ve said before it’s a nice one, but here we are nonetheless.  Shoot, even COIN (not wargames)  games are dismissed by many of the cognoscenti as “too complex”.

I am not uniformly enamored of Compass’ products and QA.  MMP is a wonderful boutique. Hollandspiele much the same, but even smaller.  How long will OSG, OSS, Flying Pig, and LnL endure past the passion of their founders?  We all know how narrow their margins are.  Will others emerge?  I hope so.  I do.

And, it should be said, we live in a time that has begun to regard the study of military history with a suspicion reminiscent of the 60s.

I, like y’all, am more than set for life.  And this hobby has shown itself resilient.  But I am not optimistic.

And, clearly, neither GenCon nor Origins is all that interested.  Certainly the vendors themselves are not interested in them.

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Bison

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Mine was Axis & Allies with friends who were a few years older and thought it was fun to "teach" you how to play the game by beating the piss out of you. The rest of my buddies and I bought the game, taught ourselves how to actually play and then kicked the crap out of the older guys.

My brother loved Axis and Allies. I think he loved to...bend the rules to win. A summer of trauma followed. I hate the game to this day.



mirth

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Mine was Axis & Allies with friends who were a few years older and thought it was fun to "teach" you how to play the game by beating the piss out of you. The rest of my buddies and I bought the game, taught ourselves how to actually play and then kicked the crap out of the older guys.

My brother loved Axis and Allies. I think he loved to...bend the rules to win. A summer of trauma followed. I hate the game to this day.

I played it hundreds of times in high school and college to the point that it became completely boring. We all knew exactly what had to happen on the first turn to give the Axis a realistic chance to win. A couple of bad die roles and we'd usually reset (typically by flipping the board).

I have 4-5 copies of the various versions, but haven't played a complete game in close to 20 years.

Being able to Google shit better than your clients is a legit career skill.


Bison

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We absolutely need a proper definition of “death” and “dying” for this to be useful and I may be a pessimist...actually atypical for me.

If it means “no moar wargamez”, well, of course not.  Certainly not in the next decade or so as the tweeners (Baby Boom to “X”) age into retirement.  We’ve got money and will spend on teensy print runs that our era makes possible.  We are better off than our older brothers and dads.  And, in fairness, we’ve been lifted by the tide of hobby gaming.

I think, however, that we’ve been dispatched by the mass market to a cul-de-sac.  I’ve said before it’s a nice one, but here we are nonetheless.  Shoot, even COIN (not wargames)  games are dismissed by many of the cognoscenti as “too complex”.

I am not uniformly enamored of Compass’ products and QA.  MMP is a wonderful boutique. Hollandspiele much the same, but even smaller.  How long will OSG, OSS, Flying Pig, and LnL endure past the passion of their founders?  We all know how narrow their margins are.  Will others emerge?  I hope so.  I do.

And, it should be said, we live in a time that has begun to regard the study of military history with a suspicion reminiscent of the 60s.

I, like y’all, am more than set for life.  And this hobby has shown itself resilient.  But I am not optimistic.

And, clearly, neither GenCon nor Origins is all that interested.  Certainly the vendors themselves are not interested in them.

I think the big conventions are about exposure and money. If you want to wargame at convention, it’s consimworld you want to attend.
http://expo.consimworld.com/

I’m not in the doom and gloom camp. Things change. Avalon Hill and other companies had their day and rode off into the sunset. Today it’s GMT and Compass. In twenty years, who knows but I believe someone will still  be publishing war games and people will scoff at the rudimentary rules of today’s game like many today scoff at games like Gettysburg and Stalingrad.

On a side note: I don’t understand the COIN games are not war games sentiment.



panzerde

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I just had a dude (probably a young dude, from his commentary) on r/wargames of Reddit tell me that Total War: Napoleon was a better, more historical game than SOW:W, and that Starcraft presented more complex strategic situations than most wargames. He further argued that warfare hadn't change appreciably in 2000 years, so things like order delays in SOW:W were a video game conceit and had nothing to do with historical accuracy in a wargame.

Sadly, that was the most in-depth conversation about wargames that I've had on r/wargames in several years.


I actually don't really like games.

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