Complex...But satisfying (Warhammer 40 000)

Member Name: fweeky-kitty

Product:	Warhammer 40 000
Date:	24/02/03 (651 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cool figures, Addictive

Disadvantages: Costs loads to get an army

For those of you who do not have a clue as to what Warhammer is, heres a basic guide. It is a tabletop war game fought by two or more players with miniature models you assemble and paint yourself. It is a turn based dice game (often dozens are needed) which requires strategy planning and intelligence.

I am not so much a player as my boyfriend/friends are, but I'm picking it up slowly. This is somewhat of a detached view as I don't know all the stats/special rules but have played a few times and found it amazingly complex - there is a rule for everything and you seem to spend most of the time rolling dice - to see how far you can move, if you hit something and then again to see if you hurt it, then you opponant rolls to see if they save anyone etc... as I said very complex!!

I am starting to get to grips with the Tyranids, and am fast realising it is better to use talons rather than guns on most things (like Hormagaunts I think they are) And that psychic attack rules (like for the Hive Tyrants) are very cool once you understand them. The history (or fluff) for the characters is also cool - very detailed and well thought out, like for Old One Eye, who got frozen and thawed out years later, he is one of my fav characters, I think he's a carnifex?? but I'm not sure. He is also amazingly detailed as are most of these models. Some require a lot of attention to get the painted to a high standard, as they have so many peices and so many colours are required.

Part of the attraction I can see is the prep work for the game though - hours are spent deciding exactly which army to collect, which characters to buy and which bits to use, although you do seem to spend a lot of time counting the points for your army, but Nids seem to be quite cheap especially if you don't give themn guns, so you can create great swarms of them (cuz they are insect cross alien type creatures) which is great in close combat, but they do tend to get p
icked off quite badly on the way by any army with lots of guns, but that usually doesn't matter as you can have som many Nids, if you put the cheaper points ones (hormagaunts) at the front it doesn't matter as you still have loads behind them!

Painting and assembling is also a big part of this game as you can paint them any colours you like, most people will stick to standard colours (like blue for the ultra-marines but there have been sightings of a salmon pink ultra-marine army!!) so if you wanted you could really personalise your squads!! Another fun part is conversions! You can adapt the models in any way you like, like making you Nids all 'hack n slash' with no guns, or you could make up your own chapter of space marines from fluff posted around in the various 40k literature (codexes, of which each different army has one current and several past which contain rules & the fluff, as well as Index Astartes, Chapter Approved and 'White Dwarf' the 40k magazine) My boyfriend has made a Space marine Tyranid hunter squad by using Hormagaunt bits with his Space marines, but you can mix anything you like, I have seen some cool ones which use Ork bits and it looks like the Space marine is mutating!

I know I haven't talked much about the actual game, but to me that isn't the only attraction of Warhammer 40k. I'm not sure what I thinks its about other than boys and their toys, but the work that needs to go into it makes it much more than that, you actually need intelligence to play this war game!

Summary: