Welcome back to the Gabeatorial. Asides the recurring nightmares about Spiders, Stephen Moffat and certain images people link me to break my sanity, I could not be feeling better...except maybe for the lack of sleep.

 

That being said...let's do something cynical, yet fun this week.

 

Games Workshop. Boy are you guys a real love/hate relationship of mine (mostly hate, but hey - I still support My Little Pony post Season 2, so what am I talking about?). With expensive, over designed models that they have the audacity to overcharge how much it actually costs, sending out cease and desists at the drop of a hat and one of the most vitriolic fanbases I can conceive, these guys can't possibly be doing well, right?

 

...What do you mean they still have a Monopoly? And that they're making Profits yearly?!

 

I suppose much of this boils down to the rule of Games Workshop and how they profiteer. They like to feast upon fanboyism and victimisation - you could be playing something else, but all your mates are probably into Warhammer 40,000, so naturally you have to own an army too if you don't want to be left out.

 

Pray you don't live in the Nottingham area - if you don't have a GW product army, good luck finding a gaming club that supports what you want to play!

 

With that in mind, here are five Tabletop Wargames that are superior in one respect or another to one of Games Workshop's products. We will be looking at Fluff and Mechanics (aka Crunch) - after all, a game can have the ugliest looking Models in the world, but if the game is halfway decent in either area it can very much save it.

 

With that said...

 

 

 

 

Secrets of the Third Reich is an amazing, four star quality game from West Wind - a very tiny Tabletop Wargaming company from the United Kingdom.

 

At first glance I can see what your thinking - "pfft, haven't we had enough World War 2?". And in a sense, your right - most Tabletop Companies manufacture World War 2 miniatures, and then of course there's Flames of War. However, if Flames of War is the Tiberium Saga, then Secrets of the Third Reich is the Red Alert trilogy - the first and maybe the second games from that at any rate.

 

Set in a World War 2 that has yet to end, Secrets of the Third Reich is a platoon scale game that gives you command over a platoon of Germans, Russians, Brits or Yanks. The twist however is that all of the factions have a wide variety of weirder troops and vehicles they can call upon, from Nazi (or Soviet!) Zombies to Powered Exoskeletons to Vampires to King Arthur. And if that isn't enough, an easy to use Vehicle Designer allows you to create and deploy your own deranged war machines upon the enemy.

 

While the game does have it's flaws (my one and only gaming session of Third Reich ended up in a scenario where my opponent and I had to house rule a solution for a drawn close combat because the book did not present a solution), it's imagination, use anything you have mentality and general fun factor make it superior to just about anything in the Games Workshop catalogue, and it's a game that like AT-43 I'll be waiting to play again until the end of time.

 

It's also probably the lease expensive game here.

 

 

 

 

 

Hawk Wargames are an upstart company based in the United Kingdom who have blown apart expectations with their debut game, Dropzone Commander - and it's not hard to see why.

 

Dropzone Commander is set in the 27th Century, and the ongoing fluff chronicles the story of mankind's campaign to retake Earth from an invading race of Parasites called the Scourge. Thrown into the mix are the mysterious Post-Human Republic (humans who fled with the aid of a mysterious White Sphere before the Scourge arrived, and now exist as badass cyborgs) and the enigmatic Shaltari (a race of warrior-mystics with very John Carter inspired machines). There are rumors now of a fifth faction circulating, but no confirmation yet as to what it is.

 

Regardless, Dropzone Commander plays out like a tabletop version of Ground Control (before Ground Control 2 happened and derped everything up anyway) - many of the games strategies focus upon strategic deployment and rapid response. The fighting is fast and brutal, and many tears will be shed before the game ends.

 

Where it loses marks however is in it's price point. Dropzone Commander is a very expensive game to get into. However, the models themselves are of high (or even higher) quality than Games Workshop's products - the faction design is remotely alien to anything out there on the market at the minute (the Shaltari being the biggest example, with their war machines being very heavily John Carter inspired), and the models are downright indestructable.

. There's also some missing rules as well (exactly what Active Countermeasures do to protect a Unit is never explained, so the "Ranged Full" and a "Ranged Countered" statistic on weapons is redundancy for the most part).

 

 

 

 

NOW we're playing with power.

 

Infinity is a Skirmish level tabletop wargame - meaning that rather than commanding an army like the above two, Infinity is centred around a small team of soldiers (often written off from what I understand of the fluff as adventurer parties or ad-hoc special forces units). Infinity is one of the big heavyweights that resurrected a dying genre within the Tabletop Wargaming community (though it wasn't alone on that front as Maulifaux can attest). Not bad for a small company from Spain.

 

I cannot comment a lot on Infinity's fluff, as I do not possess much at hand. However, what I can tell you is that Infinity is hilariously (and tragically) brutal. Your men will die, often in repeatedly brutal and humiliating manners, but that's not why it's better than anything GW makes nowadays.

 

It's better because of the rules. Infinity innovates - it was the first to use the Alternating Activation System used in the likes of Dropzone Commander, which allows both players to be making moves simultaneously without slowing the game down to a crawl or becoming convoluted. The Orders system as well adds an element of strategy to the game, especially when it comes to the Squad's Lieutenant and keeping him safe.

 

Combined with it's low price point and ease of access for new players, Infinity sits in at the Number 3 point.

 

 

 

 

Named for the combination of Warmachine and Hordes (which are designed to work together anyway), this game...you want to know what it does better than Games Workshop?

 

Everything. And I wish I was making it up, or beating around the bush.

 

The brainchild of Matt Wilson, both Warmachine and Hordes have the same premise and operate on the same system (and can even fight each other!). The player controls a crazy awesome Mage (either a Warcaster or a Warlock, depending if your a Warmachine faction or a Hordes faction), who in turn commands either badass Steampunk Robots or badass monsters to kill each other. Oh, and there are some little guys running around getting squished by them - they're kinda inconsequential. Oh, and then there are the even bigger Robots and Monsters that are so fun to use Games Workshop had to create things like the Riptide and Wraithknight to compete with them. Way to go PP!

 

On a fluff level, the Iron Kingdoms has hands down the best written and most well developed fluff of anything out there on the market. While Warhammer 40,000 suffers from an overflow of Mary Sues, Misogony and weapons a ten year old would make up (especially in more recent years), the fact that the Iron Kingdoms was a Dungeons & Dragons setting originally can be seen on display in every inch of the fluff. Rather than focusing on fifteen billion and one factions who are rapidly blurring into a grey mess, Warmachine has six solidly defined, well characterised factions and Hordes has four equally solidly defined, well characterised factions (plus an additional "Mercenary" faction for both systems). For anyone wanting to write fiction for a Tabletop Wargame, I point to this game as the Ur Example of how it should be done.

 

And the crunch? Like everything else on this list, it's fast paced, super brutal and extremely scalable - you need only a single Warcaster/Warlock and a couple of Warjacks/Beasts to start playing. And these guys don't just stand there hitting each other - depending on how you use your Focus, or how you manage your Fury, your Robots and Beasts will be headbutting, slinging each other around the map and ripping off the opponent's limbs and beating him with the soggy/sparky end.

 

I'm running out of space, so I'll finish off that while it does have a high price point, you need significantly fewer models (and thus less Dosh) to play than what GW would charge you. Also, they're having a Kickstarter right now for an upcoming slice of awesome, so either pledge now, or at the very least give fun a Greenlight?

 

And now, at number one...

 

 

 

 

And seriously, would it really be anything else?

 

Monsterpocalypse is the most amount of fun I had with a Tabletop Wargame since my youth where I played sessions of Necromunda and Inquisitor with my "College Buddies". What's it about? Giant monsters beating the ever loving bejeezus out of each other! It's essentially Pacific Rim: The Tabletop Wargame.

 

Monsterpocalypse takes a ball of crazy awesome, infuses it with 50's B-Movie radiation and makes it snort cocaine for the resulting concoction. This is a game where you can have Mazinger Z beat up Cthulu. I'll say it again -

 

This is a Tabletop Wargame where Mazinger Z beats up Cthulu.

 

Only a person devoid of any sense of fun could not see how that's not appealing in the slightest.

 

It's also surprisingly easy to learn to play. And I mean rocks-over-brains levels of easy. It's pretty damn hard not to recommend this game - especially if you just got back from seeing Pacific Rim.

 

Which brings me to some bad news. Due to a movie deal with Paramount going south, Monsterpocalypse has gone into suspended animation at Privateer Press. Not because the game wasn't printing money for them, but because of Hollywood movie deals and stuff (not that the movie would have been great anyway - Tim Burton as the Director anyone?). You can find the pieces around eBay for cheap, but outside of that this makes the game slightly inaccessible.

 

And there we are. Five games that do things better than anything Games Workshop can do. And of course there are dozens of others I've missed off - Dystopian Wars, Malifaux, Dust Tactics and even up and coming games like All Quiet on the Martian Front and Wild West Exodus. I'm sure I will get around to them soon enough.

 

Until then, I have been your GABEN...and I think my PHR army just arrived. Excuse me...