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Review: Epochs: Course of Cultures – 2025

April 20, 2026 5 Minutes

I do enjoy a good civilization game. In fact, if one were to casually browse my gaming shelves (an expedition not unlike cataloguing a particularly nerdy wing of the British Museum), one would find no shortage of grand historical ambitions neatly packed into cardboard. Titles such as Through the Ages, Western Empires, and Nations just to name a few sit there rather smugly, silently judging lesser boxes. One might even say, though only after a modest pause for dramatic effect, that I am something of a connoisseur.

I know, more or less, what I want from a civilization game, but I do delight in being surprised by games in this genre, providing something unexpected. This is precisely where Epoch: Course of Cultures emerges, like a well-dressed time traveller stepping out of a slightly unreliable machine. It presents a civilization-building experience that feels comfortingly familiar, yet curiously novel, an impressive feat that would likely earn a small, approving nod from Sid Meier himself. I would even argue this game has done more for the genre itself than the latest PC disappointment, Civilisation 7, though that is not as extraordinary feat as you might imagine it to be. A topic perhaps for another day.

Overview

Final Score: (3.6 out 5 Stars)

Epoch: Course of Cultures is, at its heart, an action selection civilization builder, which is a wonderfully polite way of saying, “you will spend a great deal of time making big key decisions and then immediately wondering if they were terrible ones.” Beneath the surface, it carries many of the familiar mechanical bones of the genre, but with just enough curious mutations and original ideas to keep things feeling fresh, competitive, and pleasantly tense in that “I may have just doomed my people” sort of way.

Now, civilization games do have a reputation for being… Chronologically challenged. In that context, Epoch sits comfortably in the middle ground. When compared to titans like Through the Ages or Western Empires, a four-hour playtime feels almost refreshingly restrained, like a historical epic that politely ends before your snacks run out. That said, it’s quite the affair compared to your standard board game play time, especially at the preferred 4 player count.

One of the central concepts behind a good civilization game in my opinion, is that it should feel massive, epic.. sprawling even. That approach however, usually comes with several drawbacks, the time needed to play often being one of the primary reasons you rarely get to play them. I love my Western Empires, but getting 5+ players together for a 12+ hour game is exceedingly rare, so it becomes a beloved dust collector instead.

What Epoch does rather cleverly is take a seemingly simple action structure and quietly turn it into something far more devious. On your turn, you’ll do something wonderfully straightforward: play a card representing a development in your civilization, and then choose an action, settling new lands, advancing culture, investing in science, and so on. All very reasonable, yet that play of a card leads to all the actions that include all the core ideas of civilisation building. Production, technology, construction, trade, etc.. All very civilised. And yet, beneath this calm exterior lurks a deeply strategic, wonderfully thinky puzzle that will have you staring at the board as though it has personally offended you.

And there is quite a lot of board to stare at. The game comes with an impressive collection of pieces, icons, tracks, and other paraphernalia that suggest great complexity. But in truth, mechanically speaking, especially by civilization game standards, Epoch is surprisingly approachable. It’s less “arcane ritual” and more “well-organised chaos.”

There is so much built into your action selection card play in Epoch that it feels wonderfully intuitive and powerful each time you pick something. It’s a decision that will pay out over the course of the entire game, making each action central to a larger, grand strategy.

What truly elevates the experience, however, is how tight it feels and how interactive it is in a way modern games in general have been gradually pulling away from. Every action matters. Every decision nudges your civilization forward in a way that feels tangible and earned, with an impact on the other players directly. This subtle but blatant interaction makes you constantly aware of your opponents, because unlike many modern civ builders, Epoch is not afraid to let you go to war. In fact, escalation towards war is one of the core features of the game. Each player’s choices ripple into yours, shaping your next move, whether you like it or not, it’s really only a matter of time before you clash. This is a refreshing change from many civilization games, which can sometimes feel like a group of people politely playing solo games in the same room, with occasional brushes like “oh no, you took the card I wanted”. Here, the interaction is real, the tension is present, and the consequences are just inconvenient enough to be delightful.

Civilization: A New Dawn shares a lot of similarities as a design with Epoch, both games feature an explorable terrain board and an action selection system that drives the game forward, but unlike Epoch, A New Dawn landed rather flat with me and it was the shortage of meaningful interaction between players that I would blame as the root cause for it.

In its own way, Epoch will challenge classics like Through The Ages, though the question remains, where does it rank in the great scheme of this very robust genre? I don’t think you can get away with making a Civilization builder without comparisons, so we will be doing a bit of that in this review.

Components

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: Very flashy and usable. Things are easy to find the iconography is exceptional.

Cons: There are a lot of pieces to this game, and you’re going to need a larger-than-standard table to play it, especially 4 players.

I consider component quality to be important in a civilization game only because these games are, at their core, sprawling puzzles masquerading as historical progress. You are expected to maintain a bird’s-eye view of everything at all times, an impressive feat, given that your brain is already busy calculating the long-term consequences of a decision you made fifteen minutes ago involving what seemed, at the time, to be a perfectly innocent grain surplus.

Analysis Paralysis is not just a possibility here, it’s more of a lifestyle choice. When a single action can ripple five to ten turns into the future, you need clarity. You need visibility. You need iconography that doesn’t require a degree in interpretive archaeology to understand. In short, you need the game to communicate with you clearly, ideally without muttering cryptic symbols like an ancient alien artefact.

Traditionally, this clarity comes from strong, simple rules, but equally important is how the components themselves convey information. After all, if the board looks like a tax form designed by chaos theorists, no amount of good rules will save you and this tends to be the case in many civilisation-building games.

Fortunately, this is where Epoch positively beams with competence. From the cards to the player aids, from the iconography to the general visual presentation, everything is crisp, readable, and, dare one say, rather attractive. It carries a certain aesthetic familiarity that fans of Sid Meier’s work will recognise immediately, as if the game itself quietly aspires to be invited over for tea with Civilization and not embarrass itself.

And it succeeds. This is a production that balances beauty with functionality in a way that feels almost suspiciously well thought out. You will, after all, be staring at this game for several hours, possibly long enough to begin assigning personalities to your resource tokens, so it’s rather important that the experience is visually pleasant. (There are, one suspects, entire galaxies that have been abandoned for less.)

There is no question that Epoch is a sprawling game with tons of “things” on the board, which can be quite intimidating for the average board gamer. This is rather misleading because, despite the very busy board, Epoch is a pretty straightforward game you might compare to your average Euro in terms of complexity.

Like most civilization games, Epoch isn’t something you’ll casually throw onto the table on a whim. It demands time, attention, and a willingness to explain rules to your friends that may, at some point, sound like you are describing the tax policies of a small but determined nation. However, thanks to excellent organisation and intuitive design, the learning curve is far gentler than it could have been. The same game with lesser components would have been far more complex.

In fact, during my very first play, I already felt surprisingly in control, an unsettling sensation in a genre that usually delights in making you feel like a confused ruler shouting at maps. By the second play, it was all strategy, all the time. And much of that ease comes down to components that are not just well-designed, but designed for use.

Well done indeed. Top marks here, no need to consult the Guide on this one.

Theme

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: It nails civilization building with class while including things that are often omitted in other Civilisation-building games.

Cons: It’s missing historical figures, with technological progress being a heavily abstracted concept that has little impact on the game beyond resource collection.

I suspect this section can be handled with the sort of efficiency normally reserved for highly competent civil servants and improbably well-organised galaxies.

The theme of Epoch: Course of Cultures is civilization-building and history, and I’m pleased to report that it achieves this with very little fuss and a reassuring amount of success. It looks like a civilization game, it plays like a civilization game, and, most importantly, it feels like a civilization game while you’re sitting at the table making questionable long-term decisions. In short: it does exactly what it says on the tin, which is more than can be said for a surprising number of things in the universe.

That said, there is a small crack in the otherwise polished marble.

One of the great joys of the genre is the sense that each civilization has its own identity. That playing Persia should feel meaningfully different from playing Egypt, beyond simply having a different colour and a slightly more exotic name to mispronounce.

Epoch gestures in this direction, offering each nation a minor, slightly quirky advantage you can develop over time. It’s a nice touch, pleasant, even, but its impact on the actual gameplay is… modest. So modest, in fact, that you may find yourself forgetting who is playing what entirely, which is rarely a good sign in a game about civilizations and their supposedly rich identities.

These differences don’t meaningfully steer your strategy, nor do they create distinct playstyles. You won’t find yourself passionately debating the merits of one civilization over another, or dramatically declaring, “Ah, but you see, this is exactly what the Persians would do.” Instead, everyone is essentially playing the same game with very slightly different accents.

There is also a noticeable absence of historical figures. No great leaders, no visionary scientists, no wildly overconfident generals making bold claims about invading Russia in winter. It’s a small thing, perhaps, but these human elements often provide a strong sense of connection to history, anchors that make the experience feel less abstract and more alive.

I think Through The Ages is the king of themes when it comes to Civilization builders, mainly because it’s so all-inclusive of the tropes that you hope to find in a Civilization building game. From the people, wonders, techs and buildings, everything has that Sid Meier feel to it, and this is despite the fact that the game doesn’t feature a map at all.

Here, the world of Epoch is curiously… people-less. Civilizations rise, expand, and occasionally go to war, but they do so without the guiding presence of anyone you might recognise from a textbook, or indeed, from a particularly enthusiastic documentary narrator.

It’s not a dealbreaker by any means. The theme works. It lands. But it never quite reaches that smile-inducing moment where everything clicks and you feel like you’re part of a grand historical tapestry. It doesn’t have that “role-playing” aspect of running a personality.

It’s more… a very well-organised spreadsheet of history. Perfectly functional. Just missing a few memorable personalities and faces.

Gameplay

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: Solid, streamlined framework that makes the game easy to teach and learn, making it a far more approachable civ builder than the vast majority of its competition.

Cons: It doesn’t really compete with the classics, it’s a fun alternative, but it’s not going to replace anything.

A proper civilization game, in my view, must achieve three things, rather like a good cup of tea, except vastly more complicated and with a higher likelihood of military conflict.

First, it must deliver a genuine sense of growth and expansion. Not just numbers going up (though we do love a good number), but a feeling that your civilization is becoming something distinct. Your choices should matter. Your path should diverge. You should feel, at least in some small but satisfying way, that you are carving your own slightly questionable decisions into the annals of history.

Second, it ought to feel grounded in history, or at least in something that politely waves in history’s general direction. Playing as different civilizations should feel different. Whether you lean into military dominance, technological supremacy, or industrial might, there should be a strategic identity to your choices, and ideally a way to feel quite smug about them when they work.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, it needs to hold up over repeated plays. A civilization game that can be “solved” is about as useful as a guidebook that confidently tells you the restaurant is at the end of the universe but forgets to mention it’s closed on Tuesdays. There must be room for variation, for adaptation, for strategies that evolve based on circumstances rather than habit. There has to be a way for a local meta to form, and the game must have built-in ways to challenge and reforge that meta without expansions. That is the only way to get replayability long-term with a Civilization game.

Now, achieving all of this in a single board game is, frankly, a bit unreasonable. But that is the burden of the genre. When you are competing with giants like Through the Ages and Western Empires, the inevitable closing line of any review tends to be, “It was very good… but X or Y Civ Builder does it better.”

So, where does Epoch land? Well, rather respectably, actually.

It doesn’t kick down the doors of the genre and declare itself emperor, but it does bring enough interesting ideas to justify its place at the table. One of the most notable things it does is reintroduce something many modern civilization games have quietly abandoned: the map.

Not having a map as part of a Civilization building game was a trend created by Through The Ages, and for a time it caught on, which included games like Nations and Age of Innovation, for example. A map brings a much higher level of design complexity, eliminating it is a clean way to avoid some of those traps. It works for some games, but it does feel like something is missing from the experience, even when it works.

It is not just a decoration here. This is, gloriously, a game about actual presence, about being somewhere, owning territory, and occasionally sending small, determined groups of people to stand on it and argue with other groups of people. Much like Western Empires, there is very much a “dudes on a map” experience.

This is important because somewhere along the way, designers occasionally forget that Sid Meier’s Civilization, the grand inspiration for much of the genre, is, in many ways, also a war game. Position matters. Resources matter. Territory matters. And, crucially, these things can be taken away from you by someone who has decided your empire looks a bit too comfortable.

Epoch understands this, it embraces it.

War is present, impactful, and, importantly, expensive. Starting a conflict is not something you do lightly, unless you are either (a) winning and feeling confident, or (b) losing and feeling vindictive. Both are valid historical precedents.

Dudes on a map are handled quite simply with cubes in Epoch, as the actual military strength elements are driven by cards you can purchase. This makes the execution of war simple, but the strategy behind it, when you should do it, how you should do it etc.., that is an entirely different question. Even after several plays, it was not clear to me where war falls in Epoch so far as strategy goes.

There are two main approaches: a more measured declaration that gives your opponent time to prepare, or a full “I have made a terrible decision and will now commit to it immediately” war-monger stance that lets you attack anyone at once. Both options carry consequences, both reshape the board, and both inject the game with a delicious sense of tension.

Now, a brief warning: Epoch has what might be described as an “old-school personality.” Player interaction can feel… direct. Occasionally pointed. At times, even a bit mean. If you are accustomed to modern board games where conflict is more of a polite disagreement than a full-blown geopolitical incident, this may come as a shock. Personally, I think it’s wonderful. But consider yourself warned, this is less pillow fight, more street brawl conducted with spreadsheets.

Perhaps the most elegant part of the design, however, is how it condenses the entire 4X experience, explore, expand, exploit, exterminate, into a single, streamlined core game loop.

You play a card. You take an action. That’s it.

And yet, that one action encapsulates everything: production, development, technology, expansion, trade, governance, and the general sense that you are somehow both in control and one poor decision away from ruin. Each move feels significant. Each turn alters the board in a meaningful way. You are not idly passing time; you are doing things, and they matter.

I especially liked the handling of government in Epoch. Each government type comes with unique benefits ot the exclusion of other possible selections. It’s a tough choice and needs to be made in cohesion with the rest of your general strategy. There is no going back and making a mistake here can be quite costly.

It’s immensely satisfying.

More importantly, it’s intuitive. Unlike some of its more illustrious cousins, Epoch doesn’t require a lengthy lecture on “how to actually play well” after you’ve learned the rules. You understand what you want to do almost immediately. By your second game, you’re strategising with confidence rather than fumbling through historical guesswork.

This is, frankly, one of its greatest strengths as it is often a key weakness in even the best of the civilisation-building genre games. I love my Western Empires, but unless you have played it a dozen times, I’m going to crush you so badly you’re going to think the game is broken, and there is no shortcut to that education but repeat plays. Epoch is clever enough to avoid that problem.

Randomness, another traditional troublemaker in the genre, is handled with a commendable degree of restraint. Yes, the map can favour some players over others (as maps, and indeed life, tend to do), but the advantages are never so overwhelming that you can predict the winner from the opening placement. The game provides enough tools for clever play to overcome a less-than-ideal start, which is exactly how it should be.

That said, no civilization game escapes compromise, and Epoch is no exception.

The most noticeable absence is the tech tree, that beloved web of dependencies where one discovery unlocks another in a satisfying chain of progress. Here, technology is far more abstract. You invest in it, you gain benefits, but you’re not building toward specific unlock paths in the traditional sense. There’s no “research pottery to unlock granaries” moment. It’s more fluid, less structured, and for some players, that will feel like something is missing.

While I was not a huge fan of Fantasy Flight Games, Sid Meiers Civilization, it did include the tech tree in a hierarchy, and that felt quite right to me. You got a strong sense of progress, and “tech advantage” was a concept built into the game.

Wonders, too, lack a certain… well, wonder. Rather than grand, multi-turn projects that define your civilization, they are more transactional, appearing, being purchased, and providing benefits without much ceremony. There is no standing atop your cardboard empire declaring yourself a golden god of architecture. It’s all a bit more… efficient.

War, while excellent in concept, also carries an interesting limitation: it is often too expensive to be used as a precise strategic tool. Instead, it tends to emerge at the extremes, either from a dominant player pressing their advantage, or from a struggling one lashing out in desperation. The nuanced, tactical “check your opponent” war is less common, simply because your resources are usually better spent elsewhere as this is still a game about victory points.

And yet, despite all of this, it works.

The game remains deeply strategic, richly interactive, and thoroughly engaging. Resource management is meaningful, positioning matters, and the sense of building something over time is both tangible and rewarding. It ticks a remarkable number of boxes for a 4X civilization game, even if it approaches some of them from unusual angles.

There is certainly room for expansion, perhaps a bit more depth in certain systems, a touch of refinement here and there, but what’s already here is compelling.

In short: it’s a civilization worth building again.

Replayability and Longevity

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: Plenty of reasons to play it several times, lots to explore.

Cons: There is a cap somewhere, some limit before you shelv it and never come back to it, this is not an instant repeatable classic.

It may not be entirely fair, but civilization games carry with them a certain grandeur. They are not simply games; they are events. And when you reach for one on the shelf, you are not just picking something to play, you are making a decision of mild historical importance.

That decision, in my experience, is governed by two variables:
How much time do you have, and how many players are involved?

Tell me those two things, and I will tell you which civilization game to play with the quiet confidence of someone who has spent far too long thinking about this.

Many of these “slots” are already occupied by titans.
Large group, plenty of time? Western Empires, no hesitation.
Small group, plenty of time? Through the Ages, a masterpiece.
Large group, limited time? Nations will do the job admirably.

The awkward gap, the one that has always been a bit of a problem, is small player count with limited time. This is the Bermuda Triangle of civilization games, where ambition goes in and slightly disappointing “filler” experiences come out. Sadly, Epoch doesn’t quite solve this particular cosmic mystery either.

Instead, it settles into the 3–4 players, ample time category, which places it in direct, and rather bold, comparison with Through the Ages and Nations, just to name a couple.

Now, this might sound like a dangerous place to be, but here’s the interesting part: Epoch holds its ground surprisingly well.

In fact, it has a distinct advantage. Games like Through the Ages, as brilliant as they are, can be notoriously unforgiving to new players. Your first few games often feel less like building a civilization and more like being politely but firmly dismantled by someone who understands the system better. Nations can suffer from a similar issue.

Epoch, on the other hand, is refreshingly approachable. It’s intuitive. New players can sit down, grasp the flow, and feel competitive far more quickly. With a bit of light strategic guidance, you can have a genuinely good experience right out of the gate, which is, frankly, a rare and valuable trait in this genre.

It also tends to run a bit shorter than both Through the Ages and Nations, making it a strong candidate when you want something substantial, but not life-schedulingly so. And compared to other games attempting to fill this niche, such as various adaptations of Sid Meier’s board game, it stands out as the more compelling option.

Epoch is a very busy game with a lot of levers, it certainly falls into the “heavy” category by most people’s standards, but I would argue for how involved the game looks, it’s considerably simpler than that. If you’re accustomed to playing Heavy Euro’s, you’re not going to find this game complicated at all. It’s actually pretty straightforward.

So yes, there is absolutely a place for Epoch on the shelf.

The more difficult question is: how long does it stay there?

After three plays, I found myself in an interesting position. I hadn’t exhausted the strategic possibilities, nor had I identified any clearly dominant paths to victory. The game is dynamic enough to keep things engaging, but at the same time, the overall experience didn’t vary as dramatically from session to session as one might hope.

The map provides the most noticeable variation, but not to the extent that it fundamentally reshapes your approach. You adapt, certainly, but you don’t reinvent.

My instinct, always a slightly unreliable but occasionally insightful companion, suggests that after perhaps six to ten plays, the game may begin to lose a bit of its novelty.

Now, to be fair, that is not a damning criticism. Most games do not survive more than a handful of table appearances. In fact, if a game sees five plays, it is already outperforming a significant portion of the hobby.

But civilization games are not most games.

This is a genre where longevity is king. Where titles like Through the Ages can be played a hundred times over a decade, and Western Empires, despite requiring what feels like a small lifetime to complete, still returns to the table again and again because of that glorious grandeur.

By that standard, Epoch may fall just short of true immortality.

It is absolutely replayable. It is enjoyable. It earns its place.
But whether it will still be called upon ten years from now, with the same enthusiasm reserved for the genre’s greatest legends, I find unlikely. It lacked that true… umpf! A terrible description, but fans of Civ games know what I’m talking about here.

Conclusion

Epoch: Course of Cultures is, without question, a very good game. If what you’re after is an engaging, strategic experience wrapped in a historical civilization-building theme, and you don’t necessarily feel the need to compare everything to the sacred texts of the genre, then this is an easy recommendation. Particularly for Euro game fans, it delivers exactly the sort of tight decision-making, meaningful trade-offs, and competitive race for victory points that keeps the brain pleasantly occupied and occasionally mildly distressed.

It is thoughtful. It is strategic. It is, in all the right ways, a game that asks you to care about what you’re doing.

However, and this is where we gently adjust our monocle, if you are a full-fledged civilization-building enthusiast, the sort who speaks reverently of Through the Ages and Western Empires as though they were ancient and slightly temperamental deities, then Epoch may feel like it falls just short of true greatness.

Not because it does anything wrong, but because it doesn’t quite ascend to that rarefied level of “instant classic.” It is not, at least not yet, a card-carrying member of what can only be described as the Civilization Building Illuminati, a shadowy group of games that have achieved long-term dominance over gaming tables everywhere, and possibly influence global events (though this is difficult to verify).

That said, there is something important to note: I still very much want to play it again.

Epoch is a very engaging puzzle; there are plenty of moving parts that create depth in the strategy to keep you invested. I think its a good civilization game. It does not, however, dethrone any of the classics in my opinion. It’s kind of doomed to be an alternative to other Civ games I would rather play, given an allotted amount of time. No objections to playing Epoch, but if you ask me “What Civ Game do you WANT to play”, by default answer is not going to be Epoch.

After multiple plays, it hasn’t worn out its welcome. It hasn’t been solved, shelved, or quietly judged. It remains engaging, inviting, and, perhaps most importantly, fun. And in a genre that can occasionally take itself a bit too seriously, that counts for a great deal.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that Epoch feels almost tailor-made for digital play. A platform like Board Game Arena would suit it perfectly. Its streamlined action system, relatively low mechanical overhead, and clean structure would likely translate into a smooth online experience, one where a full game might be completed in about an hour, rather than requiring the careful scheduling of one’s social calendar and possibly a packed lunch.

And really, any civilization that can be built in an evening, or a very long lunch break, is doing something right.

So no, Epoch may not rewrite the history books of the genre. But it absolutely earns its place among them, and for many players, that will be more than enough.

Gaming Articles, Warhammer 40k

In Theory: The Gamification of Table Top Miniature Games

March 23, 2026 5 Minutes

I’m often accused of being “weird”, when speaking about my taste in miniature games; the word… chaotic is frequently used. It’s true my preferences tend to be a bit of a wild mix of systems, styles, and scales that don’t appear to follow any clear pattern.

But that only holds true until you understand one core principle I care deeply about, which we are going to talk about today!

The creeping gamification of tabletop miniature games, and how it quietly chips away at what makes this hobby special in the first place. My opinion, of course.

Understanding the Underlying Principle of Miniature Game Assumption

To really understand this “theory”, we need to take a small step back, just a quick glance into the history of miniature games and where they actually come from, how they got their start. In a word, my foundation in the hobby.

It’s not some hidden or complicated truth. In fact, it’s quite simple and surface-level. It’s just something many modern players may not even notice, nor is it usually relevant to modern gaming because it’s a piece of history.

The gist of it is that at their core, miniature games began as pure simulations. It’s a foundational construct of miniature war games, originally, that they all had an internal logic based on trying to simulate the battlefield.

Back even in the early days of the modern hobby as we know it today, think the 70s and 80s, the goal of a miniature game wasn’t just to “win” in a mechanical sense. The goal was to recreate, as faithfully as possible, the feeling and logic of a battlefield, a concept that heralded an even earlier variant of the game, historical war game simulation. Whether that battlefield was historical, fantastical, or somewhere in between, the idea was the same: what would this actually look like if it played out? What do expected results look like, and how does the game surprise you, and most importantly, is that consistent with the internal logic of the setting or piece of history? All mechanics were designed toward that goal.

That’s the foundation.

Historical Table Top War Games have one core and fundamental feature, which is critical to understanding how it’s played. It simulates via mechanics the reality in the field; it’s a simulation, abstracted as it may be, it strives to re-create the real conditions, decisions, strategy, and attributes of what made these battles tick.

Historically, this came from simulation-heavy war games, systems designed to recreate real battles, real tactics, and real consequences. But that philosophy didn’t disappear when fantasy and sci-fi entered the scene. It simply adapted.

Because simulation doesn’t mean “realistic”, it means internally logical.

Take early Warhammer Fantasy as an example. You had dragons, wizards, and undead legions, hardly realistic. But the game still tried to simulate how those things would behave within their own world. We derived that from the setting, much in the way you would derive a historical period battle from history books.

A dragon breathes fire? That’s terrifying, but what is the impact on the battlefield? How would that work if you wanted to simulate the effect?

Morale is a perfect example of a mechanic with internal logic. A unit of soldiers faces overwhelming odds? They might break and run. It exists in many games because, in real battles, soldiers don’t fight to the last man, they panic, retreat, and survive. So morale became a core mechanic when simulating tabletop battles. But then you apply fantasy logic: skeletons and mummies don’t feel fear, because they are dead, so they might ignore morale rules, for example.

So even within a fantasy, there is internal logic.

It all tracks. It all makes sense, within the simulation.

And that’s the key idea.

Even the most fantastical elements, magic spells, immortal beings, dragonfire, were governed by rules that felt like they belonged in a living, breathing battlefield as part of a simulation.

So when I talk about the gamification of miniature games, this is what I’m contrasting it against.

I’m talking about rulesets that move away from this idea of simulating a battle, and instead lean into abstract mechanics that exist purely for the sake of the game, rather than the world it’s trying to simulate.

Example of Gamification

The easiest way to understand the difference between simulation and gamification is through a concrete example.

So let’s talk about A Song of Ice and Fire: The Miniatures Game, because if we’re looking for a clear case study, this one puts it front and center.

On the surface, the game does a lot right in terms of simulation.

You’ve got two armies clashing on the battlefield. Units have speed, strength, defenses, morale, all the things you’d expect if the goal is to simulate combat in the Game of Thrones universe. You maneuver, you fight, you hold objectives, you try to outplay your opponent using positioning, timing, various advantages different unit types have, tough, fast, or ranged, perhaps. You use the terrain to your advantage, so on and so forth.

So far, so good. This is the simulation part working exactly as intended, even so far as the fantastical elements go, like Dragons.

But then… we step sideways.

Enter the NCU board.

This is where characters from the setting, Cersei, Joffrey, and Tyrion for example, operate completely outside the battlefield itself. They occupy abstract “zones” that trigger powerful effects on the game. And this is where the shift happens.

As interesting a mechanic as it was, the NCU board was a layered mechanic completely disconnected from the battlefield, yet it had an immense impact on it. The result was this sort of “extra” side game that could and often did unravel the rest of the core mechanics of the game. It was this heavy abstraction that could make your battlefield tactics and strategy irrelevant to the resolution of the battle. It worked fine, but it could be gamed.

Suddenly, you have a character like Joffery who can activate an ability on the NCU board that forces a morale check on a unit across the battlefield. Fail that check, and suddenly soldiers start dropping.

Now, pause for a moment.

Why are troops, possibly hundreds of miles away from Joffrey, losing men because Joffrey sat in a chair somewhere and did something political? Why would a dragon care? Why does this have an effect on a battlefield action?

The answer is simple:

It’s not part of the simulation; it’s not designed into the game to make sense or have any internal logic. It’s a game mechanic. This is gamification, not simulation.

It’s an abstract system layered on top of the battlefield, one that exists to create interesting decisions and strategic depth, but not necessarily to represent anything that logically plays out in the battle itself. It’s not part of a simulation of the battle; it’s part of a game.

And to be clear, this isn’t inherently bad, but for me personally, this creates a dilemma and breaks the immersion of what the game is trying to represent. It’s a bit like adding a knock-knock joke in the middle of a Star Wars lightsaber duel between two Jedi; it might be hilarious, but it’s out of place, out of context.

Is Gamification Bad?

Gamification can be incredibly fun. It adds layers of decision-making, clever interactions, and those satisfying “gotcha” moments that make games memorable. But it does change the nature of the experience, and that’s where things, at least for me, start to disconnect.

Because at its core, this comes down to a simple distinction: Are you playing a game… or are you simulating a battle?

The true definition of a simulation and game, and really the tell that you are dealing with a simulation game, is that battlefield conditions will typically be quite robust. Rules for cover, for example, are often key to the game, they are core rules, and you want to avoid abstract external consequences on this unless said effect is something visible on the table, like a unit that has a weapon that circumvents cover, for example. You don’t want a card play or some hidden mechanic altering it, because if that is possible, cover then becomes less relevant as an element of strategy, as it can be circumvented by “hidden things”.

Now, that might sound like splitting hairs, but it really isn’t.

“Playing a game” leans toward board game logic, optimizing mechanics, managing resources, triggering abilities, and outmaneuvering your opponent within a defined system of rules. Victory comes from mastering those systems. It’s not a game about trying to understand the concept of “battles” and using inherent internal logic to make decisions; it’s about the manipulation and execution of mechanics, creating synergy, and trying to “win” in a game.

“Simulating a battle” is a bit different; it is about applying battlefield logic and seeing what happens. It’s an external experience; you are as much the controller as the audience. It’s almost a kind of experiment. What would happen under X, Y, Z conditions within the construct of this setting/universe, or historical period, or historical battle? How can I change the results with my decisions? Can I do it better than the history or the expected outcome? Simulation is a kind of discovery in the form of entertainment. It’s a spectacle more than a game.

Positioning, timing, morale, flanking, and decisions that feel grounded in how a conflict might actually unfold are the key to creating a simulation. The dice step in to represent chaos, uncertainty, and the unpredictable nature of war. Most importantly, in a battle simulation, most of the information, in particular when it comes to consequences, risk vs. reward, and the general understanding of what can happen in any given situation, is open information. The only “gotcha” moments in a simulation are derived from someone using a strategy you didn’t expect or an unexpected or unusual dice outcome.

Both approaches are valid. But they create very different experiences.

Gamification tends to introduce what I like to call… shenanigans.

These are mechanics that pull your focus away from the battlefield itself and toward the system behind it. Instead of asking, “What would Jon Snow do in this situation?” you start asking, “What combination of abilities or effects can combo with the cards in my hand that I can trigger right now to let Jon Snow do something my opponent does not expect or can’t counter?” In a way, you can say it’s about breaking your opponent’s strategy by altering the rules of the game that are visible and can be anticipated.

In a simulation-driven game, when two armies clash, the outcome is shaped by their inherent strengths and weaknesses. Maybe one side has better morale. Maybe the other gains an advantage through positioning, flanking, terrain, or timing. And ultimately, the dice decide how that moment resolves. It’s a combination of strategy and fate, but both players can see what is happening in the field. It’s not the result of a gamist mechanic; it’s a result of the resolution of core mechanics that both players understand and can see. In a sense, seeing what happens is the result of watching the simulation execute. It doesn’t mean the results can be predicted, but the odds can be calculated.

It feels organic. Grounded. Earned. You make decisions about movement and position by accessing these factors, and while the results may still surprise, the surprise isn’t going to be your opponent playing a hidden card in their hand that lets them do some internal logic-breaking thing. It’s going to be a statistical anomaly in the randomization used in the game, typically dice. There is an expected outcome from the clash, but fate might intervene with unusual dice results. A miss that should have been a hit. In a simulation, you “do stuff” and then “see what happens” within the scope of predictable factors, statistics, strengths, and weaknesses. There are no shenanigans that are going to alter the outcome.

In a more heavily gamified system, that same clash can be dramatically altered by effects that have little to do with the units or situation themselves. A card is played. A hidden ability is triggered. Suddenly, the outcome hinges less on the clashing units and the battle… and more on the mechanics layered on top of it. What hidden shinaningans does each player have that they can execute?

And again, that’s not wrong in any sort of “mechanical” or “design” sense. I want to be clear about this, but I think it’s fair to say that it’s a different kind of gaming experience.

One sort of important, albeit mostly overlooked element of simulation games is that they are grand spectacles of storytelling. The goal isn’t to win or lose so much as it is to have a great experience you can go back to and say stuff like “you remember that one time I….”. That tends to happen a lot less when the thing that happened was that you drew a card and played it. It doesn’t have the same story feel. A story is the bridge between short-term fun and long-term love affair.

The reality is that most miniature games sit somewhere on a spectrum. Very few are purely simulation-driven, and very few are entirely abstract. The issue isn’t the presence of gamification, it’s the degree of it. There is a tipping point in a miniature game where too much gamification kind of erases the need for internal logic and simulation consistency; it becomes abstract enough that you are no longer seeing it as a simulated battle, and it’s just a tactical/strategic game., closer to a board game or a card game It becomes a game about the shenanigans instead of the simulation.

The more abstract, disconnected, and prominent these mechanics become, the further the game drifts away from simulating a battle, and the more it becomes about executing systems within a game engine.

At some point, you’re no longer commanding an army. You’re solving a mechanical puzzle.

And whether that’s a good thing or not… depends entirely on what you came to the table for, but at this point, I think my personal taste and bias start to kick in.

Why I Think Simulation Is Better

At the heart of it, my preference for simulation comes down to one thing: Clarity and longevity, and though I think there are some added minor issues that conflate my problem with gamist systems on top of those two things.

In a simulation-driven game, you can see the battlefield, not just a game construct, but as an imagined real thing that works as close to “reality” as game mechanics can get it, even when abstracted. You understand the state of play. You can evaluate risks, predict outcomes, and make informed decisions based on what’s actually in front of you. You can also create scenarios that present unique challenges (circumstances) that are overcome by unique tactics using the same internal logic of the simulation that inherently exists in such games. Unique game states that require unique solutions within the confines of the same base rules structure that replicates that reality, which again is driven by recognizable internal logic and a visible game state.

That kind of visibility, combined with a solid grasp of probabilities, beats surprise-driven gamist “gotcha” mechanics every time, at least for me.

Because once you lose that clarity, the experience starts to shift.

The Balance Problem

One of the biggest issues with heavily gamified systems is balance. Or more accurately… the lack of it.

In my experience, the more a game leans into abstract mechanics, cards, hidden triggered abilities, off-board effects, or mechanics that circumvent internal logic, the harder it becomes to keep things fair. And things are usually not just slightly off, but noticeably off.

Take A Song of Ice and Fire again as an example. Many of its most glaring balance issues don’t come from the core unit design; they come from the layers on top of it. The cards. The NCU board. The external effects that interfere with the battlefield. Even when a unit is designed in a reasonable way, the various cards and NCU board effects can make that unit bizarrely stronger in one army than another. These aren’t equivocal in the same way, there is a difference between a Targaryan cavalry and a Lannister cavalry, not because their stats are different, but because of the way the game can be manipulated by the gamist mechanics like NCU boards and hidden cards the players have access to. A cavalry unit is not just a cavalry unit in a Songs of Ice and Fire

These mechanics often override the very things that are supposed to define units and the internal logic of the battlefield simulation.

A slow unit suddenly isn’t slow anymore. An already-activated unit acts again. A weak unit spikes damage out of nowhere or makes a surprise move. The base information isn’t fixed, the gamist mechanics can alter without much warning the functionality of units and the execution of the core mechanic.

A Song of Ice and Fire Rankings are a tell about how this game does with balance. The distance between the best faction and the worst faction is extremely wide. That isn’t all, however; a couple of card changes or a new NCU can alter an army from one that never loses a game to one that never wins a game. Case in point, Nights Watch was once at +90,000 faction, now it’s a -28,000. The rules haven’t changed for the game, the units’ attributes have not been changed, but the abstract shinnaningan mechanics were altered, and some of the armies’ core shinannigans” no longer work. Without them, the strength of the army on the field is irrelevant. The strongest factions are those with the best cards and NCU’s, the armies really don’t matter much in this game. It’s the typical outcome of a gamist system.

At that point, the carefully constructed strengths and weaknesses of the army start to lose meaning, as does the simulation itself, as it does not function reliably.

And when that happens, player decisions also lose their purpose and meaning.

You might make the perfect tactical move based on everything you can see and control, only for it to be undone by something you couldn’t see or control. Not because you misplayed or miscalculated, but because the system allowed your opponent to circumvent the rules themselves through the execution of gamist mechanics.

That’s where simulation starts to crack. Because now, the game on the table and the game you’re actually playing aren’t quite the same thing. There’s an invisible layer sitting on top, constantly threatening to rewrite the outcome.

The “Feel Bad” Problem

Then there’s the emotional side of it, the infamous feel-bad moment. In a simulation-driven game, the potential for failure is part of the deal.

You miss a charge. You fail a morale check. You whiff an attack roll. It stings, but it makes sense. You knew the odds going in. You chose to take the risk. The dice decided the outcome. It’s a kind of controlled chaos.

It’s frustrating to fail, sure, but it’s fair. It lives within the logic of the system, within the expected range of outcomes in a simulation.

And honestly, that tension, the chance of failure, is a big part of why we play.

Gamified systems create a very different kind of failure potential and feel-bad moments.

Instead of failing because of risk and probability, you fail, for example, because someone played a card that says, essentially, “No, what you just tried to do within the rules doesn’t work after all.” Or worse, “I do something that is normally against the rules of the game and could not be predicted”.

You made a sound decision. You understood the odds. And then… none of it mattered. That kind of moment doesn’t feel like a failed gamble or the result of poor decision; it feels like the rug got pulled out from under you in an unfair game.

Not outplayed. Not outmaneuvered. Just… overridden by rule-altering mechanics, the goal post was moved dynamically. And that’s where frustration starts to creep in. That’s when a mechanic that seems interesting and clever at first, because of a balance problem and frustration that sucks the fun out of the game on repeated plays.

One of the issues with Warhammer 40k, even though it is primarily a simulation-focused game and does not rely on “gotcha mechanics,” is that the core rules of the armies are still hidden behind pay walls. The end result is that even though all of the information at any given battle are on the table, there are so many units and so many different armies and you can only see the attributes of the armies for which you have a codex, your usually flying blind anyway and it ends up having the same “gotcha” effect as a hidden set of cards. I personally have no idea how most armies work, or what units do for armies I don’t collect, paint, and use and there is no legal way short of buying every codex to get that information.

Because there was no meaningful decision that led to that outcome. No visible risk. No way to prepare for it. Just an abstract mechanic firing at the perfect (or worst possible) moment. It’s not clever to execute an effect that says “Sorry, I’m changing the rules”, it feels more like a cheap shot.

The whole game can quickly start to feel less like a game of strategy… and more like playing against a system that occasionally cheats, legally.

The Immersion Problem

Perhaps one of the biggest impacts on me, is that gamification breaks immersion, which leads to stagnation and boredom.

In a simulation-driven game, you’re in it. You’re thinking like a commander. You’re reading the battlefield, planning maneuvers, anticipating outcomes, and experiencing the battle almost like an observer. Your focus is entirely on the clash unfolding in front of you. Each battle functions under the same internal logic, while the circumstances are different every time. It’s exciting, it’s something you can build experience at and become better at navigating. There is a route to becoming a better commander, but Lady Luck will always play her hand, and even the most brilliant of plans can fail, and that becomes a kind of story that can be told in the same way you might describe a historical battle, but it’s a piece of history you wrote at the table together with an opponent. The game is about finding out what happens when all those factors come together.

But when heavy gamified elements enter the picture, that focus shifts.

Now you’re thinking about cards in hand. Triggers. Combos. Hidden interactions. Not just what’s happening on the battlefield, but what might happen outside of it. Your card draw can define whether you will win or lose a scenario. Did you get the right combo of effects you’ll be able to nail your opponent with? Did your opponent draw the counters he will need to circumvent your cards? The story becomes about how many points you scored and how X card or Y hidden effect resulted in you winning the game. There is a kind of cheapness to that story, told not through the eyes of commanders but through the eyes of players, playing a game of abstraction.

And that changes the feel of the game and the experience dramatically.

Warcrow is a really cool tactical game, but personally, I don’t see it as a “battle simulation”, and I don’t think it intends to be that. It’s very much a skirmish game about special characters with special powers. It’s really more like a miniature-based board game, similar to the Masters of the Universe tactical game. It’s in a very different category, and while I love the concept, it doesn’t really fill the miniature war game itch for me. It’s fun, but something in a different category.

What should be a decisive cavalry charge into an exposed flank suddenly becomes a question of, “What mechanic is about to interrupt this?” The tension isn’t about tactics anymore, or dice outcomes, it’s about the timing of hidden effects and abilities, the gamist elements that are the true drivers of the game.

Some gamist and abstracted elements can be fine. Even enjoyable in moderation.

But when those mechanics become powerful enough to completely unravel battlefield strategy, the illusion breaks. The battle stops feeling like a battle and starts feeling like a system being manipulated.

You’re no longer commanding an army. You’re managing interactions.

From Intrigue to Exhaustion

The final thing here is the irony that these gamified systems are often very appealing at first. They feel modern and clever, even. I find myself attracted to such systems, but it never lasts. There is a kind of exhaustion that kicks in because you’re analyzing the game, not the battles.

Gamist systems often feel clever. Dynamic. Full of surprising moments and interesting interactions. There’s a lot to explore, and that initial discovery phase can be genuinely exciting.

But over time, those same mechanics can start to feel repetitive and oppressive; they become the source of the frustration rather than the source of the fun.

Players learn these tricks. The combos. The optimal plays. And what begins as variety slowly turns into a cycle of shenanigans and counter-shenanigans. Army building becomes a matter of trying to build the synergies with these gamified mechanics, and usually, very clear winners rise to the top. Games become predictable, and spice turns into boredom.

For me, that’s where the interest starts to fade. Because what I’m looking for isn’t just a game to play. It’s a battle to experience. It’s the act of sitting at a table with a friend, with two forces on the table where the battle will be decided by movement, positioning, tactics, and the chaotic results of the dice within the setting of the world we are playing in.

I got really burned out on Songs of Ice and Fire, even though I really enjoyed my time with it. The main reason is that the game was about the cards, the NCU’s, and the shinnaningans you could pull with them. It was less a battle simulation and more a game about shinannigans, which was fine, but the alterations to the game, how the game was played, what your army could do, and how the game was balanced over time were through these card effects, and that was kind of exhausting to keep up with. Just getting the game to the table meant printing out and cutting out decks of cards, sleeving them, and getting re-familiarized with how every single element of your army changed since the last time you played. It’s just too much effort to play a game.

If all of that is undone by hidden mechanics and abilities, the game’s shelf life is going to be limited to how long these gamist mechanics remain interesting, before the game becomes played out and boring.

I’ve seen this pattern repeat over and over again, and I have a shelf full of miniature games I don’t play to prove it.

Long-Term Success vs. Flash In The Pan

If you really want to see this principle in action, you don’t have to look any further than the history of miniature gaming itself.

Because over time, patterns emerge.

The games that endure, the ones that stick around for decades, build loyal communities and continue to evolve, tend to lean heavily toward simulation. They create a foundation that players can understand, trust, and invest in long-term.

They feel consistent. Predictable in the right ways. Deep with just the right amount of chaos. These aren’t even necessarily always “better games” or even “modern designs”, but the stability over time and the variability of the simulation versus the shinanigan mechanics tends to win long term.

And that matters more than you might think.

Because miniature games aren’t just games, they’re hobbies. They demand time, money, effort. You build armies, paint models, learn rules, and invest in systems. Players want to feel like that investment has stability and longevity.

Simulation-driven systems provide that.

They offer a kind of rules “gravity.” Even as editions change and mechanics evolve, the core logic of the game remains intact. Movement matters. Positioning matters. Morale matters. The battlefield still behaves like a battlefield. The core is a core architecture upon which the game sits.

Constant rule changes, I think, are only good for games that are broken and need to be fixed. At some point, however, you should be able to find the balance, and the game should require fewer and fewer changes until, at some point, you perfect the game. That rarely ever happens, usually changes are introduced for changing’s sake, and I don’t think that is a healthy way to handle a product. Constant changes are annoying, and many games, even good simulation games, do too much of this.

You can leave the game for a year or five, and come back without feeling like everything you knew has been flipped upside down, and perhaps more importantly, the game will still be in print, which is rarely the case for gamist systems. The hotness today is gone tomorrow.

Gamified systems often struggle with that kind of longevity.

Because when a game leans heavily on layered mechanics, cards, combos, triggered effects, and abstract interactions, it becomes much harder to maintain balance and clarity over time. Each new addition risks compounding complexity, introducing new edge cases, and shifting the meta in unpredictable ways. Perhaps more importantly, the game starts to crack under its own weight, and demands from the player base for balance and fairness are muted by the fact that gamist systems see balance and fairness as an adjustment to the gamist mechanics, not as a core construct of the simulation.

What starts as exciting… can quickly become unstable. And when that instability builds, players drift away.

Not always immediately. Sometimes these games explode onto the scene with energy and enthusiasm. They feel fresh, dynamic, full of possibility.

But that energy can and very often does fade.

That’s where you see the “flash in the pan” effect. A strong launch. A burst of popularity. And then… a slow decline.

Now, to be fair, this isn’t a universal rule. There are exceptions on both sides. Some gamified systems find ways to stabilize, and some simulation-heavy games stumble for entirely different reasons.

But as a general trend, I think this tends to be true. The more a game roots itself in simulation, clear logic, visible systems, grounded interactions, the better its chances of standing the test of time.

Because at the end of the day, players aren’t just looking for something new. They’re looking for something that lasts.

Battletech

If you want a textbook example of longevity in miniature gaming, look no further than Battletech.

Launched in the mid-80s, this is a game built on pure simulation principles, and it shows. Its core rules have remained remarkably consistent for over 40 years. It has never truly disappeared, never fallen out of print, and today it stands as one of the highest-grossing miniature games on the market.

That kind of staying power doesn’t happen by accident.

And I think the reason is simple: Battletech doesn’t need gimmicks to stay interesting.

I think the biggest part of Battletech’s success comes from the fact that they kept fixing the rules until they got them right, and then they stopped. Now, new rule books are just “updated printings with better editing”. This stability is very good for the game.

You can play the exact same scenario, same mechs, same map, same players a hundred times, and you’ll get a hundred completely different outcomes. A hundred different stories. There is no puzzle to solve in Battletech; there is no meta, it really is simulation purity.

There are no hidden cards. No off-board mechanics. No surprise systems waiting to override what’s happening on the table. Everything is visible. Everything is grounded in the simulation. The dice are the only surprise factor.

It’s just you, your opponent, and a battlefield full of giant war machines where every decision carries weight.

That’s it.

And it’s more than enough.

Star Wars: X-Wing

Star Wars: X-Wing is perhaps the most fascinating example of both sides of this argument, and prime proof that there is something to this theory. It showed how powerful a good simulation can be… and how fragile it becomes when that foundation is compromised.

When X-Wing first launched, it was beautifully clean. At its core was a simple but brilliant idea: movement is everything.

Players secretly selected maneuvers using dials, revealing them simultaneously to simulate the uncertainty and tension of a dogfight. Ships had firing arcs, usually in the front, so getting a clean shot was all about positioning, which required different levels of risk and prediction. It was quite perfect as a simulation; everything that made the game tick.

Beyond that, the system was open. Transparent. Logical. No “gotchas.” No hidden layers. Just ships, movement, dice, and decisions.

And it exploded in popularity as a game.

For the first time in decades, a miniature game seriously challenged, and according to some reports, even surpassed, Warhammer 40k in popularity. It wasn’t just a hit, it was a phenomenon.

Now, to be fair, it had other advantages. It was Star Wars. It had pre-painted miniatures. It was accessible and relatively affordable.

But none of that works without a solid game underneath it. And X-Wing had that.

Until it didn’t.

Over time, the designers began introducing more and more gamified elements, mechanics that layered on top of the core system that undermined rather than reinforced them.

The most infamous example was the Twin Laser Turrets.

It wasn’t just that Twin Laser Turret ruined X-Wing, one card doesn’t do that. It was that it introduced the idea that equipment cards can and will circumvent the core mechanic of the game. It was the beginning of the end for X-Wing. It went from a simulation to a gamist system about shenanigans after this card, until it no longer mattered what anyone did on the battlefield; it was all about the effects of equipment and the synergies and combos.

This upgrade fundamentally bypassed one of the game’s core pillars: positioning and firing arcs. Suddenly, careful maneuvering, arc-dodging, and spatial awareness didn’t matter. With a single change to the game, the simulation of a dogfight, of outmaneuvering your opponent, was undermined by a mechanic that simply… ignored it.

And once that door opened, more followed. Abilities that bent the rules.
Interactions that overrode core mechanics got to such an extreme that the act of rolling dice was a formality; everything could be manipulated. Systems that prioritized clever combos over battlefield decisions. The game became about list-building synergies that resulted in players being able to compare lists and declare a winner; playing the game to determine a winner was also mostly a formality by the end of the game’s run.

The result was a very rapid and steady erosion of what made the game special. The simulation faded. The “shenanigans” took over. And the decline was just as dramatic as the rise.

A second edition failed to recapture the magic, arguably leaning even further into these layered mechanics. The game lost momentum, lost players, and eventually was passed between publishers before quietly fading out altogether.

There were, of course, multiple factors behind X-Wing’s fall. But for me, the turning point is clear:

The moment the game stopped being a simulation… was the moment it started dying.

Warhammer 40k & Age of Sigmar

Even Warhammer 40k tells a similar story, just with a different ending.

Over its long history, 40k has swung back and forth between simulation and gamification. There were periods where the game leaned heavily into abstract mechanics and bloated systems, to the point where it nearly collapsed under its own weight, dragging the company down with it.

But then GW course corrected, thanks to the company not being afraid to make big changes, and thank god they did.

Modern 40k, particularly in its latest editions, has moved back toward a more grounded approach. It still carries a fair share of gamified elements, stratagems, mission structures, and layered interactions, but much of it is at least open and visible, trackable, and something players can plan around. There is too much of it, which is a bit of an issue, making it highly complex and very involved, so it can still sometimes feel like the game has a lot of gotchas, but with game mastery its something you can overcome.

There’s a lot going on. A lot to process. And mechanics like widespread re-rolls can sometimes dilute the tension that makes simulation-based systems feel so compelling.

It’s better, but it’s still walking that line, and also still improving with each iteration of the game, and there is a lot of hope for 11th edition coming out this summer.

Age of Sigmar, GW’s other big game, interestingly, might be the cleaner of the two.

While it had a rocky start, it has steadily refined itself over time. It trims away many of the excess layers, fewer re-rolls, fewer disruptive mechanics, and focuses more on flow, clarity, and battlefield interaction.

It’s not a pure simulation by any means, but it leans in that direction more confidently.

And I think that’s a big part of why it continues to grow.

Because as long as it stays grounded, focused on the battle rather than the systems around it, it has a very strong foundation to build on.

Conclusion

I don’t think most players consciously think about this when they pick up a game, but the patterns emerge just the same. And one of the most consistent patterns I’ve seen is this:

Simulation-driven games last.
Gamist systems… don’t.

Gamist games tend to explode onto the scene. They’re praised for their innovation, their “modern design,” their clever mechanics. And to be fair, they are clever. They’re exciting. They’re fresh.

At first. But over time, those mechanics start to settle. The community figures them out. The puzzle gets solved.

And once that happens, something important is lost.

Because at their core, many gamified systems are puzzles. And puzzles, once solved, don’t have the same pull the second, or tenth, time around.

They become repetitive. Predictable in the wrong way.

Simulation systems, on the other hand, thrive on unpredictability. They aren’t puzzles, they’re systems of controlled chaos.

You can play the same battle, under the same conditions, with the same armies, making the same decisions, and still get wildly different outcomes. Not because of hidden mechanics, but because of the inherent uncertainty of the simulation itself.

That’s where the longevity comes from. That’s where the stories come from. And ultimately, that’s what keeps people coming back.

When I look at the games I’ve loved over the years, vs. games I have played and more importantly, the ones I still have interest in today, the list is surprisingly small.

Battletech.
Warhammer 40k
The Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game.
X-Wing (but only the early edition stuff)

These are the games that stuck.

That doesn’t mean the others weren’t great. I’ve had fantastic experiences with plenty of gamified systems. Some of them were incredibly fun, creative, and memorable. They review well.

But the issue is that they didn’t last. I don’t play Songs of Ice and Fire anymore. I loved Warcrow, but ultimately, I’m not driven to get it to the table. I love my Runewars miniatures, but I know I will never play that game again. They burned bright and then faded into obscurity. There is a graveyard of games on my shelves.

And for me, that difference comes down to one thing:

Whether the game was asking me to solve a system…

Or to command an army. That is, in the end, the crux of the whole thing.

Gaming Articles, Miniature Games, On The Table, Warhammer 40k

In Theory: Warhammer 40k 11th edition – Wish List!

March 12, 2026 5 Minutes

The rumors are over, 11th edition of Warhammer 40,000 is coming. This is no longer speculation, hopeful guessing, or wild internet theorycrafting. It’s confirmed. It’s real. A new edition of the grim darkness of the far future is on its way.

And when a new edition looms on the horizon, it’s only natural to start looking back at the one we’re currently playing. I’ve spent a lot of time with 10th edition, and like every version of 40k before it, it’s been a mixed bag of brilliant ideas, strange design choices, and the occasional rules interaction that makes you wonder if the Emperor himself wrote it during a particularly confusing warp storm.

So with 11th edition approaching, it feels like the perfect moment to reflect a bit on my experience with 10th, what worked, what didn’t, and the things that made me raise an eyebrow across the gaming table. More importantly, it’s a chance to share my own personal wish list for what I hope the next edition might bring.

The 10th edition core set that launched with the game is, without question, one of the best starter sets we ever got, it was the main push for me to get back into the game.

Because at the end of the day, I love this game. I played a lot of 10th edition, and the prospect of a brand new version of Warhammer 40k is always exciting.

So let’s talk about it.

Overview – 10th Edition & Miniature Gaming

10th edition of Warhammer 40,000 was actually my return to the game after a long break. The last time I had played seriously before that was back in 6th edition. But my absence wasn’t really about being fed up with 40k. Instead, it was because the wider world of miniature gaming absolutely exploded around 2012-2014.

Suddenly, there were incredible alternatives everywhere. Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game took the tabletop by storm, followed by exceptional Star Wars: Armada and later Star Wars: Legion. Privateer Press was dominating the competitive scene with Warmachine, and a wave of new titles kept arriving. Games like the outstanding A Song of Ice and Fire: Tabletop Miniatures Game filled the gap that 40k once occupied for me.

For a while, those games completely replaced my need to collect, paint, and play Warhammer 40k.

But as the years passed and the dust settled, something funny happened: I started to miss it. The familiar universe, the armies, the ridiculous over-the-top lore. When 10th edition launched, I noticed that my beloved Tyranids were front and center in the starter set, and that was all the excuse I needed. I picked up an army and dove back in.

And almost immediately, I had a realization: for all its flaws, Warhammer 40k is still the most fun I have ever had pushing miniatures around a table.

Now let’s be honest here. 40k is a flawed game, and Games Workshop is a flawed company. That’s hardly a controversial statement. But the game has something that many of its competitors struggled to maintain: staying power and a steady fan base. It’s been around for decades, and here we are in 2026 with a pretty clear scoreboard.

Many of the games that once “replaced” Warhammer for me are simply gone. X-Wing and Armada are effectively dead. Warmachine and A Song of Ice and Fire both ran into design issues that pushed them into awkward corners. Even games like Legion never quite stuck with me long term and are floundering, trying to reinvent themselves.

Fantasy Flight Games Star Wars X-Wing miniature game was the first game in miniature gaming history that outsold Warhammer 40k. Many believe it is what prompted Games Workshop to rethink their long-term strategy and start modernizing 40k a bit more seriously. It may very well be responsible for the much improved condition 40k is in today, a kick in the ass the GW really needed.

Meanwhile, 40k is still here. It’s the game I still paint for. It’s the one I still want to play. My miniatures are still valid in the game.

And credit where it’s due, 10th edition was a genuine step forward. In fact, it might be the first edition of Warhammer 40k where I found myself thinking, this is actually a fairly well-designed game. Not perfect, and certainly not cutting-edge compared to modern tabletop design (say, compared to Warcrow, for example), but by 40k standards, it was probably the best version of the system we’ve ever had.

It works. It’s fun. And it addressed a lot of long-standing problems that had plagued the game for years.

That said… There are still a few things that kind of suck. Enough for a wish list!

And with 11th edition on the horizon, it feels like the perfect time to talk about them. So today I’m putting together said wish list, ten things I’d love to see improved, fixed, or completely rethought in the next edition of Warhammer 40k.

In no particular order… let’s get into it.

1. Strategems and Command Points

I hate them. There, I said it.

Stratagems and Command Points might be one of the most controversial mechanics in modern Warhammer 40,000 for me; they represent one of the biggest design missteps in the current game, in my humble opinion.

Now I understand why they exist. There’s a huge competitive scene around 40k, and there’s clearly a push to make the game feel more like a modern tactical system. The idea is that stratagems create deeper decision-making, more reactive play, and more strategic layers.

Strategems don’t just add a lot of rules and complexity, slowing down the game, but many of them give inherently unequal advantages to certain factions, creating balance issues.

In theory, that sounds great.

In practice… it just doesn’t work for what 40k actually is.

At its core, Warhammer 40k is still a dice-chucking spectacle. It’s a game of eyeballing distances, rolling handfuls of dice, and watching ridiculous things happen on the table. That’s not a flaw, that’s part of its identity, and 40k should be leaning into that. It’s supposed to be fast and explosive, but strategems act as the complete opposite to that concept, slowing the game down dramatically and adding a lot of complexity to the resolutions of actions.

So when you bolt on this extra layer of “gotcha” mechanics with stratagems and Command Points, the result isn’t deeper strategy, it’s a slower, clunkier game.

Every turn becomes a minefield of “Wait, do you have a stratagem for that?” moments. Games grind to a halt while players scan cards or phone apps. Someone forgets to use half their abilities. Someone else drops a perfectly timed stratagem that feels less like clever play and more like a rules ambush that results in the inevitable “I didn’t know you could do that”. For obvious reasons, few of us have so much time that we can learn every nuance of every army in the game. There is just no way any reasonable person can track all this stuff, and strategems add a whole other layer to an already sprawling amount of faction rules.

Instead of adding meaningful depth, the system mostly creates feel-bad and gotcha moments and a thousand new ways for the game to become wildly unbalanced.

Personally, I’d love to see stratagems massively trimmed down, or preferably removed entirely.

Let the unit cards, army rules, and faction-specific enhancements carry the core gameplay. Those elements are easier to remember, easier to balance, and far more in line with the flow of a traditional 40k battle. The current stratagem system feels like an awkward layer of card-play that never really belonged in the game to begin with. Why are we playing Magic: The Gathering in the middle of our Warhammer 40k game? “What the fuck do you mean you counterspell!?”

To me, stratagems mostly do two things. They add a mountain of rules that nobody remembers, and they introduce a destabilizing factor where there are very obvious winners and losers.

And if you’ve played enough games of 40k, you’ve heard the same conversations after the match:

“Oh man… I forgot to use half my stratagems.”
or
“That stratagem is so unbelievably OP.”

It happens all the time.

Now, if stratagems absolutely must stay in the game, I’d love to see them treated as optional advanced rules. Let players choose whether they want that extra layer of complexity or not. Sometimes you want the full tournament experience. Other times, you just want to throw some dice, move some cool miniatures, and finish a game in a couple of hours without flipping through a deck of tactical tricks. But make those official, established optional rules so that it’s clear to players that “these are extra, not default”.

2. Simpler but More Impactful Terrain Rules

Terrain in Warhammer 40,000 is one of those things that looks incredibly important on the table… but often ends up feeling strangely irrelevant once the dice start rolling.

And that’s a problem.

Right now, the terrain rules are oddly caught between two worlds. On one hand, there are a lot of rules to remember, keywords, cover conditions, line-of-sight quirks, and special terrain interactions. On the other hand, the actual impact on the game is surprisingly small. In many cases, terrain barely changes the outcome of a firefight at all.

In fact, if you played a game of 40k with no terrain whatsoever, the difference in gameplay would often be… minimal, as there are so few units in the game at this point that garner any positive or negative effects from cover.

That’s not great.

The current system ends up feeling like a stack of rules you have to keep in your head that ultimately don’t matter very much. It’s complex to explain, awkward to apply, and yet somehow still underwhelming in terms of gameplay impact. I once wrote a 5,000-word essay just explaining the benefits of cover, which probably tells you everything you need to know about how intuitive the current system is.

What I’d love to see in the next edition is terrain that is both simpler and more meaningful.

The rules should be easy to apply at a glance and based on logic we can quickly eyeball across the table. No complicated chains of conditions, no digging through terrain keywords, and no debates over whether a model’s left kneecap is technically within a ruin footprint.

Just simple questions.

Are you in cover? Yes or no.

If the answer is yes, you get a clear and meaningful benefit, something like +1 to your save, full stop. No exceptions, no extra layers of logic, no obscure edge cases.

Terrain should be something that players actively care about during the game. It should shape movement, influence positioning, and create meaningful tactical decisions. Right now it often feels like decorative scenery with a rules appendix attached.

Even this simple benefit of cover rule, ends up being quite complicated because note that it refers to the model, not the unit. Not only that, but the end result, because most units in 40k have a 3+ save is that cover doesn’t do anything.

This one feels like a no-brainer to me. Terrain rules should be simple to apply and powerful enough that terrain genuinely matters on the battlefield.

After all, if we’re going to fill our tables with beautiful ruins, forests, and industrial complexes… they should probably do something.

3. Eliminate Dice Re-Rolls

I’m going to say something here that might sound extreme, but I genuinely believe it:

There should be no dice re-rolls in Warhammer 40,000. None. Ever.

Re-rolls are one of the most common mechanics in modern 40k, and in my opinion, they are also one of the weakest pieces of game design in the entire system. When designers lean heavily on re-roll mechanics, it usually means they’ve run out of better ways to represent abilities or create meaningful gameplay differences.

In other words, it’s a design crutch.

And in 10th edition, that crutch is everywhere.

Let’s start with the first problem: it slows the game down. Warhammer 40k is already a long game, and re-rolls add a massive amount of extra time to every battle. Roll to hit. Check which dice failed. Pick them up. Roll them again. Then do the same thing for wounds, saves, and sometimes even damage rolls.

For my army, I’d estimate that 40–60% of the dice I roll can be re-rolled in some way. That’s absurd. At that point, you’re not really rolling once, you’re rolling twice for half the game. I’m convinced the mechanic alone adds close to an hour to many matches.

The second issue is that re-rolls kill the drama of dice rolling.

Rolling dice should be exciting. You throw them across the table, everyone leans in, and for a moment, the fate of the battlefield hangs in the balance.

But with re-rolls, that moment gets completely deflated.

You roll the dice.

“Oh man, I missed.”

Pause.

“Wait… I get re-rolls.”

Pick them up. Roll again.

“Never mind, I hit.”

That entire moment of tension just evaporates. The first roll didn’t matter because we were going to do it again anyway. Nothing kills the momentum of a game faster than realizing the dice result you just saw isn’t actually the real result yet.

And then there’s the third issue, which in my view is the biggest one: re-rolls destroy statistical balance.

From a game design perspective, they undermine the entire math behind the system.

Every unit in 40k is built around probability, weapon skill, armor saves, and wound rolls. These numbers are carefully tuned to create expected outcomes. But the moment you introduce widespread re-rolls, those probabilities stop meaning what they’re supposed to mean.

A 3+ save isn’t really a 3+ save anymore if it can be re-rolled. The actual statistical survival rate changes dramatically. The same goes for hit rolls, wound rolls, and everything else. Add re-rolls to a resolution of more than one of these statistics and the numbers are all over the place.

And once you start stacking re-roll mechanics across an army, balancing the game becomes exponentially harder. The baseline math that designers rely on stops being reliable.

When I say re-rolls are bad design, that’s not just personal frustration talking; it’s a fundamental game theory problem. If you take even a basic game design course, one of the early lessons is that mechanics that constantly override probability curves make balancing systems far more difficult. Do it enough and unbalance is a foregone conclusion and cannot be repaired through other mechanical finagling.

Yet 40k leans on them everywhere.

Instead of destabilizing the entire statistical foundation of the game, I’d much rather see abilities expressed through clear modifiers, unique effects, or meaningful unit rules. Those are far easier to understand, easier to balance, and far faster to play.

Because at the end of the day, when the dice hit the table in Warhammer 40k…

That roll should matter.

4. Data Slates – Rules Updates & Faction Books

For this one, I’m going to say something unusual.

Don’t change a thing.

Credit where it’s due, Games Workshop has actually done a really good job supporting Warhammer 40,000 in 10th edition. Balance dataslates, frequent points updates, and quick reactions to what’s happening in the community have been a massive improvement compared to older editions. The game feels actively maintained, and that’s exactly how a modern tabletop system should work.

Do they always nail the changes? No, they don’t, but the effort counts, and I think it beats the hell out of radio silence.

So from that perspective, the current update cadence is excellent. Keep doing it.

However, there is a side effect to this approach that players have been frustrated about for years: codex books becoming outdated almost immediately.

We’ve all seen it happen. A faction book releases, players buy it, and before the ink dries, some dataslate, FAQ, or balance update changes multiple rules inside it. Suddenly, the book you just paid for no longer reflects how the army actually works.

It’s not a new problem, but with the current pace of changes, I think it’s time to rethink what faction books are supposed to be.

Instead of acting as the primary source of army rules, codexes should lean much more heavily into lore, art, strategy, narrative content, missions, and thematic mechanics that capture the identity of the faction. That’s the part of the book people actually enjoy owning.

I love the codexes, I have bought the codex for every edition of Tyranids, even when I wasn’t playing Warhammer 40k. These are awesome books full of art and lore, it’s a piece of the game and you’re going to want to own the one for your favorite faction. There is no reason to make it a requirement to own for the faction rules, people would buy these books anyway.

Because here’s one of the strangest things about playing Warhammer 40k: if you face an opponent whose faction you don’t collect, you often have no idea what their army can do unless you’ve also bought their codex.

Imagine playing a sport where you only know half the rules and your opponent knows the other half. It’s bizarre when you think about it.

Army rules should be freely available online for everyone. That way, players can understand how every faction functions, what the threats are, and how the game actually works across the full range of armies.

The reason to buy faction books shouldn’t be access to the rules, it should be because the book itself is awesome.

The art.
The lore.
The narrative campaigns.
The unique missions and faction flavor.

Players will buy those books regardless. I know I will. I love my Tyranids, if a new codex drops, I’m buying it. But I’m fully aware that the rules printed inside it will probably be outdated before it reaches my house. That’s not why I want the book.

I want it for the atmosphere of the faction and the joy of flipping through a beautiful hardcover full of alien monstrosities.

If it were up to me, I’d go even further: include the full core rulebook inside every faction book.

That way, players only need a single book for their army that contains the lore, the faction content, and the core rules for the game. Charge $60 for it, I honestly wouldn’t mind. Having one complete, self-contained book for my army would be far more useful than juggling multiple rule sources.

Meanwhile, the actual army rules and points values live online, where they can be updated quickly without invalidating the book on your shelf.

To me, that’s the best of both worlds.

5. Crusade Rules Should Use Legacy Architecture

One of my absolute favorite ways to play Warhammer 40,000 is with the Crusade rules. The idea of narrative campaigns, evolving armies, and story-driven battles fits perfectly with what 40k is supposed to be about.

But while I love the idea of Crusade, the actual campaign system leaves a lot to be desired.

The biggest issue is that it tends to follow a classic “winners win more” design. If you win a game, you gain advantages that help you win the next one. Those wins stack, the gap between players grows, and before long, the campaign starts to feel less like a tense war story and more like a slow-motion steamroll.

Tyrannic War is one of my favorite Warhammer 40k supplements ever made, this is exactly the sort of lore books I want to see for Warhammer 40k. I just wish the Crusade rules were a bit better thought out. As they are they are pretty … meh.

That kind of design can quickly drain the drama out of a campaign. Once momentum swings too far in one direction, the narrative becomes predictable, and that’s the last thing you want in a game built on epic storytelling.

But beyond that, Crusade feels like a massive missed opportunity.

If there’s one place where Warhammer 40k could really push the boundaries of tabletop design, it’s here. And honestly, I think the inspiration should come from modern legacy-style board games.

Imagine buying a Crusade campaign book that comes with a box of sealed, unlockable cards or envelopes. As battles unfold in your campaign, certain outcomes trigger hidden content. You rip open a new mission at the table and suddenly discover new lore, special battlefield conditions, or unexpected story developments. Maybe special characters are introduced, new weapons, and more. There is so much sci-fi goodness built into the 40k universe; the options here are quite limitless, and you could tie these concepts into novels, new product releases, and online content.

One battle might unlock a desperate evacuation mission.
Another might reveal a secret objective tied to an ancient alien artifact. A devastating defeat might trigger a revenge scenario two games later.

Each mission pushes the story forward and branches into new paths depending on the results of the previous battle.

Over time, players would experience a living campaign that evolves as they play. Every season, a new expansion pack could add fresh missions, new story arcs, and new unlockables that keep the narrative moving forward.

The crazy thing is that this idea is just one of about a billion ways the Crusade system could evolve. The design space here is enormous, and it feels like something Games Workshop has barely scratched the surface of.

My point is simple: Crusade should be a major pillar of the game.

Lean into the narrative side of Warhammer. Expand the campaign systems. Give players something deep, dynamic, and story-driven to sink their teeth into.

Because if any universe deserves truly epic campaign play… It’s the grim darkness of the 41st millennium.

6. Bring Back Organizational Charts/Requirements

Alright, this one might be a bit controversial.

I know a lot of players love the current “take whatever you want” style of army building in Warhammer 40,000, but I think removing organizational structures from armies has created several problems.

The first issue is lore.

Warhammer 40k isn’t just a game system; it’s a universe. The factions, the military structures, the way armies are organized in the lore… that’s a huge part of the appeal. And honestly, if the lore and atmosphere aren’t important to you, why play Warhammer 40k in the first place?

Let’s be real for a second: the game itself isn’t some cutting-edge masterpiece of modern design. It’s fragile, swingy, and still carries a lot of DNA from older tabletop systems. What makes 40k special is the setting, the factions, the scale, and the spectacle of it all.

Back when organizational charts existed, armies actually looked like armies. When you built a strike force, you expected a core of basic troops, a few vehicles, a couple of command units, exactly the way military forces are described in the lore. The structure gave armies a sense of authenticity.

I really like the idea of organizational charts being based on something. Be it a mission, a campaign or faction detachment based. I don’t want it to be a static thing that becomes part of a meta, its something you should have to decide for each match, and it should change often. The game needs to be shaken up.

Your force on the tabletop resembled something that could plausibly exist in the 41st millennium. That era is gone. I haven’t seen anything that resembles a 40k lore army during the entire 10th edition run; it’s all about optimization of unit selection.

The second issue is game balance.

Right now, one of the biggest reasons games can feel wild and swingy is because players are free to build armies purely around points optimization. The result is a lot of strange, hyper-efficient lists packed with the same units repeated over and over, while the vast majority of the catalogue doesn’t see any play at all.

Three Terminator squads.
Three Devastator squads.
Three of whatever unit happens to be mathematically optimal this month.

Players build armies to maximize efficiency, which makes perfect sense in competitive play, but it often runs completely against the spirit of the game.

This isn’t Magic: The Gathering Arena where you’re crafting the perfect competitive deck. Warhammer 40k is supposed to be a narrative war game about massive armies clashing on the battlefield.

When every list becomes a spreadsheet exercise in optimization, something gets lost.

And that leads to the third issue: collecting armies used to have a purpose.

Organizational charts encouraged players to build complete forces. Even if a particular unit wasn’t the most optimal choice, you still had a reason to include it because it was part of the structure of your army you had to fill.

You might field a unit of Tyranid Warriors not because they were mathematically perfect, but because they belonged in the force you were building.

And the best part? Your opponent was dealing with the same constraints, forcing an equalization.

Those slightly sub-optimal armies often created far more interesting games than the current environment, where every list tries to cram in the most efficient units possible.

Now, I’m not necessarily saying we should go all the way back to the exact force organization charts of older editions.

What I’d really like to see is an organizational structure tied to detachments.

When you choose a detachment, it should influence what units you bring or can bring. Your army should naturally evolve around that theme. Collecting and painting would feel like building toward something specific instead of just optimizing a list.

Your Tyranid army and my Tyranid army could both be powerful, but in completely different ways.

Maybe your detachment encourages units A, B, and C.
Mine encourages D, E, and F. You can have x4 of A unit, but I can’t have any at all!

Now our armies look different. They play differently. They feel like distinct forces instead of slight variations of the same optimized list.

Right now, detachments rarely influence what units you actually bring. Instead, players build the most optimized army possible and then simply choose whichever detachment works best with that list.

Everything else becomes “sub-optimal,” and because everyone else is optimizing too, bringing anything less efficient often means getting crushed by turn one or two.

At that point, the system is forcing players toward the same narrow set of choices just to stay competitive.

And that’s exactly the kind of problem organizational structures used to solve.

Bring back some form of structured army building, and I think you’ll see more thematic armies, more diverse lists, and far more interesting games on the table.

7. Make Internal Balance The Priority

Organizational charts can help encourage a wider spread of units in an army, but they only work if the units themselves are actually worth taking.

And that brings us to one of the biggest long-standing issues in Warhammer 40,000: internal balance.

If the internal balance of a faction is off, then any kind of structural army requirement just forces players into an awkward situation. Instead of encouraging variety, it simply makes people field units they don’t enjoy because they have to, even when those units are clearly underpowered.

And that’s not fun for anyone.

One of the most frustrating things in 40k is looking at your shelf full of beautifully painted miniatures and realizing that half of them just aren’t viable on the table. There are so many fantastic models in this game that players would love to use, but the reality is that many of them are so inefficient compared to other units at the same point cost that they simply never get fielded.

Unless, of course, you’re intentionally running a sub-optimal army.

That’s always a bad feeling.

Take my Tyrannocyte, for example. It’s a really cool model. I love the concept, the look, and the idea of it smashing onto the battlefield like a giant alien drop pod.

But at 105 points, it’s barely worth half that in actual game value. So it sits on the shelf.

And that’s a shame.

Owning models that you love but suck in the game is a real shame. Your options are to use them anyway and probably lose matches as a result, or not use them and be pissed about that. Internal balance is a crucial element to a game’s design, and GW really needs to get it right. I think there is a lot that can be done to make this happen.

This is why internal balance should be a major focus of 11th edition. Every unit in a faction should feel like a legitimate option. Not necessarily the best choice, but at least something you could reasonably include without feeling like you’re handicapping yourself.

At the same time, the game needs to avoid units that become automatic “take three” choices in every list. When one or two units dominate the efficiency curve, the entire faction’s army design collapses into a predictable formula.

And suddenly everyone’s running the exact same army, which is exactly what you saw in 10th edition. Tons of options, but everyone is running variations of the same small selection of lists. Most of the catalogue is just not seeing any play.

Internal balance might sound like a basic concept, but it’s absolutely critical to the health of the game. If every unit has a clear role and a fair point value, players can build armies based on theme, creativity, and personal taste instead of just chasing the most efficient spreadsheet entries.

And that’s the kind of Warhammer 40k most people actually want to play.

8. Improved Mission Design

I touched on this earlier when talking about Crusade, but this issue goes deeper than narrative play. It’s really about the structure of missions and how victories are determined in Warhammer 40k.

Right now, 10th edition often feels less like a battle and more like a Euro-style worker placement board game wearing a Warhammer costume.

You’re not always fighting a war, you’re playing a strange sub-game where units run around the table doing random administrative tasks in order to score points. Scan this objective. Perform that action. Score five points here, two points there.

The result is a bizarre level of victory point granularity that constantly pulls players away from the actual battle happening on the table.

Instead of focusing on the clash of armies, you end up sending units off to perform strategically questionable or thematically nonsensical actions simply because that’s how you score points.

And it feels… weird.

I understand what GW was going for here, and I don’t even think its nescessarily bad design, but it slows the game down, and the result is a kind of disconnect from the main focus of the game, which is the battlefield. Missions need to be a lot simpler, make the game about the fight, not some weird side game about point scoring.

A lot of the current objectives feel forced, as if someone decided the game needed a certain amount of scoring complexity and then a design team had to invent a hundred different ways to make that happen. The design process feels backwards, a chicken before the egg; the points system came first, and the mission ideas were built afterward just to justify it.

Mechanically, the game suffers because of it.

At its core, Warhammer 40k is about two armies colliding on a battlefield. The missions should reinforce that idea, not distract from it. Objectives should be simple, clear, and grounded in the logic of the setting.

Things like: Take that hill and hold it, destroy the shield generator, or secure the landing zone.

You can still build interesting missions around those ideas. You could even introduce phased objectives, capture the objective, plant the explosives, destroy the structure, and escape before reinforcements arrive. Missions like that feel connected to the world of the game and create natural storytelling moments during play.

I especially dislike “surprise” scoring opportunities. Drawing a card and hoping that it gives you a chance to make an easy score somewhere is not a strategy; it’s luck, and neither player can do anything to predict its coming.

Players should always have a clear understanding of how to win the game.

And right now, that’s often not the case.

The current mission system is so packed with scoring mechanics that half the time, a winner is decided because someone forgot about a particular mission card or missed a scoring opportunity buried in the rules, or just got lucky with the card draws.

I’ve played a lot of 10th edition games, and I can honestly say I’ve never sat down after a match and had someone confidently explain every way points could have been scored in that game. There are just too many objectives, too many scoring triggers, and too many little systems layered on top of each other.

So players tend to fall into one of two traps. They either ignore the battle and focus purely on farming points, which is dull. Or they focus on the battle, wipe out the enemy army… and still lose because of the scoring system.

Few things feel stranger than getting tabled and still winning the game.

At that point, the mission system isn’t supporting the battle; it’s supporting a gaming system, and that feels off to me in the backdrop of a Warhammer 40k battle.

What I’d love to see in 11th edition is a complete rethink of the mission design philosophy. Objectives should be intuitive, thematic, and clearly tied to what’s happening on the battlefield, and it would be icing on the cake if they were tied to thematic event-driven stories in the game world.

Because at the end of the day, Warhammer 40k should feel like what it is supposed to be: A massive science-fiction battle in the 40k universe.

Better Vehicle and Aircraft Rules

At this point, I feel like I’m just pointing out problems that every Warhammer 40k player already knows exist.

And nothing illustrates that better than the vehicle and aircraft rules in Warhammer 40k.

I honestly doubt you could find a player anywhere on God’s green earth who thinks the current system works particularly well. Vehicles and aircraft have been a design headache for years, and they’re still one of the most awkward parts of the game.

The core problem is that these units almost always land in one of two extremes.

Either they are absurdly durable, borderline unkillable unless you’re packing the heaviest anti-tank weapons in the game, or they’re so fragile that they barely function as vehicles at all.

There rarely seems to be a middle ground.

The rules themselves, especially for aircraft, are often strange, overly complicated, and sometimes downright nonsensical. Movement restrictions, special targeting rules, weird interactions with terrain… the whole system often feels like it’s fighting against the rest of the game.

In fact, aircraft have been so problematic over the years that many tournaments and organized play events have simply banned them outright because the rules create too many headaches.

That’s not a great sign.

These are cool models, and I love them, but if Aircraft are going to be in the game they need much better rules than what we have right now, and I think GW knows it.

What vehicles and aircraft really need are simple, cinematic rules that fit the spectacle of Warhammer 40k. These units should feel powerful and exciting on the battlefield without turning into some kind of obscure combo card that breaks the game.

They should be big, dramatic pieces of the battlefield, tanks rumbling forward under heavy fire, gunships screaming across the sky, not strange mechanical puzzles that nobody wants to deal with.

And the funny thing is, if you look around the community, there are hundreds of house rules people have come up with to fix these problems.

At this point, many of those community solutions are honestly better than what Games Workshop has implemented over the years.

So if 11th edition is looking for a place to start cleaning things up, this is an easy win.

Vehicles and aircraft don’t need complicated rules. They just need good ones. I don’t have a suggestion, I’m not a game designer, that’s GW’s job, I just know when something sucks and vehicle and aircraft rules, certainly do suck!

Faster Gameplay

Warhammer 40k has always had a lot of rules, but honestly, I don’t think the rules themselves are the main reason the game feels so slow today.

The real problem is everything else we’ve already talked about on this wish list.

Stratagems and Command Points slow the game down.
Overcomplicated terrain rules slow the game down.
Dice re-rolls slow the game down a lot (like, literally adds at least 1 hour + to the game).

But even beyond those issues, there’s another major factor that rarely gets discussed enough: the game just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

With each edition of Warhammer 40k, the “standard” game size has crept upward. Today, the default expectation is a 2,000-point game, which seems normal, but 2,000 points today is not really 2,000 points.

The problem is that at the same time, unit costs have steadily decreased over each edition. The result is that a modern 2,000-point army contains far more models and units than it used to. In practical terms, a 2,000-point army today feels closer to what a 3,000-point army looked like two editions ago.

That’s a massive increase in size, and that equals a massive increase in time needed to finish a game.

Large, slow games are really bad for the tournament scene as well. People have to rush through games, and it’s common during tournaments that games are “called” rather than finished. The game needs a major improvement in speed, a match should be playable within 2-3 hours maximum without having to speed through it, and it feeling like there is insane time pressure on the players.

There are so many units on the table now that, in some missions, it’s literally not possible to deploy everything because there isn’t enough physical space on the board. And to make matters worse, the boards themselves have actually gotten smaller over time.

So what you end up with is essentially a knife fight in a phone booth, packed with units, abilities, rolls, re-rolls, and re-rolls of re-rolls.

It’s chaos.

Personally, I believe the time it takes to play a game of 40k could be reduced by as much as 75% without sacrificing any of the fun, if the rules were streamlined and the core structure of the game was designed around gameplay rather than simply encouraging players to buy more models.

Now, realistically, I don’t expect Games Workshop to change that philosophy anytime soon. But as a community, it might be time to start questioning the assumption that 2,000 points is the “standard” game size.

Because at today’s unit costs, it really isn’t.

In fact, it’s kind of absurd.

A modern 2,000-point game often feels less like a tactical wargame and more like Yahtzee with miniatures, a chaotic avalanche of dice rolls where the sheer volume of units overwhelms any meaningful strategy.

And the worst part is how long it takes.

At this point, finishing a full game of 40k in a single evening is becoming increasingly difficult. In my experience, about half of our games don’t even finish. Eventually, someone looks at the clock, realizes it’s getting late, and we just call it.

A typical game can easily run four to six hours, and if players aren’t moving quickly, it can stretch to eight hours or more. Happens all the time for me.

That’s just not reasonable.

If there’s one big wish I have for 11th edition, it’s that the designers take a serious look at reducing army sizes and tightening the overall structure of the game. Combine that with improvements to the other issues on this list, and the result could be a faster, smoother, and far more enjoyable experience.

Because at the end of the day, Warhammer 40k should be something you can play and finish in an evening, not an endurance test.

Conclusion

For an article that started out by praising 10th edition of Warhammer 40,000, I sure did spend a lot of time complaining.

But the truth is, I really do think it’s been a great edition. It’s had a strong run and introduced some genuinely good ideas. The problem isn’t that 10th edition is bad, it’s that it’s starting to feel a little rusty.

And the reality is that Warhammer 40k is no longer competing against its own previous editions. The tabletop gaming world has evolved. There are plenty of modern games now proving that with clean mechanics and thoughtful design, you can have a fast, snappy, and highly enjoyable experience at the table. Sure, most of these games don’t have the staying power, but they do illustrate what can be done with good game design.

I’d love to see Warhammer 40k embrace some of that design philosophy.

At the same time, I completely understand that 40k is its own kind of game. It should be bigger, heavier, and more dramatic than most tabletop systems. That’s part of its identity. But I also think it already achieves that depth through its factions, units, and battlefield interactions, even without the extra layers that have accumulated over the years.

Stratagem bloat, overly complex mission scoring, endless re-roll mechanics, none of those things are necessary for the game to feel deep or meaningful. Somewhere in the middle, there’s a sweet spot, and I think Warhammer 40k could absolutely reach it.

I’m not asking for a massive overhaul of the system. What I’d really like to see is optimization and efficiency, small but meaningful improvements that smooth out the rough edges.

More than anything, I want Warhammer 40k to feel less like an ordeal at the table.

Collecting and painting miniatures should absolutely remain a big part of the hobby. That investment of time, creativity, and effort is one of the things that makes Warhammer special, and I would never want to see that aspect simplified or diminished.

But once the models are painted and you’re ready to set up a game, that experience should be lighthearted and fun.

It should feel exciting, not confusing.
Enjoyable, not frustrating.
And above all, it should be fast, smooth, and satisfying to play.

D&D, Gaming Articles

In Theory: D&D 6th edition in 2027?

February 17, 2026 5 Minutes 1 Comment

There is absolutely no debate that 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons, released in 2014, was a runaway hit. It did not just do well. It did not quietly succeed. It kicked in the tavern door, rolled a natural 20 on persuasion, and walked out with the entire hobby under its arm.

Now, yes, those of us with a few decades of dice scars may have a list of complaints. We have opinions. We have feelings. We have binders. But even the grumpiest old school gamer has to admit that 5e was a phenomenon. The numbers do not lie. The dragon was awake again.

There are many reasons for this success, but the big three are as clear as a freshly laminated character sheet.

First, 5e was a course correction. After the bold, shiny, heavily gamified experiment of 4th edition, Wizards of the Coast gently steered the ship back toward something that felt like classic D&D. Not a full retreat. Not a full reboot. More like returning home after a semester abroad with some new ideas and a slightly different haircut. It felt familiar again. That mattered.

What D&D should look like, what it should feel like, and in general what it should be mechanically has been debated for as long as the game has existed. There is, however, one universal thing that I think everyone can agree on, which is that it should be fun. And fun is the most subjective and incurably based on personal taste. You cannot create a game that everyone will love, but 5e came pretty damn close.

Second, Dungeons and Dragons escaped the basement and walked onto the stage. Thanks to groups like Critical Role and other streaming pioneers, playing D&D became entertainment. People were not just rolling dice. They were performing. They were voice acting. They were crying on camera. At one point, it was entirely possible that more people were watching D&D than actually playing it. Somewhere, Gary Gygax probably raised an eyebrow.

Third, Wizards of the Coast embraced the digital age instead of pretending it was a passing fad at the perfect time. The pandemic hit, and we were all trapped in our houses, and playing D&D online swung the door open. Unearthed Arcana gave players a peek behind the curtain. DnD Beyond made character creation less of a paper management mini-game. The DM Guild let aspiring designers throw their ideas into the wild (myself included), and the age of VTT’s blossomed. The game was not just something you bought in a bookstore anymore. It was something you interacted with online, argued about, homebrewed, and refreshed your browser for.

All of this helped, of course. But there was one more crucial factor.

The game was fun again. I know many people in the old school space hated it, but I think a lot of that hate comes from a general hate of change and is pretty misguided and mostly an assessment offered by a group of people that never even tried it.

Not exactly the same fun as the red box days, I get it. Not quite the ruthless, unforgiving dungeon crawls of our youth. But it hit a sweet spot with a wide audience. It welcomed new players without demanding they memorize a rulebook the size of a small nation’s tax code. At the same time, it did not completely exile the veterans to the wilderness.

I played it. I still play it from time to time. It is not perfect. It is not sacred. But it is, undeniably, a good time. And sometimes that is all a game really needs to be.

Gender Politics and Woke Agenda

All right. Deep breath. Let us wade into the dragon’s lair.

At some point, about two-thirds of the way through the 2014 edition’s ten-year reign, the world outside the hobby started changing at a rather brisk pace. Culture wars went from being something discussed on late-night talk shows to something that seemed to leak into every possible corner of entertainment. Television, movies, comics, novels, blockbuster franchises with laser swords and capes, nothing felt untouched.

Dungeons and Dragons did not exist in a vacuum. It never has. And eventually, Wizards of the Coast made it clear that they were going to plant a flag. The company leaned into contemporary social themes and made an effort to reflect modern values directly in the game’s language, art, and presentation. From their perspective, this was not reckless. It was responsible. It was being on the right side of history. It was aligning the brand with the audience they believed would carry it forward.

On paper, that sounds perfectly reasonable. No company wants to look outdated or hostile to its audience. The problem, as many entertainment giants have discovered over the past decade, is that audiences are rarely as unified as marketing departments hope they are.

Large franchises such as Star Wars and Marvel have had very public struggles navigating this terrain. For some fans, changes feel refreshing and overdue. For most, they feel intrusive, even if you support the ideology and purpose behind them. The result is often less a calm evolution and more a noisy food fight on the internet. And once the food starts flying, it tends to splatter everywhere, bumping against the bottom line.

Going woke with shows like Acolyte has cost Disney millions, but they are perfectly capable of creating insanely successful shows like Andor that stay away from political messaging and just let themselves be awesome. At some point, you have to pick. Do you want to make money or do you want to be political?

By the time D&D’s fiftieth anniversary update arrived in late 2024 and early 2025, rebranding the system as the 2024 edition of Dungeons and Dragons, tensions were already simmering in the wider culture; people were frankly kind of sick of the fight. The DEI and Tumblr warriors who never actually played D&D to begin with were gone, and the only people remaining were fans of the game, not so much the politics. The new core books sold quickly at launch. Wizards of the Coast proudly announced record breaking performance. Critics, however, have not been kind to these books. As is often the case, the marketing headlines were louder than the spreadsheets.

The reception itself felt different from 2014. The original 5th edition was greeted with near universal enthusiasm. The 2024 refresh, while mechanically very similar at its core, received a far more mixed response. Some players praised clarifications and refinements. Others felt uneasy about tonal shifts in the writing and presentation. The game had become very…preachy, as did the company running the franchise.

Then vs. now. How far the mighty have fallen. I understand that this is a bit out of context, a comparison designed to create outrage. My point is that the image on the left is indisputably Dungeons and Dragons, through and through. The one on the right is a parody and has nothing to do with Dungeons and Dragons at all. Period.

One of the loudest points of friction centered on the game’s language around ancestry, identity, and morality. Longstanding fantasy concepts were reexamined. Half-race people were reframed or removed. Traditional assumptions about inherently evil creatures were softened or rewritten. Orcs were no longer automatically villains. The language around alignment and culture became more cautious, more nuanced. Real-world politics and political positions were infused into the game on every page, in the words, in the design, in the art.

For some players, this was overdue housekeeping. For others, it felt like an overcorrection. They did not come to the table looking for a seminar on modern ethics, especially by the end of 2024, at a time that we had already endured so much infiltration of politics into our hobbies and entertainment. They wanted dragons, dungeons, and that escapist feeling at the table that D&D had provided for decades. They were looking for familiarity, the comfort food that is D&D. Instead, D&D like so many franchises, was weaponized to push a political agenda.

The art direction also shifted in tone. Where older editions leaned into grim and gritty sword and sorcery, the newer books embraced a brighter, more inclusive aesthetic. To supporters, this was welcomed creativity and inclusivity. To detractors, it felt sanitized or didactic. The debate was less about rules and more about vibe. The message of the book was not about Dungeons and Dragons and fantasy, but about the real-world culture war being waged in the pages of our games, splashing its way into yet another beloved hobby.

I’m not saying this is bad art; it very clearly is done by a very talented person who has a flair for color and style, but if these images did not appear in a D&D book, no one would mistake them for representing D&D worlds and settings. It’s art that belongs in a different game. In what setting do bards dress like rock stars and play an electric base?

And that is the thing. Mechanically, the 2024 edition is still 5th edition at heart. Advantage still exists. Armor class still matters. Fireball is still fireball. But tone is powerful. Presentation shapes perception. When fans are already fatigued from broader culture battles in other franchises, even subtle changes can feel amplified.

Meanwhile, corporate realities marched on. There were reports of layoffs within the broader Hasbro structure. Longtime contributors departed. Ambitious digital initiatives such as the planned virtual tabletop platform known as Project Sigil struggled to find a stable footing and collapsed, and there was a complete lack of any evidence of the game’s success, with plenty of proof to the contrary. For a brand publicly celebrating success, the surrounding news cycle felt oddly turbulent and out of tune with the messaging. This continues to this day.

Now rumors swirl, as they always do in this hobby. Whispers of a sixth edition drift through forums and video essays. Wizards of the Coast remains largely quiet, which of course only fuels speculation further. Silence, in the internet age, is rarely interpreted as calm confidence.

In the end, what we are witnessing may be less a moral apocalypse and more a growing pain. Dungeons and Dragons has survived moral panics, edition wars, satanic scares, and rulebook bloat thick enough to stun a troll. It is unlikely to be slain by a paragraph about orcs.

But it is fair to say this: the 2024 era feels different. Not necessarily doomed. Not necessarily triumphant. Just… contested.

Rumors have now begun, from claimed leaks coming out of Wizards of the Coasts to speculation, the question everyone is asking. Is 2024 ok? And if not, what is the next move?

My Theory

My theory is fairly simple, and possibly completely wrong, which of course makes it perfect for the internet.

The RPG industry is nimble. It always has been. It is powered by small publishers, independent designers, artists in spare bedrooms, and creators who can pivot faster than a rogue dodging an opportunity attack. If the cultural winds shift, they adjust. If players want grittier rules, lighter rules, stranger settings, someone will test it, publish it, and move on before the ink dries.

Wizards of the Coast does not move like that. It never has, and TSR did not either in its prime. When you are part of a large corporate machine, you carry weight. Layers of approval. Strategy decks. Risk assessments. Brand alignment meetings where phrases like cross vertical synergy are spoken without irony. By the time a plan is approved and executed, the rest of the hobby may already have experimented, adapted, and moved on.

Being big has advantages. Massive distribution. Deep pockets. Marketing reach that indie designers would trade a legendary artifact for. But size comes with inertia. In a fast-changing cultural climate, inertia can look like tone deafness even when the intent is good.

Add to that monster-sized echo chamber in which Wizards of the Coast lives. When your interviews are conducted by your own employees, when messaging is tightly controlled, and every word goes through sensitivity experts, when the loudest feedback comes from the most vocal online minority, like the utterly incoherent and completetly diluisional DnD Beyond forum community and its moderators, you risk mistaking noise for consensus. In the 2024 update, once a direction was chosen, it was embraced completely. The tone was deliberate. The messaging is unified. If this were a space opera, someone quietly said execute order sixty-six, and the creative trajectory was locked in.

Here is the nuance that gets lost in the shouting.

The fan base does want inclusivity. We want diversity. We want talented creators from every background imaginable making incredible games. Kelsey Dionne is a great example. A married lesbian designer whose work on Shadowdark won awards across the hobby. People did not buy Shadowdark because of her identity or the infusion of a political agenda in her book. They bought it because it is a sharp, confident, well-designed game that understands dungeon crawling at its core. She understood that the people who cry war over political issues and the audience who buy RPGs are not the same people. The awards and accolades came from D&D fans and were earned through craftsmanship, not activism. She was not given any credit from the so-called woke left because she refused to play their game. It was D&D fans who stood by her side and helped promote her work; she succeeded on merit, not bullshit.

I could go anywhere in the world, show any random person this image, and ask them where it’s from, and everyone will say “D&D”. This is Dungeons and Dragons art; everyone knows this. It’s a universal style, an understood cultural identity.

That is the distinction. You do not have to signal virtue. You have to be virtuous in your craft.

Most players are not asking for fantasy worlds that feel like corporate retreats. They want danger. Moral tension. Villains who are actually villainous. They want to feel heroic precisely because the world is not safe and tidy. They want that in the writing, in the mechanics and in the art of the games they play.

The mistake, in my view, is assuming that a diverse audience requires a softened fantasy. Being part of a minority group does not mean you want your dragon-slaying adventure to turn into a polite seminar with emotional affirmation circles fueled by sensitivity training. People of every identity enjoy sharp stories, dark themes, high stakes, and gritty art. To assume otherwise feels patronizing, even insulting.

What we are seeing feels like overcorrection. As if the brand is attempting to atone for decades of perceived sins by turning the dial all the way in the opposite direction. The irony is that when everything is curated to signal virtue, it can start to feel less diverse rather than more. Narrow in a different way.

There is indisputable proof that Wizards of the Coast is perfectly capable of capturing the theme, mood, settings and style of D&D in art in spectacular fashion, as proof in this amazing image from the 2024 5e book. Adding shitty art not representative of the name Dungeons and Dragons was done intentionally.

Dungeons and Dragons claims to be for everyone. But when the aesthetic and tone begin to feel targeted toward a very specific cultural slice, some longtime players inevitably feel sidelined. Representation is healthy. It was handled well in 2014. Strong female characters. Diverse heroes. Expanded visibility. It felt organic. It still felt like D&D.

The 2024 edition, by contrast, feels different to many players. Not because representation exists, but because the tone feels self-conscious. As if every page is glancing over its shoulder, worried about offending someone. That nervous energy seeps into the reading experience and to the table.

Most players, regardless of background, simply want great games. Bold settings. Mechanics that sing. Adventures that make them feel clever, powerful, terrified, and triumphant. They expect the game to avoid lazy stereotypes and actual bigotry. That is baseline. But they do not want every paragraph to feel like a position in a cultural debate.

But of course I’m talking about players, not social justice warriors, not the Tumblr echo chambers, not this violent vocal minority who doesn’t give a shit about Dungeons and Dragons, they just want to win an internet fight and see yet another franchise created by middle-aged white men burned to the ground.

We get it, Gygax was a racist and a misogynist, but he has not been part of D&D for nearly 40 years, and he is also dead and buried. Shut the fuck up and let it go!

Look again at Shadowdark. It trusts the audience. It leans into classic fantasy energy with confidence. It focuses on play. It feels like it is speaking from love of the hobby rather than from a corporate messaging strategy, and it does not misstep and offend reasonable people. It’s just a great game; it has let go of all the bad old legacy of D&D and embraced everything that is amazing about this hobby and this game.

I suspect this tension has not gone unnoticed inside Wizards of the Coast. Across entertainment, companies that leaned too heavily into overt cultural messaging have faced financial turbulence and consequences. Executives notice patterns. Quiet meetings happen. Words like recalibration and brand realignment start circulating.

The long silence since the 2024 edition launched, combined with persistent rumors of a sixth edition, suggests something is brewing. Maybe it is a simple iteration. Maybe it is something bigger.

Dungeons and Dragons has reinvented itself before. It will again. The real question is not whether change is coming. It is whether Wizards of the Coast recognizes that one may be needed and understands where they are failing.

What 6th Edition Should Look Like

What should 6th edition actually look like?

If the rumors are true and a new edition is on the horizon, my hope is simple. Not louder. Not shinier. Not wrapped in corporate buzzwords. Just better.

Right now the wider RPG scene feels alive. Designers are experimenting. Small teams are taking risks. Books feel focused and confident. They feel like they are trying to make great games, not press releases disguised as rulebooks. If 6th edition is coming, it should study that energy very carefully.

The biggest shift I want to see is a return to trust.

Trust the audience.

Trust that players can separate fantasy from reality. Trust that they can handle complex themes without a warning label every other page. Trust that diversity at the table does not require constant commentary from the publisher. If you hire talented, diverse creators, their voices will naturally shape the game. You do not need to underline it in red ink on every spread.

Focus on design. Focus on writing that crackles with adventure. Focus on fantasy that feels dangerous, mythic, and larger than life. Dungeons and Dragons is not a public policy document. It is not a corporate confession booth. It is a game about impossible heroes standing against impossible odds.

Yes, the hobby has a past. Many of us were there. We remember the rough edges. The jokes that aged poorly. The blind spots. Acknowledging that and doing better is healthy. But doing better does not require swinging so far in the other direction that the game loses its teeth. Growth is not the same thing as overcorrection.

Look at what Kelsey Dionne accomplished with Shadowdark. The inclusivity exists because she exists. It is part of the creative DNA of the project. It does not need a spotlight or a speech. It simply sits alongside tight mechanics and a clear love of dungeon crawling.

That is the model.

The best way to be inclusive is not to sand down every sharp corner. It is to welcome everyone to the table and then give them something awesome to play. Let the diversity of creators and players shape the culture organically. Corporations are in the business of making products. That is fine. Just make a great one. If you give players a compelling reason to buy your book, they will.

Above all, trust your audience.

We do not need moral instruction in every chapter. We do not need dragons reframed as misunderstood metaphors for modern anxieties. We need perilous ruins. We need villains worth hating. We need magic that feels powerful and a little dangerous. We need victories that feel earned.

We need dungeons.

And dragons.

Gaming Articles, Role-Player Game Reviews, RPG Preview

Legend In The Mist: The Rustic Fantasy Role-Playing Game

February 2, 2026 5 Minutes

Truly inspired ideas in role-playing games are not rare at all, and that, perhaps, is what keeps the RPG hobby endlessly fascinating. Unlike board games, which often iterate and refine on what came before, tabletop RPGs still feel unafraid to wander and explore new territory. Each game I read I find has its own energy and unique take on the hobby. Every new book carries the promise of a different path, a different voice, a different way to tell stories together. It’s amazing that this sort of thing is common in the hobby.

Despite this almost routine ability for RPG designers and writers to surprise, when I got my first look at Legend in the Mist, I knew I was in for a treat. It had the look of something created with love and care, a personal touch, the expenditure of enormous amounts of creative energy. It may be weird to say, but I think anyone who reads a lot of RPG books as I do would probably agree that when you crack a new book open, you almost expect innovation and something original. That is rarely a problem. But whether you find something that speaks to you, that delights you, that is the real trick.

The real question is always, “Will this land with my group?”

Legend in the Mist is a new tabletop role-playing game, successfully Kickstarted in 2024 with the support of over 8,000 backers, and now standing on the threshold of its physical release. I’m a bit late to the party on this one, Legend in the Mist has been very provocatively successful and has seen some pretty heavy coverage by some of the most renowned RPG bloggers and YouTubers in the business. Ladies and Gentlemen, to whom I bow to with respect. It’s sitting pretty on the best seller list on RPG DriveThru and outselling my beloved Daggerheart, which of course begs the question. How? I mean, what is this game that is crushing it right now?

The Kick-Starter may be over, but getting your hands on it shouldn’t be too difficult. I suspect with the general fanfare with which this game has had, it will be available wherever you buy your RPG stuff before too long.

You have my attention!

I’ll be giving the game a full, detailed examination later this year, but after spending some time with it, it felt wrong to stay silent. Games like this deserve to be talked about, even if only in fragments at first. Consider this a glimpse through the trees before the forest opens up if you just happen to be late to the party, like I was.

Overview

At its heart, Legend in the Mist is driven by a modern, story-first design philosophy, but not the kind that discards structure in favor of pure improvisation. This isn’t a game that asks you to abandon mechanics and simply “feel your way forward”, like say Dungeon World or Index Card RPG, nor is it a heavier mechanic hidden behind contextualized flavor like say Dungeon Crawl Classics. Instead, it offers a carefully built framework designed to support narrative play, to guide it, and, at key moments, to challenge it.

There’s an important difference between removing mechanics and hiding them.

Legend in the Mist is very much a system. There is an engine here, one that governs risk, consequence, and change, but it hums quietly beneath the surface, woven into the fabric of the story itself. The rules don’t interrupt the narrative; they shape it. They ask hard questions at dramatic moments and demand answers that matter, not just to the plot, but to who the characters are becoming. And this is the center stage of the game, it’s not as much a game about narrative as it is about character perspective on the narrative and their response to it and that internal dialogue that asks, what would my character do? A question that is somehow more profound in Legend in the Mist because of how the system is designed (more on that in a minute).

There is no question that “art” was foremost on this publisher’s mind when making Legend In The Mist. It’s provocative, original, and inspiring, with a level of love that is hard to ignore. People say A.I. will replace people one day. When you look at work like this, all I have to say in response is “good luck with that”. You need a soul to make something like this.

Explaining exactly how the game achieves this would require a deeper dive than I want to take right now. For the moment, it’s enough to say that Legend in the Mist is less concerned with heroic spectacle and more interested in the personal legend of ordinary people, from quiet places, who step into the unknown carrying little more than their resolve.

This is, in itself, kind of an old school philosophy or approach, but while Legend in the Mist has an old school premise from a story/narrative perspective, aka, ordinary people in extraordinary situations, mechanically the game itself is very modern with a lot of modern sensibilities about “how” the story lives in the game.

That’s mouthful and a long run-on sentence, I know, but I think it will make more sense once we dive in a little deeper.

To help paint that picture, there are three core aspects of the game that are worth highlighting.

The Writing & The Art

Role-playing games have a long history of treating their books like instruction manuals. Clean. Functional. Sometimes almost clinical. The writing does its job, the rules are clearly labeled, and inspiration, if it arrives at all, is left to seep in between the margins. I guess my point is that most RPG books these days tell you how to play, but rarely bother to tell you what the game is meant to feel like once the dice hit the table. Modern games like Daggerheart and now very clearly Legend in The Mist are trying to change that, and they are doing so very successfully in my opinion.

This book is not a reference manual for how to play the game, it’s art from front to back. Even when explaining game concepts and rules, it makes it a form of artistic expression.

That clinical approach of creating reference manuals works, don’t get me wrong. But it’s never been the only way; there was a time not so long ago when RPG makers were as much writers as they were game designers. Legend in the Mist I think is bringing us back to that style of RPG design and writing.

It’s time to go off on a tangent, it’s story time!

Back in the 1990s, a small publisher called White Wolf took a very different path to book writing from what most were doing at the time, when RPGs were still very much more G than RP. Through the World of Darkness, they treated RPG books not as sterile rule references, but as artistic expressions, guided tours through mood, theme, and identity. Those books didn’t just explain a setting; they immersed you in it. They whispered tone through poetry, bled atmosphere through layout and art, and made it unmistakably clear what kind of stories they wanted you to tell. For many players, they weren’t just rulebooks; they were formative experiences, myself included. In fact, I was very lucky in my formative years to actually grow up with one of the original writers from the early era of White Wolf, so I like to think that, at the very least, I understand the desire and passion of that work, having heard about it growing up from the horse’s mouth.

Reading the opening pages of Legend in the Mist, I was immediately taken back to that era of RPG’s. To those many conversations about the books, about role-playing, and about what storytelling actually means in that context.

There is a deliberate artistic hand at work here. The writing flows with confidence and intention, guiding you gently but firmly into the world the game inhabits. It doesn’t rush to explain itself. Instead, it establishes presence first, inviting you to slow down, to listen, to feel the rhythm of the setting before asking you to engage with its mechanics. You come away with a clear understanding of what this game wants to be at your table, long before you’ve memorized a single rule.

Just because the game book is an artistic expression, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t do a good job of teaching you what the game is, how the engine works. Quite to the contrary, the opening chapters hold your hand through the core game with great examples, all tied into a story format that you effectively follow along as you learn. It’s a fantastic approach.

The effect is quietly captivating. There’s a sense of nostalgia for a game you’ve never played before, a familiarity that doesn’t come from imitation, but from shared philosophy. It builds on the feeling we inspire to have at the table in our imagined games. It was only after sitting with that feeling for a while that the connection clicked for me: this is storytelling-first design in the old, confident sense. Not apologetic. Not minimalist. Purposeful. The game itself is a story.

What Legend in the Mist does particularly well is blend teaching with tone. As the book introduces you to its setting and themes, it also begins to reveal the engine beneath the hood, the way its mechanics serve the story rather than compete with it. You’re learning how the game works almost by accident, absorbed through example and narrative momentum rather than rigid instruction. It’s a technique that feels rare today, which is odd because it’s remarkably effective.

That approach is perfectly matched by the game’s artwork. The illustrations don’t scream for attention; they invite it. They reinforce the rustic fantasy mood, grounding the game in misty hills, quiet villages, and half-forgotten paths with an almost comic book, dare I say, Saturday morning cartoon feel to it. Together, the writing and art don’t just support the rules, they carry them, ensuring that from the very first page, Legend in the Mist knows exactly who it is and what kind of stories it wants you to tell.

This game doesn’t need a sales pitch; just hand someone the book and let them read the first 5 pages. If it doesn’t grab them by then, you might want to check your pulse; you might already be dead.

Themes and Tags

At the core of any role-playing game, Legend in the Mist very much included, is the character. Not just what they can do, but who they are: how they behave, what they believe, and why they act the way they do. These are the fundamentals of a good backstory. Yet in many RPGs, those elements live mostly outside the mechanics, serving as loose guidance rather than something the game actively engages with. In fact, most RPG’s traditionally define “who your character is”, outside of the game entirely, and the game itself is responsible for explaining “what you can do”.

For example, a class of a character to some extent says something about who your character is in an abstract way, A Cleric, a Fighter etc.. but mostly the point of the class is to tell you what powers you have. Yet, oddly enough, that class as a concept ends up infiltrating on a bit of your creative power over your character’s backstory creation because now you have to incorporate that class somehow into the “who you are” part of your character.

Legend in the Mist takes a very different approach. No classes, no pigeon holding, just pure freedom.

Instead of stats and classes, character creation begins with four themes. Each theme represents a defining aspect of your hero, such as their personality, training, background, or devotion. Within each theme are several “Power” tags, short descriptive phrases that give that aspect texture and meaning. These tags might be broad and human, like “a good listener,” or deeply specific, such as a family heirloom weapon passed down from a sibling. Every theme also includes a weakness tag: a flaw, doubt, or vulnerability that can complicate your hero’s journey.

Together, these themes and tags form a living portrait of the character. They tell you who this person is, how they tend to act, and what matters to them, not in abstract terms, but in language that naturally invites story. Personality, training, and motivation aren’t just written down for flavor; they’re embedded directly into how the game is played.

The layout of a character sheet in Legend in the Mist is very different from what you might be used to in a typical RPG. You don’t have stats or a class. Everything is built around the abstract, narrative concept of themes and tags.

And that’s only the foundation.

Beyond your core themes, characters in Legend in the Mist constantly pick up story tags, temporary descriptors born from events, choices, and consequences in play. These can be positive or negative, representing things like injuries, emotional states, allies, favors owed, fleeting advantages, or dangerous complications. Alongside these are statuses, which measure the intensity of conditions affecting your character. Together, they reflect how the story is actively changing you.

What’s striking is that nearly everything in the game flows through this same language of tags. They are the connective tissue between narrative and mechanics: small pieces of story that can be leveraged for advantage, turned against you as complications, or evolve over time. The game doesn’t ask you to step outside the fiction to resolve actions; the fiction is the system.

We’ll get into the mechanical details of how tags are invoked, spent, and transformed in the full review. For now, it’s enough to say this: if a game wants to be truly story-first, and Legend in the Mist absolutely is, while still remaining a game with structure and consequence, it needs a bridge between those two goals. Themes and tags are that bridge.

They are the fuel that drives play forward. The cues players use to justify bold actions, accept meaningful consequences, and understand why the story unfolds the way it does. In Legend in the Mist, story isn’t something that happens around the rules, it’s what the rules are built from.

It’s this aspect of Legend in the Mist that defines the experience and, in a sense, is “how” the game is about the story defined in very clear and uncertain terms.

The Construction of Story

Legend in the Mist spends a surprising amount of time explaining how stories work as a principle. On the surface, that might feel unnecessary; after all, this is a role-playing game. Why pause to teach storytelling? I would argue personally that any role-playing game should assume its reader has never played a role-playing game before, but generally, I think the act of storytelling is typically built into the “how to play this game” of the book. As a story is such a fundamental part of Legend in the Mist mechanic, knowing how to play the game and how to write a good story is practically the same thing.

The answer lies in how deeply this game commits to the idea of story-first play.

In many traditional RPGs, the story is emergent. Take Dungeons & Dragons as a familiar example. You don’t need much narrative structure to begin: “We’re adventurers seeking treasure and glory, there’s a dungeon over there, let’s go”. What the story becomes is largely the result of mechanical interaction, combat rolls, spell effects, saving throws, and unexpected outcomes stacking on top of one another. The narrative grows organically from what happens at the table.

Legend in the Mist works in the opposite direction.

Here, the mechanics don’t generate story on their own. Instead, they respond to it. Without a tale taking shape, without tension, stakes, and meaningful choices, the system has very little to push against. The rules are designed to bloom only when fed drama. In that sense, story isn’t a byproduct of play; it’s the soil everything grows from.

Because of that, explaining how to construct a story isn’t optional; it’s essential. There is no hidden narrative engine quietly assembling plot from dice rolls. If you want the mechanics to engage, you must give them something to engage with. That means structure. It means buildup. It means understanding how scenes, conflict, and consequence fit together.

Good storywriting doesn’t have to be complex; in fact, Legend in the Mist kind of pushes you to write simple, more straightforward stories as a guiding principle, as the game is not so much about plot as it is about character story development. Tremendous effort is taken in the book to explain the processes of creating and narrating a story in the game.

This isn’t a flaw. It’s a deliberate design choice.

To support it, Legend in the Mist breaks storytelling down in a clear, almost academic way, more reminiscent of a high school theatre or creative writing class than a traditional RPG manual. The book walks you through narrative fundamentals: narrator exposition, quests, conflicts, scenes, and how these elements connect into a rhythm of play. Each “round” of the story introduces challenges, discoveries, twists, consequences, and resolution, all framed to ensure that player choices genuinely matter.

The goal isn’t complexity, it’s clarity, but that clarity requires a clean process, and it’s exactly what you get from the book.

By formalizing story structure, the game ensures that adventures remain dynamic and responsive. Choices aren’t just flavor; they alter the direction of the tale, reshape characters, and leave marks that don’t easily fade (in the form of story tags). The result is an evolving narrative built around player decisions, rather than a prewritten plot the players merely pass through with real consequences to the character sheet and future resolutions, motivations, and so on.

In effect, Legend in the Mist functions as a strong tutorial in how to tell stories within an RPG framework. While the techniques are presented through the lens of this specific system, many of the lessons are broadly applicable to any game that thrives on narrative play.

Veteran players may find parts of this approach almost rudimentary, and that’s very much the point. Legend in the Mist isn’t interested in sprawling epics that require flowcharts, encyclopedic NPC lists, or intricate political webs. It aims instead for clear, direct tales: journeys with emotional weight, hard choices, and consequences that can later be retold as legend.

Simple system. Simple stories.

That simplicity isn’t a limitation; it’s the design goal. Legend in the Mist is built to tell stories that are easy to grasp, easy to play, and easy to remember. Stories shaped at the table, carried away afterward, and shared like folklore. And if the game does what it sets out to do, those stories won’t just be adventures; you’ll remember them as legends.

Conclusion

Is there more to Legend in the Mist than what I’ve covered here? Oh yes, far more. This is a substantial book, clocking in at nearly 500 pages, and at first glance that might seem at odds with the relatively simple, almost understated way the game presents itself. How can something so focused and restrained take up that much space?

The answer circles back to where this article began.

While Legend in the Mist is unquestionably a story-first system, designed from the ground up to support narrative play, it is still very much an engine. A robust one. This is not a loose pass/fail framework that gestures vaguely at story and leaves everything else to player improvisation. It is a fully realized role-playing game with a carefully constructed mechanical core, one that actively facilitates storytelling through structure, consequence, and momentum. That kind of design requires rules. A lot of them. Just not the kind most players and GM’s expect out of your typical RPG.

In many RPGs, the bulk of the rules are dedicated to tactical combat, exhaustive equipment lists, spell catalogs, and scenario-driven problem-solving. By contrast, Legend in the Mist devotes much of its page count to teaching you how to plan, design, and execute stories, and then providing a system that supports that process end to end. Large portions of the book are effectively a guide for players and Narrators alike, explaining how this style of play works, why it works, and how to make it sing at the table. To truly unpack everything the game offers would require a far deeper dive than this preview allows.

Suffice it to say, the system is not “simple” in the way light RPG’s are that mean to be story-focused by getting the rules out of your way, quite to the contrary in a way, Legend in the Mist is a heavy rule system that is focused on supporting storytelling. That said, it doesn’t mean the game is hard to learn or requires a lot of memorization; that is not the case either, but you will have to study the game’s purpose and learn its intention to get the most out of it.

What I’ve outlined here barely scratches the surface, but I hope it serves its purpose: either sparking your interest, or making it very clear that this isn’t the game you’re looking for.

Which raises an important question: who is Legend in the Mist for? It’s tempting to say “everyone,” and I’m sure the creators would welcome that answer. But I think the truth is a bit more specific.

If you’re an RPG aficionado, someone who enjoys exploring the breadth of what this hobby can be, Legend in the Mist feels like a must-try entry. It taps into a lineage of narrative-focused design that’s confident, intentional, and refreshingly unapologetic. In that sense, yes, it’s for everyone who loves RPGs as a medium, not just as a game, and wants to explore something new and fresh.

More practically, though, if I were to sum it up, this is a game for the theatre kids.

If your enjoyment of role-playing games comes primarily from tactical combat, mechanical optimization, and strategic mastery, if the “game” part of RPGs is where you find your fun, this likely isn’t your system. The goal of Legend in the Mist is not to present challenging tactical puzzles, but to leave the table having told a meaningful story.

If you love games like Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, or Draw Steel, games where tactical depth and mechanical systems are a core part of the appeal, you may feel like entire subsystems are simply missing here. That’s not a value judgment. It’s a recognition that Legend in the Mist commits to the story in such an all-encompassing way that it leaves little room for switching between “game mode” and “story mode.”

This game is almost entirely story mode.

For me, that commitment is what makes Legend in the Mist such an exciting discovery. I’m genuinely curious to see how it lands with my own group, who already gravitate toward narrative-heavy play and strong story-driven rulesets. I have a feeling this is a game that will thrive at our table, and one we’ll be talking about long after the dice stop rolling.

And really, that feels like the highest compliment a game built on legend can receive.

Overview

Components

Theme

Gameplay

Replayability and Longevity

Conclusion

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Understanding the Underlying Principle of Miniature Game Assumption

Example of Gamification

Is Gamification Bad?

Why I Think Simulation Is Better

The Balance Problem

The “Feel Bad” Problem

The Immersion Problem

From Intrigue to Exhaustion

Long-Term Success vs. Flash In The Pan

Battletech

Star Wars: X-Wing

Warhammer 40k & Age of Sigmar

Conclusion

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Overview – 10th Edition & Miniature Gaming

1. Strategems and Command Points

2. Simpler but More Impactful Terrain Rules

3. Eliminate Dice Re-Rolls

4. Data Slates – Rules Updates & Faction Books

5. Crusade Rules Should Use Legacy Architecture

6. Bring Back Organizational Charts/Requirements

7. Make Internal Balance The Priority

8. Improved Mission Design

Better Vehicle and Aircraft Rules

Faster Gameplay

Conclusion

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Gender Politics and Woke Agenda

My Theory

What 6th Edition Should Look Like

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Overview

The Writing & The Art

Themes and Tags

The Construction of Story

Conclusion

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Dedicated To All Things Gaming