It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Great Western Trail. It sits comfortably at number 10 on my all-time list, and it has held that spot ever since I first discovered it many moons ago.
Since the release of the second edition, two new entries have arrived. Until now, I had not managed to get either to the table. Great Western Trail: Argentina still manages to avoid me, but I finally got to try Great Western Trail: New Zealand.
And honestly, I was not prepared for how much I would enjoy it.
After just one play, I am already tempted to say something slightly controversial. This might actually be better than the original.
Great Western Trail 2nd edition did a fantastic job of tightening up the rules and creating a great, balanced experience. The game, however, does have quite a few static elements, which, if you play often enough, you will begin to see certain patterns emerge. It’s not a problem per say but I think for fans looking for something more robust, the other two Great Western Trail games (Argentina and New Zealand) are going to be great options to get some variety using the same system.
All the magic is still there. The familiar rhythm, the satisfying engine building, the constant push and pull of optimizing your route. But what New Zealand does is loosen the puzzle just enough to let the game breathe. It feels less like solving something fixed and more like navigating something alive.
Take the buildings, for example. At first glance, everything looks familiar. But then, halfway through the game, four of the neutral buildings flip. Suddenly, the board shifts under your feet. Plans that felt solid now need a second look. Routes that seemed optimal might not be anymore.
The new neutral buildings cover the same core game effects as before: buy more sheep, hire workers, build new buildings, but there are a few buildings that have two sides that switch on you mid-game and that is going to create a bit of chaos for people who are accustomed to the static state of buildings in the original game.
It is a small twist, but it has a big effect. The game nudges you out of autopilot and asks you to adapt. I love that.
Then there is the biggest change of all. The train is gone.
In its place, boats take over, and with them comes a much more flexible system. Instead of a straight line forward, you now have branching routes. You can move back and forth. You can pivot. You can chase opportunities instead of just advancing.
Progress is still important, but now it is a choice rather than a track you march along. It adds just enough freedom to make every decision feel more intentional.
And then there is shearing.
The shearing value on the sheep cards creates reason to hold on to duplicate cards you might have otherwise simply disregarded. Having sufficient sheep herders and several white sheep cards, for example, can yield a considerable payout. Being able to earn a considerable amount of coin mid-route is an effect that was usually quite impossible in the original game.
Since this is New Zealand, cows are out, and sheep are in. With that comes a new way to earn money during your turn. Hire shepherds, shear your sheep, and watch the gold roll in.
But it is more than just an extra income stream. It opens up an entirely new strategy. You can cycle your deck faster, trigger more effects, and lean into a style of play that feels very different from the traditional cattle focus.
There are also new layers built around this. Bonus cards that replace themselves. Tracks to advance on. Tiles that reward clever timing. None of these overwhelm the game, but together they create a web of possibilities that did not exist before.
These bonus cards can be added to your deck through different effects. Note that each one gives you a benefit, but then immediately replaces itself, so you don’t have to stress about having too many of these. Quite to the contrary, the more the better.
It all adds up to something that feels richer, busier, and more ambitious.
That said, this is not the version I would hand to a first time player. There is a lot going on here. If the original game is a deep strategy experience, this one feels like the advanced course. Familiarity helps a lot.
But if you already enjoy Great Western Trail, this is a fantastic evolution.
I have only played it once, so I am not ready to deliver a final verdict. But first impressions matter, and this one made a strong case.
Call me impressed. I am already looking forward to getting it back to the table.
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.
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.
A small but vicious little kit landed in my bucket this week: a Shadowdark RPG adventure headed for Kickstarter in the near future called Demidirge: Fanged Funnel.
At first, I hesitated to do a preview. Normally, if I’m going to write about an adventure, I want to run it first, spill some blood, break a few characters, listen to players argue about marching order. But then I remembered: I’ve been a DM for so long that I can smell a good dungeon from a cold read. Also, this is a preview, not a review, so nobody needs to clutch their pearls. I think I’m on solid ground here.
What really hooked me wasn’t the premise, the stats, or even the promise of grisly player death (though those are all respectable selling points). It was the art.
Classic black and white ink art has an uncanny charm and ability to inspire, love it.
Now, I’m no art connoisseur, but I read a lot of adventures and RPG material, mostly scavenging for ideas to steal for my own tables. And these days? A lot of RPG art blurs together. It’s competent. It’s polished. It also often looks suspiciously like it was generated by a machine that’s never rolled a saving throw in its life.
Demidirge, however, is something else entirely.
This is unmistakably original, hand-drawn ink art in that grimy, old-school style, raw, evocative, and absolutely smashing. It’s the kind of art that doesn’t just decorate the page; it dares you to run the adventure. And honestly, this is one of the things the OSR does right. There’s a genuine love of illustration here, a reverence for the weird, the nightmarish, and the slightly unhinged, something that’s increasingly rare in the broader modern RPG space (and yes, I say that as someone perfectly comfortable using AI art myself).
The art in Demidirge is the sort of stuff that crawls into your brain and starts whispering encounter ideas. It’s moody. It’s grotesque. It’s inspiring. Old-school gamers are going to eat this up.
And here’s the thing: great art makes you want to read the adventure. That’s exactly how this module got its hooks into me. You’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but when you see this cover, you’re absolutely going to crack it open and see what horrors are waiting inside.
The Adventure
There are three things you need to know about this adventure, but fair warning, as always: if you’re a player, stop reading now. Seriously. This is a funnel. Knowledge is a liability. Spoilers ahead.
First, this adventure is written for Shadowdark, the current darling of the OSR scene. That said, like most good old-school modules, the bones are system-agnostic. You could run this with just about any OSR ruleset without breaking a sweat. That said, Demidirge is very deliberately tuned for Shadowdark and even includes a bespoke zero-level character creation framework designed specifically for this nightmare. You’re not playing “peasants who happen to be here”, you’re playing tunnelers, and that distinction matters mechanically and thematically.
Shadowdarks success as an RPG is uncanny; it’s spoken about in circles that stretch well beyond the OSR, at this point its practically mainstream. One day soon, I predict the OSR is going to give Wizards of the Coast a run for their money. It’s growing by leaps and bounds.
Which leads neatly into the second thing: this is a funnel, and it wears that badge proudly.
If you’re not familiar with funnels, here’s the short version: instead of lovingly crafting a single hero, each player controls a small crowd of level 0 nobodies. These unfortunate souls are fed into a lethal gauntlet with the full expectation that most of them will die screaming, dissolving, or being recycled into something worse. The lucky few who survive crawl out the other side as first-level adventurers, scarred, changed, and usually carrying some deeply troubling memories.
I’ve always loved funnels (Dungeon Crawl Classics remains my personal poison of choice), because they’re one of the best onboarding tools tabletop RPGs have ever produced. Minimal rules. Immediate stakes. Constant laughs punctuated by sudden, shocking death. They’re perfect for non-gamers, party games, or just reminding veteran players that life is cheap and heroism is earned. Demidirge understands this completely and leans into it hard.
Now for the third element, the one that really elevates this adventure from “cool funnel” to “oh hell yes, I need to run this.”
The entire funnel takes place inside a shared nightmare.
One of the sort of quirks of classic funnels is that you have very little to work with; you are not going to find the answer on your character sheet. Survival requires clever players. Still, the players are given some tools in this adventure that may very well prove useful.
The characters believe they are workers in a vast subterranean mining complex known as the Malic Mindshaft, a living, bureaucratic hellscape of quotas, rival labor crews, holy management cults, and acid-filled tunnels. In reality, they are prisoners trapped inside the mind of an inhuman entity called The Hermit Queen. Their physical bodies hang elsewhere in the real world, sealed inside organic coffins, while their consciousnesses are forced to dig ever deeper toward something called the Sunless Horizon. The queen’s nest of sorts from which she is attempting to escape, and the players are inadvertently helping her to do so by digging her out.
Their real objective, though they won’t realize it at first, is to notice that something is wrong. To pick up on anomalies. To question the reality of the tunnels. To recognize that the rules of the world don’t behave quite right. Only by collectively triggering enough psychic “cracks” in the illusion can they awaken… at which point the nightmare ends in spectacular fashion and the survivors emerge into the real world as first-level characters.
This setup is brilliant for two reasons.
First, it gives the GM enormous freedom. This is a dream. A hostile one. Reality can glitch, contradict itself, loop, or outright lie. NPCs can behave inconsistently. Dead crews can reappear. Shadows can move wrong. You are encouraged to mess with player expectations, and the module provides a long list of concrete tools, events, rival crews, nightmare phenomena, and outright body horror, to do exactly that.
Second, and this is the real GM gold, Demidirge is setting-agnostic by design. Because the adventure ends with the characters waking up somewhere in the real world, it can slot cleanly into any campaign setting. You don’t need lore buy-in. You don’t need a starting town. You don’t even need to explain where the characters are from. They wake up, alive, confused, and hunted, and now your campaign begins.
For me personally, that makes this an ideal opening adventure. I’ve been planning to kick off a Dolmenwood campaign and have been wrestling with how to start it in a way that feels strange, unsettling, and memorable. Demidirge: Fanged Funnel solves that problem completely. Drop the players into the nightmare, let them claw their way out, and then unleash them into the woods with no safety net and a head full of questions.
That’s a hell of a session one.
Conclusion
I’ve been intentionally vague about the finer details of this adventure, and that’s very much by design. The two questions people usually want answered are “What is this adventure about?” and “How do I actually use this in my game?” I hope I’ve given enough context to answer both, without robbing anyone of the joy (or horror) of reading it for themselves. And yes, that includes DMs. This is very much an adventure best experienced fresh.
What Demidirge: Fanged Funnel offers is that classic OSR, “trust the referee” style of adventure design. You’re given strong impressions, clear themes, and a well-organized structure, tables, factions, events, and evocative bite-sized descriptions, rather than pages of boxed text and rigid scripting. The module assumes you know how to run a game, and more importantly, that you want to. It’s fast to read, easy to internalize, and leaves the real magic where it belongs: at the table.
That’s one of the OSR’s greatest strengths. Instead of overwhelming you with lore dumps and hyper-specific contingencies that immediately fall apart once the first sword is drawn, this adventure gives you the tools and trusts your instincts. Once play begins, the dungeon breathes, reacts, and mutates based on player choices rather than a prewritten flowchart.
There are key elements that matter, of course. The slow discovery that the characters are trapped inside a nightmare is central to the experience, as are the unsettling monsters and factions that inhabit it. The adventure is carefully seeded with obstacles that double as clues: rival tunnel crews, bureaucratic cruelty, ritualized labor, and nightmarish events that don’t quite add up. Everything subtly pushes the players to dig deeper, literally and figuratively, while quietly hinting that something is very, very wrong.
Mystery is notoriously difficult to pull off in tabletop RPGs. Players are clever, suspicious, and prone to setting things on fire just to see what happens. But here, I think the author genuinely succeeds. The truth is neither obvious nor handed to the players, and I fully expect many groups won’t survive long enough to unravel it at all. This is a funnel, after all. Death is cheap. Insight is not.
Players will need to bring their A-game, and probably a few spare character sheets, if they want to make it to the other side.
In short: this is a great story, thoughtfully constructed, beautifully illustrated, and deeply engaging. It’s weird, cruel, and imaginative in all the right old-school ways. If you’re looking for a funnel that does more than just kill characters, one that leaves survivors changed, this is absolutely worth picking up.
UPDATE: A New Manual for Syncanite Foundation can be found here.
This afternoon, my mailbox delivered a rather pleasant surprise: a review copy of Syncanite Foundation. A new boardgame of cutthroat political conspiracy that was kick-started last year.
Now, to be clear, the surprise wasn’t that the game arrived. I was fully aware it was on its way, having worked with the marketing team handling review copies. The real surprise hit the moment I laid eyes on the box. Before a single component was revealed, Syncanite Foundation was already speaking my language and making a strong first impression with its awesome sci-fi fantasy vibe.
I’m a relatively small-time reviewer, with only occasional appearances in some real journalism, thanks largely to a few connections I have to the game industry by sheer accident. The result of that in the last 10 years has been a loyal audience and a steady group of regular readers, but most publishers I work with that send me review copies tend to be fairly niche affairs. Interesting, often clever, but clearly operating within a smaller production scope. This, however, felt a bit different even though Syncanite Games is indeed a very indie operation. The box alone radiated confidence: polished, striking, and unmistakably professional. This didn’t just feel like a passion project punching above its weight; it was more like a heavyweight newcomer stepping into the ring for the first time. A new kid on the block, sure, but in the immortal words of Micky Goldmil, “You ain’t no bum, you ain’t no chump.”
As I cracked open the box, it became immediately clear that this was a game made with serious intent. There’s a level of care, cohesion, and sheer love in the presentation that demands to be met halfway. This wasn’t something I could casually glance over. If the game was going to put in this much effort, the least I could do was put on my reviewer hat properly and reciprocate.
So, with expectations officially raised and curiosity fully engaged, let’s get into it. This is going to be a two-part article review. First, we will do a sort of first impressions and unboxing, where I will simply look, read, and explore the game, that’s today. The second article will be a full review I will put together after a few play sessions with my local gaming group.
Overview
Cracking open the box, I did what I almost always do first: I reached for the rulebook. Not out of habit alone, but because I genuinely had no idea what Syncanite Foundation actually was. This isn’t a game riding on the coattails of a well-known franchise, yet from the moment you lift the lid, it’s obvious that this thing wants to be more than just cardboard and plastic. There is magic here. My instincts, as it turns out, were right on the money.
Pretty is an understatement; Syncanite Foundation laid out on the table is art.
The artwork immediately suggests a strange crossroads between science fiction and fantasy. At first glance, I caught faint echoes of Final Fantasy in the aesthetic, ornate, confident, and unapologetically dramatic. That impression lasted about five minutes. Once you start reading, it becomes very clear that this isn’t borrowing a skin from somewhere else. Whatever this is, it’s very much its own beast, an original work perhaps inspired by but not photocopied from other sources.
The introduction reads less like a rulebook and more like the opening chapter of a novel. The prose flows, sets a tone, and gently reminds you that you’re stepping into a fully realized world rather than learning how to push cubes around a board. It’s here that the curtain lifts: Syncanite Foundation is set in The World of Arkanite, a setting originally created as a novel and now being expanded into something far more ambitious, all by the confident hand of a designer with a plan. From the looks of it, this isn’t just a board game release; it’s a deliberate attempt to build a larger media universe. With a polished website, extensive lore, and clear narrative intent, this feels like a foundation stone rather than a one-off project. A respectful nod to the designer here: this is how you do worldbuilding.
One of my favorite things that publishers do is to create lore for a board game and give it proper treatment. Twilight Imperium’s Guide To The Imperium is a fantastic example.
I’ll admit, I’m an easy mark for games with a strong narrative backbone. I want my mechanics supported by meaning, my components backed by context. Syncanite Foundation wastes no time delivering exactly that. When I sit down to teach this game, we will be starting with story time, and that is going to resonate with my gaming crew, who are all avid role-players.
So what is this world about?
Without claiming deep knowledge just yet, it’s hard not to see familiar inspirations bubbling beneath the surface. There’s more than a hint of Dune in the way power revolves around a single, world-shaping resource. Touches of Game of Thrones appear in the ruthless political maneuvering, while the shadowy, authoritarian edge made me briefly wonder if a bit of Judge Dredd snuck in through the back door. At its core, this is a game about oligarchs, powerful figures who never sit on thrones, but who quietly decide who does. They pull strings, shape conflicts, and bend the world to their will… all while competing with each other for supremacy.
That competition centers around Syncanite itself: a miraculous, dangerous crystal that fuels industry, progress, and influence. Like the spice of Dune, Syncanite is less about what it is and more about what it represents. Control it, and you control the future. But, and this is important, it’s not the endgame. It’s simply the spark that lights the powder keg.
A steam entry for Syncanite Foundation can be found for a digital version of the game in the works, which speaks to the ambitions of its designers.
All of this lays the groundwork for what feels like a genuinely strong narrative-driven strategy game. Interestingly, while it shares no real mechanical DNA with Twilight Imperium, it gave me a similar vibe. Not in scope, mechanics or length, but in philosophy. War doesn’t seem to be the point here. Conflict is a tool, not a goal. The real game is intention: reading the table, manipulating perceptions, making promises you don’t intend to keep, and choosing the exact right moment to make your final move. This is supported by the core win objectives in the game, there are no victory points or progression-based conditions, it’s a winner-takes-all game, and anyone can win at any time by meeting one of the game’s politically fueled objectives.
Victory conditions are tied to one of five events that trigger under certain board game states. These events alter the rules of the game and can exist simultaneously. This speaks to the potential dynamics of the game and player impact. I love the concept.
Even from a first read-through of the rules, it’s obvious that Syncanite Foundation is going to live and die by table talk. Accusations, alliances, bluffs, quiet deals, and that inevitable moment where someone leans back and says, “Fine. Let’s do this.” All promises between the nuance of rules and the intended playstyle of the game.
All told, this feels like exceptionally solid footing for something special. Expectations are set, curiosity is high, and I am more than ready to get this one to the table.
The Components
Board gaming in the 21st century, especially anything with a Kickstarter pedigree, immediately triggers a small internal alarm for me. Years of experience have conditioned me to be cautious. I’ll say this plainly: I would rather play an ugly-as-sin cube pusher with brilliant design than an overproduced, miniature-stuffed spectacle that mistakes excess for depth. I’m a gamer first. Eye candy is a very distant second.
That said… reality has a way of complicating principles.
If you glance at my collection, you’ll find more than a few games that are undeniably gorgeous. Because the truth is, I don’t want to choose. I want both. I want a sharp design and visual presence. And if I’m being completely honest, even excellent games that are hard on the eyes tend to get passed over when it’s time to decide what hits the table. A game can be good, but if it looks like homework, it’s fighting an uphill battle.
All of which brings us to Syncanite Foundation, a game that wastes absolutely no time announcing itself as a looker.
Whoever oversaw the art direction, component choices, and final production had a clear, confident vision, and more importantly, an understanding of what modern board gamers expect visually. Every decision here feels deliberate. One can only hope (and I genuinely do) that this level of care extends just as deeply into the gameplay.
Because make no mistake: this is a stunning production. Not “nice.” Not “solid.” Stunning. This game is, quite frankly, a work of art.
Component quality is excellent across the board. Cards, tokens, and the main board all feel premium and durable, clearly built to survive repeated plays rather than a single unboxing glow. That said, this level of quality is increasingly the baseline expectation these days. Cutting corners on materials is no longer acceptable, so I’d frame this less as exceeding expectations and more as confidently meeting them.
One thing I always look for in any board game is the ability to assess the game state with a quick glance. The way markets are handled with cubes and a little tray makes looking up prices of goods quick and easy. Simple and straight to the point.
Where Syncanite Foundation truly flexes is in its artistic ambition.
The main board features richly detailed, geographically inspired digital artwork that is nothing short of gorgeous. Despite the visual density, clarity never suffers. Lines are crisp, iconography is readable, and information is presented cleanly, exactly what you want in a game that expects players to stare at the board for hours.
The tokens follow suit. Each is visually distinct, satisfyingly weighty, and just tactile enough to invite idle fiddling. They come surprisingly close to that coveted “poker chip” feel, the universal gold standard of board game tactility.
But the real showstopper here is the cards.
The artwork, line work, and layout are lavish to the point of indulgence. These aren’t just functional components; they’re miniature paintings. Each card feels like it deserves a pause, a moment to be appreciated before being put to work.
The cards are beautiful, there is no doubt, but the black cards with glossy, foil text make reading them very painful. Fortunatetly only select cards are done in this foil style, but as a whole, the legibility of cards is a pain. Its a real shame.
One problem this game will always have is that even with glasses, I struggle to comfortably read the cards, a terrible sin and flaw that undoes some of that extraordinary artistic effort. The choice of white text on a black background, while undeniably stylish and maybe even thematically appropriate, is a nightmare. Add to it that some cards are black with gold foil writing, and you’re quite literally pulling out a magnifying glass to read some of the cards. It’s a bit of a tragedy.
The Rules & Rulebook
The original rulebook that came with the game was a bit of a mess, but an updated rulebook was released (v 3.2) as of this writing that attempts to address the issues of the original.
As it stands, the rulebook included in the box does not actually teach you how to play Syncanite Foundation. Nor does it provide functional setup instructions. What it does offer is a high-level overview of the game’s ideas and intentions, almost as if it assumes the existence of a second, missing document that handles the practical business of actually getting the game to the table.
That overview, despite lacking instruction, is genuinely well written, the manual laid out well, and worth a read as a preview to the digital document available online (here).
A manual with a nice presentation that sets the tone, gives a good overview of a game, and sets the stage for an exciting tabletop experience is absolutely critical to the success of a game, in my opinion. I see it as something extra that should come in addition to a rules reference. Some companies have normalized this, and I would love to see more of it.
It’s evocative, inspiring, and a pleasure to read. It successfully communicates tone, ambition, and theme, and it left me excited to play. Unfortunately, when you reach the final page, that excitement gives way to confusion. You’re left wondering if a rules reference accidentally fell out of the box. As a teaching document, it’s simply insufficient. You cannot set up or play the game using this book alone. Fortunatetly the, the updated digital rulebook is the answer; it brings the game into alignment with the ambitions laid out in the one that comes in the box and gives you the needed instructions.
At its core, Syncanite Foundation appears to operate across a series of structured phases where players claim territory, gather resources, and leverage those resources to advance long-term agendas tied to distinct victory conditions. Much of this is done by manipulating the board state through influence cards and effects.
Where the game truly seems to come alive, however, is in its free-form political layer.
Negotiation, table talk, and outright manipulation aren’t just encouraged, they’re assumed. Influence cards can be played at almost any time, regardless of turn order. You can interrupt, retaliate, or derail plans mid-conversation. There’s something delightfully unhinged about the idea that someone can cut you off mid-sentence with a card that completely alters the situation. Conceptually, I love this. It carries a strong role-playing energy and leans hard into player-driven narrative.
You can see that clarity of writing is not Syncanites Foundations strength. Even in the game material like the Cycle Chronicle Guide, English and German are commonly mixed up, with elements not translated properly. In reality, this is not a big deal, but it illustrates a rush to release, rather than to perfect.
It also firmly places the game in what I’d call the “mean” category.
This is not a gentle experience. If the rules deliver on their promise, Syncanite Foundation will sit comfortably alongside games like Diplomacy or Game of Thrones: The Board Game, where betrayal isn’t a possibility; it’s a requirement. Ruthless play isn’t antisocial here; it’s the engine that drives the game.
For my group, that’s pure gold. We enjoy confrontational designs with sharp edges and “take that” mechanics, provided everyone at the table understands the social contract: this is a game, not a personality test. But years of gaming have also taught me that not every group can handle that style of play. If you tend to take setbacks personally, or if direct player aggression sours the mood, this game may very well bounce off you, though it’s far too early to make any final judgments. We will see how this pans out when I do the final review after a few play-throughs.
Mechanically, though, I’m deeply intrigued.
While comparisons are inevitable, Syncanite Foundation ultimately feels like a bit of a white elephant design, something unusual, ambitious, and difficult to neatly categorize. In that sense, it reminds me strongly of the work of Vlaada Chvátil, particularly titles like Through the Ages, Galaxy Trucker, and Mage Knight. Games that are unapologetically themselves, full of bold ideas, and largely incomparable to anything else on the shelf.
That kind of ambition is exactly what excites me as a gamer.
Conclusion
Syncanite Foundation is, without question, a visual feast. It presents a bold, confident concept and carries with it an enormous amount of potential. I genuinely want this game to succeed, and I’m eager to get it to the table. But art and enthusiasm alone doesn’t make a game playable or good. I can be a tough critic when it comes to gameplays, especially if you get my hopes up and make no mistakes, you’ve got me excited, Syncanite Foundation, the pressure is on!
An extraordinary amount of effort has clearly gone into the presentation, the worldbuilding, and the physical production. All admirable and original efforts worthy of praise and attention. Now it’s time for the real test, the mechanics and gameplay, to see if the game delivers on its promise.
With an updated rulebook freshly printed out, a game session scheduled and an excited crew already hyped up from my depiction of the game, it’s time to play some Syncanite Foundation!
UPDATE: A New Manual for Syncanite Foundation can be found here.
