Warhammer 40k, and whats wrong with it.
So I've been around playing this game since 2nd edition.
Nowadays I hear alot of people complaining, people do play the game, but it is with less and less joy it seems.
The older players, many of whom have strongly defended the game through the ages are leaving the game.
And while these things are not new, with every new edition it is more or less the same, something is different in the air this.
Because the problems of this edition are not new, they existed in 6th edition as well. 7th is basically 6th edition with a new coat of paint.
So why are people complaining on 6th and 7th?
Here I will summarise the problems.
Special rules. The game has too many special rules, just about every unit has a special rule, and alot of them are uniqe, ie not detailed in the main rulebook.
Too much focus on emergence too little focus on battlefield manouvers.
The game is more of a game of Magic the Gathering, where stacking effects create new emergent powerful effects, making the game more about army composition than army manouver.
Too detailed rules.
In Flames of War, an infantrysquad is only two bases, with members of the squad split on them. The exact position of the members is not of interest, only the two large bases. If you split the squadmembers up on seperate bases you increase the detail of the game.
In wh40k, you have that, each member on a seperate base. In 6th and 7th it is important where each model is in relation to both the enemy and the rest of the squad. in 5th this wasnt as important, as casualties were not picked from the front, instead you allocated wounds depending on equipment.
Both of these are a drudgery compared to 3rd ed where the owning player simply allocated wounds to his own liking. More or less.
To this section should be added, imperial guard orders, chaos abilities gifts tables etc going off ingame. The new psychic powers and their own phase. Where in third only a few models had psychic powers and they might have only one, now you can drown(and bog down) the game with them.
Buildings rules, in 6th ed, the rules for buildings were slow, overly detailed, and noone read them. They were 6(!) pages long.
These things slow the game down, alot. Seeping the fun and joy out of it to just be a challenge of remembering how everything works.
There are probably more things problematic with the rules, few seem to complain about random chargelength anymore though.
If you have any gripes, write a comment below.
