It wasn’t rare years ago to pick up a game that you liked the look of,
take a glance at it, play it the once, and then decide you weren’t going to
play it again. The problem with a lot of
games that you see at conventions is that they’re being demonstrated by people
who know all the problems with them and know when to avoid certain parts of
them to make the game run smoother...
And therefore make you buy them...
So it was for me when I first encountered Battlefleet Gothic, I mean,
seriously, what’s not to like, huge great honking starships running around
without the need for hexes, more firepower than a dozen titan legions on even
the smallest ships, and all the different races of the universe out there to
shoot at each other.
What could possibly go wrong...?
Well, one or two things...
Battlefleet Gothic got the essence of what it covers very well, it’s
not a game that’s designed to simulate small combat, it’s a game to show the
sort of fights that go on between mile long capital ships, and while that’s
covered well, there’s one problem with capital ship combat...
It’s dull...
It’s not the bobbing and weaving individual dogfights like those seen
in the first star wars films, it’s the cumbersome moving of massive ships to
throw enormous amounts of firepower at each other, which requires a completely
different mindset to the one that I’ve got when it comes to space combat. For me the sitting of big ships at either end
of the board and throwing huge numbers of dice at each other is dull, there weren’t many special move or
attack options on the ships, it was whoever got the angle on the enemy first
for the most dice.
I know there’s some out there that would say that that’s no different
to a number of games out there, but when you’ve got limited options on moving
and tactics, the battle tends to go to the swift, and then there were the
expansions, which fell into the inevitable GW quandary of making everything
bigger and badder after the initial game.
The other problem was that to have an enjoyable game, you had to field a
good sized fleet or it was over before you ever really got started on the game,
because once a ship started to lose systems like propulsion or weapons, it
became a line of sight obstacle and very little else, so if you only had the
one ship, you suddenly had a very expensive target and nothing else.
And that’s where most of the people I played with had the problem, the
game we’d seen at the store was one where they’d been using a lot of the
smaller, faster ships, and it presented the game as a far faster playing game
of moving, firing, moving again and keeping the action going rather than
turning slightly and lighting up the sky with megatons of firepower...
This is not to say it’s a bad game, it’s just one that didn’t fit with
our particular game style and so while a few games were had, we didn’t really
get what we wanted out of it and so, like many things I’ve been looking at
recently, it needed to be dusted off before I took photos...
Still, be interesting to see how it works out against the new Star Wars
Armada game that’s coming out...
