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lena and I went over to Eli and Abby's place today, and Eli and I got to nerd out for a while over Warhammer 40,000. There's just something special about that setting that grabs me in a way that I normally think of as cringey in most franchises. I remembering learning about 40k for the first time in middle school, and knowing that it was something special. I think I got a couple of boxes of the Aeldar at the time -- I had a particular fascination with their elegant floating tank, I seem to remember.
So I've known about Warhammer for almost 20 years, I own more than 50 of the minis, and yet I don't think I've every actually played a real game of it...ever. Maybe as a child, I attempted a skirmish of the ruleset with my brother or a friend, but if so, the memory is lost to time. Of course, back then the rules were pretty different than they are now, but 40k has a justly-deserved reputation as kind of being a rules nightmare. I actually follow competitive 40k, to an extent, and apparently the rules are more streamlined now than they've ever been -- but if you want to play a full-size game of warhammer, be prepared to spend two and half to four hours playing out a grand total of five turns.
There are thirty-seven different armies in Warhammer 40k, each with their own rulebooks. Every army has dozens of units, each of which have their own options for builds. There are stratagems to memorize, five phases of play to navigate, your opponent's entire turn to just sit through -- it's an intimidating mess. I know I could handle the rules, I'm a rules-person, but my friends sure as shit aren't going to buckle down and learn the ins and outs of the Fight Phase. So the minis sit fallow.
Until I got fed up and wrote my own rules. And now I've played probably 10 games of playtesting of situations of various sizes over the past couple days. My fastidiously-painted space nuns are actually seeing use, and that feels amazing. I don't want to curse it (maybe they'll get boring quickly), but I've enjoyed the rules so much to date that I'm considering actually trying to get together a nice pdf of the thing and distribute it. I can do my own graphic design and illustration, and it wouldn't be very long. I know exactly who my target audience is. There are plenty of nerds who want their games to drag on and on, who want to be clearing the hurdles of baroque rules, but I know there are people who want a tight, elegant game that you can pick up easily, and still requires some thinking of you. Hopefully, I've got something, but if not, who cares -- it was just for me and my buds, anyway. I just like moving my little men around.