As someone who has the privilege of being able to play a wide variety of miniature games, I have a wide variety of both hobby projects and game opportunities. So, I’ve been thinking about what criteria I use to evaluate what I spend time building and painting and what I want to play. A good problem to have, and maybe if you are looking to pick your first second game, my experience in the area can be helpful.

Community – Is Someone Local Jonesing for It?

This is the first criteria. I have the blessing of a local group that loves obscure games and will regularly play them. If someone is jonesing for something and the game doesn’t spark repulsion in one of the other categories, I will usually be willing to get a demo and see if I like the game or the world enough to get minis. This is how I got into Judgement: Eternal Champion, Malediction, Relic Blade, and Warcrow. It’s how I got back into 40k after being out for almost 3 years.

Like I said, this is not immune to the following criteria, but I keep coming back to games like 40k that I like but don’t love, because local people are excited. This probably moves way higher if you have a much smaller local community that is interested in minis games. If you have locals that play munda and aren’t interested in trench crusade, and you’re okay with Munda you probably end up playing munda and collecting Trench Crusade.

Aside: Building a Local Community

Now, what happens if you love a game that doesn’t have a local community, or are working at a game company and want to build the community? Here’s where the juice comes in. You have to build the community. Colville has a great video on game community building that has worked for his RPG Draw Steel, that I see as the definitive resource for growing an online community. I’m going to summarize it and modify it for local community building here if you don’t have the full hour to watch the video.

A lot of local community is built around what happens at the store. If you have a local non-gw store  that sells minis and has a play space, you should make friends with the staff and see if you can run local events. Then it’s just advertising. See if there is a local discord or a community discord that has an events channel. Be sure that you lurk there and exist there for long enough that you’re an insider and a known quantity (see Colvilles video on the value of doing this) then start building your events. At first you’ll have to be consistent in your posting. Posting weekly in the 3 or so weeks coming up on your event I’ve found is a good cadence and making a poster can help. 

Then it’s making sure your local event is a welcoming environment. This can come into play in store selection, and in person is easier than online, because people are less likely to be dicks when it’s their local reputation on the line. You are still gonna have to set clear boundaries and enforce rules. I personally recommend making sure there aren’t nazis at your event, because they tend to make other people uncomfortable. GW doesn’t put up with them and you don’t have to either. 

Be sure to set clear community guidelines and enforce them. Just because someone shows up and pays doesn’t entitle them to being a part of the community. If they’re not the type of person you want in the community, you can issue them a refund and ask them to leave if they’re violating the code of conduct. Having a piece of paper you (or store employees, or other community leaders can point to) that clearly indicates what is and isn’t acceptable behavior and what the consequences are makes this type of confrontation easier. And it is hard. Confrontation is difficult, but harboring and protecting an inclusive community will make it better for everyone. 

Then at the event see who is local and who’s far away. Your Locals will likely be the folks you want to work with to build a local community for a game, and then you can work to bring in other folks. 

You might be saying, “that this all sounds like a lot of work”, and it is, but it’s work I’d do in a heartbeat for games that I love. 

What Makes Someone Love a Game?

Now, if you are designing a game, you can’t design a community, so how do you make someone love your game? I think you have 2 axis upon which you can make people love your game: Hobby and Gameplay. There is a theoretically perfect game that ranks a 10/10 on both axes, but that’s a very high bar and a game I have yet to find. So, let’s break it down.

Love Thy Hobby

I do want to be clear here. The Hobby is not just the models. It’s the models, the art in the book, and the narrative around the game. It’s the way that all three combine to make something for you to do in your free time; to obsess over. 

For example, Necropolis28 (or just Necropolis) is a game that is entirely minis agnostic. Even more so than Trench Crusade in that there aren’t really official models that you could use. The game is about liches fighting over the scraps of a dying world, and the art is a grim throwback all in black and white. It has an official setting that you can dive into but it isn’t terribly necessary. The pitch of the game is that it’s the diorama skirmish game. Unlike trench crusade where you often see the minis first, you are more likely to see art or dioramas or someone building something insane. While the developer releases minis for the game, they’re specific enough not to cover everything the theme encompasses. The Lore leaves enough open space to encourage the hobby. You could play anything from some Askurgan Trueblades to homemade minis out of floral wire and hot glue. 

Games don’t have to be minis agnostic to draw on this appeal. Even things like Quar, Warcry, and Necromunda have sucked me in through the theme and the amount of open space in their narrative to build my own guys.

This open space to world-build and storytell in draws me into the game. I’m not just playing these games with the toys provided while I’m at my painting desk or gaming table, instead I’m invited to think, daydream and create my own characters and their place in the world. This type of creativity is a huge driver for my personal hobby, and a big reason why I like games that are less focused on specific named characters. 

I’ve personally found this amount of creativity to not be able to sustain large army projects like a 40k army, but instead suited for things like Turnip28 and smaller. Just financially it’s easier on the wallet to find and build 5-15 figures than it is for numbers larger than that. 

Love thy Blorbo

While the spirit of the Orignal Character (OC pls no steal) and creating in the space drives my personal hobby, there are games like Bushido, Warcrow, Shatterpoint, or (reportedly) the upcoming Gundam Assemble that are less about making your own characters and more about combining the existing characters provided. These are games I would call “Blorbo Games” where characters that are recognizable have minimal customization so army and story building become more about ordering on menu and less about building your subway sandwich. 

While these types of games are less likely to pull me personally in, I understand how they can pull in large audiences. If you find the right characters or licenses that can pull people into the world who aren’t looking for the blank slate creative outlet but are instead looking for something to make their own out of existing characters. This culture on tumblr of seeing a relationship or character dynamic and going “This is X from Y media” is what spawned the Blorbos from My Shows meme. I think it’s partially driving the tomodachi life craze currently and drives a lot of fanfiction. Being able to adopt that is something you could design for.

Interestingly, I’ve found the hobby desire for blorbo games can cut both ways. I got into Warcrow because I like the Scions. I read their lore and thought the family concept was neat. I was excited for Master Uruk to join my company, but after playing with him for several games I got to a point where I almost dropped Warcrow because he didn’t play how I wanted him to. I’ve heard players have the same experience with the Primarchs in 40k as they’ve rapidly oscillated between mandatory for the faction and entirely unplayable.

If you nail it however, the feeling of a character matching their story and portrayal is unmatched. I’ve played games with Somabo the Blue Crane in Bushido and him cutting another samurai in half absolutely rips. His rules and his position as an expert duelist make me want to put him on the table in my lists more often and makes me want to get in more Bushido.

The Game Can’t Suck

Now that we’ve started talking about rules it’s best to get this out of the way. I’m a rules second type of gamer. As long as the rules don’t actively make me want to quit the game, if the minis are good enough I’ll play a lot of games. I love Steel Rift, Trench Crusade, and Necropolis and I think all of them have good rules but none of them are really revolutionary. They exist in the 7/10 – 8/10 zone. 

The biggest thing is that the rules match the theme of the minis and the rest of the game material. Trench Crusade feels as brutal and bloody as the lore and rulebook make it out to be. Steel Rift mechs have a weight and crunch to them that matches 40 ton death robots. Necropolis rules facilitate a frail necromancer raising legions of undead to fight for them, perfectly matching the thematic core of the game. 

I’ve bounced hard off of Shatterpoint explicitly because Darth Vader can’t kill a stormtrooper. He can take them out of action sure, but can’t cut them in half the way you’d kinda expect him to be able to based on… well anything with Darth Vader in it. That kind of Ludonarrative dissonance takes me out of the game more than playing on cardboard box terrain on the coffee table. You’ve shown me a character that I know should be able to manhandle a small army and are telling me a member of that army can just get up and dust it off? Sounds like a Game Sux from me boss.

But What if Game Good?

Now, none of this is to say that a mechanically excellent game can’t overcome what I don’t like in the Hobby. I played Judgement: Eternal Champion for almost a year because of how much fun it is to play. It checks almost all of my boxes for games that don’t draw me in. It’s exclusively about named characters that have little to no customization. Its models often have 1-2 assembly options, and while they are excellent creature caster sculpts, they’re still resin. There was almost no story you could publicly access when I was playing.

And yet, the game played like nothing else I’ve played. Could this have been the people I played it with? Like I said I have a regular group that I quite like, so maybe? But the game has the juice. It’s the type of complex tactical play that I love from skirmish minis games. The Flavor of the characters drips from their abilities. 

I painted almost the entire model range. Some Sculpts were way over-detailed and did not enthuse me as a painter. I found time to paint them anyway because the game had me jazzed.

In this case the harmony of the theming and gameplay is built not from having an existing experience of the narrative and having that feed into gameplay experience but from thematic rules building the characters up in my head. Through gameplay, Rakkir, Lugdrug, Zhim’Gigrak and others were built as characters in archetypes that I already knew. This type of storytelling is a lot of fun, and since what happens on the game table matches what I envisioned in my head seeing the sculpt and rules, it pulls my desire to hobby up even for boardgame plastic or multipart resin kits. 

This is however the exception not the rule. I already like to hobby. I started Judgement because I heard about the game and started hobbying because I knew I already liked to paint minis. There are subsets of players that love to game more than they love to hobby and for them, underworlds or malediction are perfectly fine with just the standees or unpainted minis. For some people, In this case I think even the perfect 10/10 miniature game doesn’t convince them to hobby if they have the option not to. If you want to hobby, it’s worth considering that this may happen. If you’re okay with that, fine to get into the game, but worth thinking about in advance.

But What if Both Good?

I absolutely love Quar. They’re tiny little guys and they’re a blast.The plastic models have enough customizability for me to make my own cowboy faction. Clash of Rhyfles is small enough you can knock out a squad in a weekend and be done. The setting has enough breadth and empty space that I feel comfortable filling it out myself. And the rules are perfect for these doofy little guys that are in a very serious war. The game matches their ability for serious violence like taking out fighters with a well placed bayonet or shot with their comedic nature, like a grenade going off at their feet instead of where you wanted it.

I have the entire plastic range. I bought 15mm Quar because I wanted more Quar in my life more often. I am the local “Qaur Guy.” 

Does this make Quar a good game? I’m not an objective judge of character in these respects. It does make it a game that I love, and it does that by marrying the themes of the world and story with the game. When I think about Quar, I think about very doofy little guys having very silly antics, in a very serious setting, and that theme and idea suffuses all things Quar. 

This is what makes me fall in love with the game. Not hyper-balanced rules, not hyper-narrative rules. Not high quality resin sculpts or plastic model kits, but that a game gives the experience that I expect throughout. It gives me a game that I want to love.