The Beard Bunker

People love the matched play missions, and I'm happy for them. Lots of variety, lots of numbers going up, lots of game balance levers for the designers to pull, and lots of randomness so that your games have great variety. People also love Crusade missions. Lots of ways to follow the narrative progress of your army, lots of ways to earn rewards you can use to smack your opponent right in the beans. I did plenty of this in 40K's previous edition, and wrote about doing so on this very site. And yet today's post is about why, after over twenty games of the current edition of 40K, I'm still playing the intro mission Only War. When I started writing this, I thought I was going to write a celebration of the narrative flexibility of simplicity, but it soon became an exploration of the way Games Workshop's game design style has resulted in my ignoring more and more of their rules, and even whole game systems. A good chunk of this avoidance is down to my finite brain capacit

Finishing stuff feels great. Completed vacuuming is infinitely better than vacuuming-in-progress, and despite the existence of the word 'gooning' (don't Google that at work) I'm not convinced it's something anyone enjoys. The wargaming hobby is built on the joy of finishing stuff. Finish building the thing, finish painting it, finish your kill team, your boarding patrol, your 1,000 point army. Given the varied nature of the tasks required to bring an army to the tabletop, most of us have some aspects that are joyless chores to be struggled through (for me it's cleaning mould lines) and that struggle makes completion taste all the sweeter . This nudges many of us towards a task list mindset, enjoying the feeling of nearing completion as units get marked green in the progress tracker and we close in on that most classic of numbers: 2,000 points. So recently, when I felt a random urge to paint some Imperial Guard, I thought: at last! I can finish off the last of my