I am at Gen Con to demo the new Age of Sigmar TCG, Warhammer Champions. I was able to get away during my lunch break to snap photos of the Legion boards and the games in progress, and my shift ends at the perfect time to catch the final round. Everyone playing there was friendly and accomodating, and I was so grateful to get these pics. This Bothan did not have to die to bring you this information! These are raw shots that I did not have the chance to crop.

Numerous of the pictures were taken of live games, the close shots during setup while the player on the far side was placing their minis. The far shots were during the actual battle rounds so as not to interfere.

I got to the first Maximum Firepower event on Thursday and was surprised to see a few empty tables! The terrain on them looked beautiful, but was, in my opinion, sparse, and clearly favored the Empire.

There were numerous pieces of line of sight blocking terrain, and this was a good thing. However, it limited the chances to shoot out of heavy cover – squads often had to be fully exposed to shoot their full attack dice. There as also quite little variety, in the name of keeping things simple. The ruins, the only piece of difficult area terrain, were often tucked into a corner of the board and not involved in the main battle.

I sat down to watch the top table game at the Thursday event, but it was a bit of a bust. The match was lost during the Define Battlefield step!

Key Positions is notorious for its bias toward the the Blue Player, and this abuse is at its worst during Advanced Positions and Battle Lines because the deployment zone is so thin – just a range 1 band around the perimeter. Nick Freeman, the eventual winner, was able to mark his Key Positions on two barricades, reducing what was intended to be three objectives down to two.

The two red markers are the Blue player’s Key Positions objectives

Combine that with an open field, a free forward move for troopers during Advanced Positions deployment, and a location that was easily fortified, it makes the game nearly impossible to win if you are the Red player. Nothing Nicholas did was against the rules: each individual barricade is considered its own piece of terrain. It was simply not possible for Red to win. This situation occurred twice during Nicholas’ run at the tournament. In the final match, his opponent conceded in the middle of Round 1 after having lost a bike to Maximum Firepower, and sustaining 6 trooper casualties, all before Nick’s Weiss AT-ST had activated.

This game shows that Key Positions needs a revision of some kind, or perhaps barricade rules need to be changed. Some terrain pieces at GenCon incorporated the barricades into another piece of terrain below it, so the 4-5 barricades used did not count as multiple pieces. The barricades in the Thursday final were resting on top of a flat piece and free standing, and therefore each was considered its own piece of terrain.

A terrain piece incorporating barricades

What changes to make, then? To fix the obvious imbalance, the first Key Position could be a fixed point at the center of the board, which would result in a king of the hill battle, but that would make the other two positions somewhat irrelevant. Another idea is that Key Postions must be a certain distance apart from one another, which would also be a decent fix and prevent what we saw on Thursday. A couple of other options would be to make barricades ineligible for objective placement by tuning the language of the card. One could make a rule saying that if a barricade touches other non-barricade terrain, then it would be considered part of that terrain piece, or say that the objectives could not be barricades. Whatever the case, I think FFG is aware of the problem.

I’ll wrap up this post with a few more pictures, and I was so happy to be able to interview Ryan Sliwoski and Dustin Foran, the runner up and the winner of Friday’s event. Stay tuned for transcripts of our interviews and more reaction from Maximum Firepower at Gen Con!

Special thanks to the players and FFG staff, you are all awesome!