Another two weeks have rolled by. Momentous ones here in the UK, that rather dwarf a small podcast about games, but gaming life carries on. For this episode, we’re talking about Games Workshop’s small box games. This will be a quick intro post today, as I’m about to head off to Agentscon 2022, the very first Agents of Sigmar meet-up. There are literally 100s of people turning up. Well, there are if you count in binary. Nevertheless, this small, select company of Agents supporters are meeting up to play some games and I can’t wait. (I just heard a rumor that somebody is bringing Ark Nova, which has me very excited! )
What Is a Small Box Game?
In Games Workshop terms, we take a small box game as one the company sells through alternative retail outlets such as Barnes and Noble. They’re cut-down versions of bigger games, like Blitz Bowl is to Blood Bowl, Fire Team to Kill Team, and Bladeborn to Warcry. They’re also self-contained games; you don’t have to buy additional models to get the full benefit of the rules. Though often, if you do have some extra warbands/teams, you can use those to add some variation to your games.
And these games are often (though not always) great. They’re also perfect for people with busy lives, or those of us who want to introduce our children to Warhammer without the hours of setup and brain burn that can go with it. In the podcast we ask, should GW do more to support them? Often they feel like “fire and forget” products. The boxes tend to be hard to get hold of, even on release. Often they’re not even released in certain regions, prompting fans to pay high costs for inter-continental postage and import duties. Additionally, the games would appear never to have existed, if you look at GW’s community pages. For gateway games into the hobby, this feels like a careless oversight, but perhaps it isn’t. After all, not many board games get a string of after-sales support.
In addition to the small box game discussion, we talked about which game(s) we thought everybody should play once, our recent mammoth game of Moonstone, and the latest news from our painting tables. The live chat discussion on the night of recording was one of the liveliest yet, so do check out episode 11 to see what all the noise was about.
