I like minis games, but can take or leave minis

I barely ever paint minis. Standees with good artwork almost always look better than a bunch of grey dudes in different stances. Colored minis can be better, but not always because the colors often tend to be bright colors that make the units hard to distinguish at a glance.

Mini minis are the worst. The really little minis that only exist because a game has to have miniatures. These are typically seen in DOAM games, and they spend most their time tipping over and rolling around.

I hate standees, but am a big fan of counters and blocks. Actually for many games my preferred solution is simply stickered discs. You can get a nice thematic and bold big icon in the middle, sometimes even some info (like a wargame counter), you can get wooden discs in bright punchy colours and overall I think it looks great. I've played Forlorn Hope, Doom, Incursion and Space Hulk with pretty much all the different options (minis, alternate minis, standees, and these discs) and to be honest, I actually overwhelmingly prefer the custom label stickered discs (actually, overwhelmingly is stretching it, for deathmatch mode DOOM I was very fond of Haloclix marines in red, blue, white, green for example)

Me, I like my minis like I like my standees and counters.

Kind of unrelated, but back then when I was about to buy Android, all I had wanted had been a game with myriad of colorful tokens and character markers.

SuperflyTNT wrote: ...Battlestar Galactica would not have been better if it had miniaures (of the people).

Can we now talk about the card Basestars compared to the plastic ones :-p

SuperflyTNT wrote: Conversely, Ravenloft would not have been as good with standies, and Space Hulk would not have been as amazing if it had not had cool miniatures. I might be wrong, since Incursion is awesome, standies and all....

But take this with a grain of salt. I have 123 miniatures on my desk right now, in various stages of painting.

And now his true colours come out ....

I remember having this discussion ages back about why gamers which identified more strongly with "thematic" (the word trash was probably used) games seemed to be unable to cope with filling in the narrative with imagination, of course that guy was just being an ass but he had somewhat of a point as well. I've played Space Hulk with the minis, yeah it "looked cool" but gameplay function wise I much preferred it with our stickered discs. I liked easily seeing exactly which unit was where and what they could do, I didnt need to see the minis to feel the tension in what was happening in the game. I realise that probably makes me an outlier but "facility of use" is becoming way more important to me as time goes by and I quite like "filling in the blanks" without needing the actual rendered components being in front of me. I'm happy to be a one man island in this regard, I know I won't get any love for that opinion.

I love minis. They feel good putting them down on the table and look beautiful, even when unpainted (IMO). There's just something there when you see an area overflowing with hordes of beasts in Cthulhu Wars or Chaos.

I get that most here don't agree with me on this and that's fine. I still have a 9 year old lurking at the back of my brain and heart and I want to play with toys. It makes me smile and I love it. Blood Rage is a phenomenal game mechanically, but it's even better when I'm throwing down that Fire Troll.

Jexik wrote: What I liked about it was how simple the rules were, the relatively low price point when it was at TRU/Target/Walmart, and not having to paint or assemble the miniatures at all. I'm probably one of the few people that got initially hooked on Heroscape because of the game...

I'm there with you on both counts. The miniatures were fine, but the game is what drew me in.

People think even if they don't like the game, they'll have cool minis.

This is one of the biggest lies that gamers tell themselves. The minis are rarely cool enough to justify the price without the game, and the flipside is that unless you play miniatures wargames and have dozens of sets of rules across many genres and scales, what does having cool miniatures buy you?

Even though Dead of Winter isn't really a tactical game so it's not the kind of game that would normally have minis anyway, it showed me that standees with good art are quite serviceable.

Yeah, that about says it. I think that there's something to be said of this, especially with games like Incursion. When facings are important, it's nice to have a 2D card so you know which side is facing where.
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I like Standees. They can have very good art on them out of the box and they keep the game price and bulk down. Incursion fits on my shelf next to GMT games, Space Hulk is a pig in the corner.

I don't paint, so minis end up being gobs of monocolor plastic.

I'm too price-sensitive for this conversation. I should get out now.

I do enjoy painting minis though. I just finished painting Runewars' Waiqar.

This is one of the biggest lies that gamers tell themselves. The minis are rarely cool enough to justify the price without the game, and the flipside is that unless you play miniatures wargames and have dozens of sets of rules across many genres and scales, what does having cool miniatures buy you?

Can't agree more! Even with my dumps of miniatures rules, I still often skip cool minis just because I'm not sure what can I do with them. For me minis can't exist in vacuum. They have to tell a story. For me the easiest way to tell a story is through a game.

So...we've reclaimed Euros, shit on 'common' trash themes like pirates/zombies/ninjas, and now we hate miniatures.


G'night everybody, I'll hit the lights on the way out.

Did you miss all of the Cthulhu Wars excitement here?

To be fair, goofy standees have always been trashier than minis for me.

I never played Incursion with standees. But now that I have my plastic-laden copy, I wouldn't have it any other way.

Michael Barnes wrote: Did you miss all of the Cthulhu Wars excitement here?

Undoubtedly so. Hopefully the consensus wasn't "better with green cubes?"

I believe the word "statues" was bandied about. And discussion of how it wouldn't be the same about the amazing miniatures. And yes, even Barnes said that shit.