Hello Internet, Jstove here with a little show and tell.
Let’s go back, but not very far, at least not very far as most of us guys who have been hobbying for a while are concerned, to Battlefleet Gothic.
For those of you who didn’t get into the GW scene until after Kirby and friends put the axe on the Specialist Games range, Battlefleet Gothic was GW’s large scale naval battle game. Sure it was in space, but it used naval battle rules. It was the prodigal son of GW’s earlier large scale games, Epic 40k, Man-O-War, and Space Fleet.
It was also, and I can say this without nostalgia goggles on and a lot of people will agree with me, an objectively beautiful game. We like to give old GeeDubs a hard time because they have a history of shoddy rules, shoddy errata, an increasingly diminishing role in the competitive tournament environment, and a running rap sheet of hit-and-miss codex releases, but BFG for them was triumphant.
BFG ran tight and fast and had incredible rules, as far as a GW game is concerned. The rulebook was printed to be readable and easy to reference, and was one of GW’s first rulebooks to actually have an index. You know you’re old school when you don’t take an index in a GW rulebook for granted. The units in the army list were printed, illustrated, and referenced with military precision, so you knew exactly what each ship was supposed to look like, even if a model for it hadn’t been released yet.
For those of us who were around when it came out, it blew us away. BFG blew us away, not just because the game was good, but because it was one of the first products GW ever released that had a modicum of mainstream professionalism.
Now, did the game have problems? Of course it did. It suffered from every issue a GW game has ever had. It wasn’t a flagship game like Fantasy or 40k, so it also eventually had its support trimmed and trimmed until it disappeared, and the office that was responsible for creating new content for the game got smaller and smaller and the new rules got wackier and wackier until we reached a point where if anyone showed up with a necron fleet, you just flipped the table and went home, but this is largely what we’ve come to expect from anything GeeDubs produces that isn’t their flagship title.
What made the game truly beautiful was that it played out of the box better than any game at the time. The cruisers were brilliantly designed with customizable gun decks so you could glue them together to make dozens of different classes of ship, the game came with planets, moons, asteroid belts (they were all cardboard templates but most veteran BFG players prefer 2d maps as there is no “bumper car” rule in BFG like in 40k, you can park your ship in orbit or on an asteroid belt, not just float within 1 inch and stop.) and enough cardboard tokens to make a Fantasy Flight game bashful.
The point is, if you were locked in a room for a month and you could only play one game, and you only had the contents of the starter box, the smart money would pick BFG every time. It was so good, you could even pick it over games that -gasp- weren’t GW!
Of course, where GW falls off, the competition steps in. BFG would gain its spiritual successors in the form of Firestorm Armada, Dystopian Wars, Droppy Commander, and Uncharted Seas. All of these games have their own merits, (and I think DW is probably one of the cleanest, best playing rulesets in wargaming, even though their first edition rulebook had major teething issues) but naturally, for the 40k enthusiast who wants space games set in his favorite universe, BFG will always have pride of place.
But all good things come to an end.
After GW put the axe to its specialist games section, pulling the trigger on games like epic, mordheim, necromunda, BFG and -sniff- Gorkamorka -sniff- these games which we all knew were sitting on Death Row finally got the chair.
Not even the indy retailers can get it anymore, the dream has moved to Ebay, where the specialist game enthusiasts have to fight each other over auction lots of rare prizes.
But every cloud has has a silver lining, and for every Specialist Game enthusiast that wants to keep playing the game despite GW, there is a ray of hope.
The ray of hope for BFG came in the form of 40k’s wackiest antagonists, Tyranids and Orks.
Both factions had official models, but both factions also had an evolutionary mentality- 40k players all know that the ork’s biggest gag is that he’ll build pretty much anything out of spit and string, and provided its funny enough, it will work. The hivemind, likewise, is a pure predator and will adapt to suit its needs.
This was reflected brilliantly in the tyranid fleet rules- Nid fleets didn’t actually have set classes for their bio ships, each individual ship was a shopping list of biomorphs that the player chose to suit their fleet design.
The most beautiful thing of all though, was that if you were a Nid player in 40k, you could build hiveships out of leftover bug parts, because Nid fleets are fundamentally just a swarm of space squids and starcraft zerg.
It was likewise with orks. Orks did have set classes of ships, but the nature of orkiness dictating that no 2 things an ork ever builds should ever look alike gave the proper mekboy carte blanche to go nuts. If you could strap enough rockets on it to make it break atmosphere, as far as orks are concerned, that made it a space ship. Ork rules- if it looks cool, it works.
What that means for the enterprising hobbyist naturally, is that provided you want to play orks or bugs, (which both have awesome and hilarious fleet rules, although the orks are naturally frustratingly random) you’re a trip through your bits box away from putting models on the table.
But who would do such a nefarious thing? Who would actually scratch build an entire BFG fleet instead of buying one?
Well, a cheap bastard like me would. Because I think orks are great.
The whole fleet is built out of every proper ork player’s best friends- chunks of styrene, plastic tubes, and wires. It also features bits from fantasy and 40k orc ranges hiding among the flotsam, along with other bits scooped up from the box, some micromachine and hotwheel parts leftover from childhood, and some repurposed and recycled Dystopian Wars ships that were sacrificed to Gork when my local indy went under and the playgroup got pigeon-holed into a GW store.
The “pyramid head” cruisers in the back are carriers and the blunter, goofier looking cruisers in the front are kil kroozers.
That’s it guys, i’m outta here, BUT checkout my other fun and exciting articles by clicking this link right HERE. -Jstove
