These things come in seasons, I guess; they've been through a couple rounds of intense Warhammer 40k interest at Chez Gabriel. This most recent fever is almost certainly the result of Space Marine II, and as I said before, the game is so ardent in its manifestation of the brand and its lore that I think it could mint new fans just as well as repel them. But the borderline? The person who owns models, many of whom are gray, or still lie flensed on their sprues? Those who are down to clown, but haven't prioritized the hobby recently? Their minds will be terraformed by this game. Those people are well and truly fucked.

Noah was feeling very cocky after a string of wins, which makes sense if he's playing the Death Guard seriously - the Death Guard, whose Primarch is a multi-story insect executioner plague man - because they're incredibly tough. But it's more than that, in this case: they haven't been playing with all the rules. I don't need to go whole or even really partial hog here to explain it, but they've essentially just been putting roughly equivalent values of models on the table and going fucking crazy. In a case like this, the natural resilience of the Death Guard is a huge boon. If all we're playing with is the base stats, and not objectives to control or unique faction abilities, oh yeah. There's barely any body to even shoot inside that armor. They're like wet tongues, shot through with twisted horns, or flies and beetles assembled with the instructions upside-down. They probably don't even know they're being shot at.

So, Tio Kiko, Eric, and myself went over yesterday to show them the ropes of The True Game. Things changed fast! They changed real fast. Advantages for defending or attacking certain places. Clutch techniques, gated by a resource you get to spend each round. The dynamic must have been akin to being very good at Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting on your Super NES at home and then going to an Arcade and seeing characters your friends don't even play as do shit that feels illegal.

I am not a competitive person, as I have attempted to communicate on this site about four million times. I was telling Kiko how strange it was that Gabriel's heirs were constantly checking the leaderboard, and looking up the stats of their opponents, and Kiko told me that everyone does that. I just think that Warhammer 40k is a good "place" to hang out with friends. It's frustrating when dice don't behave in accordance with statistics, sure, but the moments that dice embroider keep the game from being absolutely solvable. We can imagine a version of Magic: The Gathering without mana, and I'm not sure I want to play that. But I painted like forty very small bugs just to offer friends The Zerg Experience; I operate a kind of "xeno-spa" where we take exfoliation a little more seriously than our competitors in the traditional industry. I just want to be there. I want to look down at the table, at the little story there, and see what happens.

(CW)TB out.