I am not alone

So this is the post that actually got me started on this blog. For a while now, I've been watching various other gaming systems (Dungeons and Dragons most notably) start to experience 'old school' movements.

Whilst I hardly have enough evidence, the general feel I get from people that I chat to (and observe on the internet) is that Warhammer 8 has forced people to choose. Warhammer 6 & 7 were OK - they were playable, people could still enjoy those. They weren't different enough to make people think there was a need to change. They were...tolerable. But Warhammer 8 is either brilliant, or crap. You have to choose.

For me, Warhammer 8 is a piss-poor clone of Warhammer 3. I get the impression that the design team had a bit of a read through the book, spotted two or three things they could understand (Fire causes fear in animals? Hmm...that's true...I'll bring that across to Warhammer 8 and everyone will praise me for my original thinking and tactical depth I will be introducing...), ignored the rest, and vomited out Warhammer 8. Everything Coop says in his post is true - the background is bland and expendable; the sense of humour has gone.

I wonder how many High Elf power gamers would cringe knowing that the jewel of their 8th edition crown, those serious and brooding 50 Lothern Sea Guard-in-a-horde-formation, were originally a regiment of renown whose leader ate small toads and bathed in goat offal, and whose unit champion was a notorious rake disowned from his family because of that 'dwarf incident'?

Anyway, as Coop mentioned in his post, the cost of the new Orcs & Goblins book is £22.50. So, in my first act of open rebellion, I hit eBay to see what I could find - the intention being to find £22.50 worth of old classic OOP Orc & Goblin stuff, whose worth would prove to many more times that amount in the pleasure they brought to me.

Imagine my surprise when I came across, and won, Eeza Ugezods Mother Crushers, a Regiment of Renown from the 80s? Not only that, I then managed to discover on the same night, a later version of this regiment - the Mighty Ugezod's Death Commandos Box Set, missing only the hobgoblin berserker. All of that totaling...£23.00. That's 19 classic OOP metal Orc warriors, for the same price as the book. Also, it compares quite favourably to the new price for 10 plastic Orc Boys - £18.00!

Gaj: 1. Games Workshop: 0.