2007 TGN Editor’s Choice Award winner
Picking a winner from among the nominees for the 2007 Tabletop Gaming News Editor’s Choice Award was difficult to say the least. Pruning the list to a top ten list was even more problematic. But we have finally managed to pick a winner for the Editor’s Choice Award. This year has seen a flood of great new games and miniatures and the expansion of previously niche gaming markets, like Pulp and Weird War, as they gain new games and audiences.
Without a doubt the most important, and perhaps controversial, changes in the hobby this year have been in the area of pre-painted plastic miniatures and the winner of the 2007 Tabletop Gaming News Editor’s Choice Award, Rackham’s AT-43 game, represents this controversy but also epitomises what we think is the potential benefit of this type of game.
AT-43 is at once a threat to the established order of the hobby and also represents a potential for the hobby to continue to grow and expand. In less than a year it has become an inescapably huge player in the sci-fi battle game market and Rackham have obviously bet the company on a different way of doing things. Pre-painted and pre-assembled plastic miniatures are going to upset some gamers and miniature enthusiasts, but for those who don’t have the time to build and paint an army, those who are put off by the hobby aspect of tabletop games or those of the Playstation generation this may be a factor that gets them playing when otherwise they wouldn’t.
AT-43 has been criticized for the simplicity of its rules but it provides an alternating activation sequence, resource management in the form of leadership points that can be spent on overwatch, taking cover, delaying activations etc and a simple and intuitive central mechanic that combine to mean the game itself is easy to get into but holds a lot more tactical depth than it first appears. The new factions like the Red Blok and Karman have also shown us how Rackham intends to play with those core rules by providing simple mechanics like electronic warfare to add more strategy not only to the game but also to the army building process.
Typical Red Blok vehicle designAT-43 is very much a scenario driven game and one can see that it would quickly get boring if you just played in some sort of “line them up and shoot” fashion, but when you bring in objectives both for victory points and to earn reinforcements it’s no longer who has the best guns that wins. The game also loses some of the competitive “tournament attitude” because of this. Army building is handled in a very different manner to games like 40K and AT-43 benefits from approaching it with a fresh mind. Splitting an overall army into a main assault force and reinforcements (both with hard caps) causes players to think about the force they are constructing rather than simply trying to spend all of their points on the best troops and gear. Ignoring Rackham’s early distribution problems for a moment, game support in the form of the Damocles campaign has provided a storytelling set of scenarios that feature orbital bombardments, propaganda from the collectivist forces and swarms of uncontrollable nano-bots eating everything in their path.
Of course, not everything is singularly positive. Rackham’s financial situation is an understandable worry and provides a barrier to investing in the game (although would Fantasy Flight Games have gotten involved if things really were bleak?), the miniatures are generally accepted to be overpackaged, there appears to be a large price discrepancy between the US and Europe (albeit boosted by the low value of the dollar and higher taxes in EU), distribution has been more than a little problematic and the contents of the unit and attachment boxes have been downright odd meaning you’re likely to end up with a large pile of unused figures (Rackham have suggested they are going to address this). While these problems are not specifically due to AT-43, but more the company, they may cause prospective players to think twice.
Ultimately AT-43 is a game and Rackham has provided almost everything that gamers need. A wealth of units for each faction, a simple yet deep game and, at least in North America, they appear to have survived the early distribution problems that really threatened to kill the game’s adoption. Miniature fans are certainly disappointed with the quality of some of the sculpts but we’ve all been happy with the figures available so far and more than happy with the quality and the price of the vehicles figures. If anything the vehicles have been a dramatic success for Rackham as you are starting to see these figures repurposed for other games.
Out of all the nominees for the award this year AT-43 is not only a great example of a game but also represents a company willing to break out of the box and explore new possibilities in the hobby. And it’s this sort of thinking that not only will help to move the hobby along through innovation but may also help to bring new gamers into the hobby.
Oh, and did we mention apes in powered armour? With jetpacks? And giant guns?
