Fantasy is better than AoS.

Now that I have your attention, Warhammer is owned by a company called Games Workshop. The Warhammer series of games involves playing a strategy game which involves painting and building figures and battling them on a table or map, rolling dice to show how many units are destroyed. This is a very simplified version in case you, my dear readers, aren’t entirely familiar.

For those who have played either of these games (or both,) their positions in the game rankings is a contentious topic. I will start off by saying I have never personally played Age of Sigmar (AoS) and I have played Fantasy but a little. I have dug into the lore a decent amount, on the other hand, and am a big fan of it.

 With the background and basic information given, Fantasy is better than AoS. Fantasy had bigger armies and better variety as well as a much better story behind it. There is another system called Warhammer 40k which is a science fiction game version of the franchise. AoS is widely considered a watered-down version of the 40k game. It has been simplified and troops were reduced. The armies also went from 15 distinct races to being condensed into four factions, making the game’s format less personalized. These races now have no personal goals. The game was brought from a roleplaying tabletop large-scale strategy game to a small-scale conglomeration of other similar races being brought together.

It’s hard not to see this as a dumbing-down of the game. The rules had been greatly simplified as well. It went from having individual army books of several hundred pages and a primary rule book of 528 pages in the last edition to one rule book of four pages and some online stats for the other races. The main advantage which derives from this is it costs a great deal less.

The people who do play AoS often mock those who don’t enjoy it by stating that they are just resistant to change. The older players are upset by a super-simplified version of their game. Their pieces no longer match the armies they’re supposed to represent and the rules for their armies have been removed or entirely changed.

The lore itself took a very strange turn, going into a multiverse and completely killing off a few races. These races have people who have been playing them for up to 10 years. This, of course, upset quite a few people. The idea behind this was to make newer players interested in the game. The problem persists, though: it does interest newer players, but continues to push away the players who have been playing it for years.

Mark Drew has been LARPing for three and a half years, at Ashendael Underworld, has been a Dungeon Master using edition 3.5, he is 25 years old and has worked in fast food, and manual labor. He’s been working on a novel for several years.