"Most pleasant gaming surprise?" Topic

Let's be positive for a change :)

You bought a pack of miniatures, some paints, a book, a game or some rules expecting it to be a bit of a dud.

Yet, it turned out to be great.

What was it?

I am positive I don't waste money on something if I think it is going to be a dud.

Actually in my 40+ years of gaming there have been many pleasant surprises but in the recent past there have been three rule sets that have been very pleasant surprises: Ronin, Light Bobs and Drop Zone Commander. I did not have high hopes for any of these games when I bought them but after playing them would strongly recommend each for their respective genres.

"Above expectations" then.
Like buying a cheap pack of figures just to fill in ranks but realizing they were actually excellent sculpts.

The Frostgrave Soldiers set.

Got it as a gift, and thought it was going to be fairly "meh". Instead, it turned out to be a great set, and a lot of fun to put together. Quite a pleasant gaming surprise!

Recently – D&D 5ed, after the last three iterations it came as a hugely present surprise to find just how darned good it is.

Otherwise can think of much I bought thinking it would be a bit of a flop. Picked up Ganesha's Galleys & Galleons based on comments on TMP, wasn't expecting much found a cracking little game, so that probably counts.

I think my most pleasant surprise was becoming a big fan of Too Fat Lardies rules.

In the past I hated the very thought of card activation, but then late last year I took the plunge and bought Bag the Hun. They were such a fun set of rules that I went on to other titles and have never looked back.

To think of all the years of great gaming I missed out on just because I was so closed minded!

When you find a miniature you really wish to purchase whitest sorting through your lead (or in my case these days) plastic pile.

D&D 5 is pretty keen isn't it?

A friend of mine described it as "the edition that everyone can agree on" which is mostly true, I've seen hardcore AD&D grognards and Pathfinder die-hards get together for 5.

Most of the Osprey Blue Books have been unexpectedly good. Lion Rampant, Dragon Rampant, Gods and Mortals, En Garde, IHMN. A couple of duds in the series but mostly exceeding hopes.

Figures I make sure I find photos of before buying, been burnt too many times!!

I'll second Lion Rampant. As for finding a figure, I usually find them right after I buy the next. But this is a happy post, right?

I'm with 79thPA. I don't buy anything that I think will be a dud. My wish list goes well past my monetary ability to buy.

Finding out how much more pleasant it is to use rules that everybody knows and understands, instead of having to feverishly thumb through the newest shiniest set to find what neighboring units can do in reaction to a charge.
Once I discovered that, I stopped buying new rules.

I played a couple of play test versions of Fireball Forward at conventions and hated it. Thought I'd give it one more try after the rules were published and loved it. Now my go to WWII rules set.

How much simpler and easier the old sets of rules are than the newer shinier ones.

Spanish American War figures – Tiger miniatures from Recreational Conflict.

I picked up a few figures for a Guarda Civil unit. After getting them, went back for at least two more orders including more officers. They turned out to be two of my favorite Spanish units.

Believe it or not, some old Scruby 30mm Napoleonics. I bought some British lights advancing to serve as a particular battalion of Hanoverian Landwehr--not because I had any great hopes for the figures, but because they were what I could afford. That one time, I got a figure to compare with Stadden or Suren. Now, the next time I ordered the same catalog number, the results were quite different. But it takes nothing away from that good batch of figures.

But I'd have to say the all-time best wargaming surprise involved some enemy horse guns starting the game out of position and in mud.

The Sword and the Flame. We (Discovery Games) had the booth next to Yaquinto at Origins and I was talked into trading a copy of Source of the Nile for a copy of Ironclads and a copy of TSATF. It was Ironclads I really wanted. TSATF sat on the shelf for a number of years before I tried it. I was very pleasantly surprised at the smooth and suspenseful play. I've been a fan ever since.

This happened to me twice.

Years ago I gamed with a group which got interested in Lord of the Rings. It was one of those horror stories I soon learned to avoid like the plague where "Hey! Let's all buy a few packs of stuff and paint it up and make a game." I bought Der Kriegspielers Harradrim. I kind of liked the figures but painted them up in a fanciful way and really liked them. Years later I had a vast horde of these things and had adapted all sorts of "oriental scum" to their army, made up fanciful histories and did all the things one can do with them in Imagi-Natins.

The second time was when I saw the Windcatcher Graphics "Woodens" of the American Civil War. I bought a few boxes merely as curios and artifacts to put on my shelf on the collection of "model soldiers" with no intent of using them. Then on the way home a friend I was driving with hankered after a new period. He settled on the Civil War. I reached around to the back and said "Well I just happen to have…." and brought out the few samples of the 'Woodens." Now I have a big collection of these for the Civil War the rules of which I created by myself "Magnolia's Mint Juleps N' Gritz." They are wonderful little masterpieces. They look three dimensional on the table top though flat, and I have even created terrain to match. The Trees are created by making them two dimensional on foam core then cutting them like eg-crates to slot in together. The standard terrain no civil war battlefield can do without is made the same way with two dimensional risers to form the wheat field, peach orchard, ploughed field, cornfield, cabbage patch, stone wall and sunken road. The fortifications as well, with the Dog leg, Sand Trap, Water Hazard, Angle, Clown's mouth, Little Windmill and the 19th hole. The buildings are done in the same way, so viewed from above they look like a "cross" with the two pieces assembled but from the side or an angle they give a remarkably three dimensional effect. Trains, wagons, and ironclads have all come about the same way.

I wish the guy who made the woodens was still in business. I am experimenting now with using basswood to make more figures like Zouaves, milishy, and damn Dutchmen.

Bloody Big Battles rules pleased me AND my gaming mates. Usually one of us doesn't like the rules, leading to the search for new ones. We've been playing BBB for two years now.

CoC, even though I'm a big fan of TFL games in general I've never been much of a fan of skirmish level gaming. So I hadn't planed on playing CoC but a couple of friends had different plans. Unknown to me they bought and painted the figures needed and surprised me with a game. We loved it, now it's our go to game.

Blue Moon 15 mm London pack with Sherlock Holmes figure – that is one of the best figures ever created in any scale for any genre and it wasn't the only superb figure. Sure, not all of the Blue Moon's meet that standard, but enough sure do that I've become one of their biggest and most vocal fans.

And thank you so much for traveling the road of positive thinking. TMP needs a lot more of this!

I'd have to say the biggest pleasant surprise in recent memory is how good Age of Sigmar is. Finally a fantasy game that is about the story, is fast to play, can handle small skirmishes or warband sized battles and has some amazing figures and you can go crazy with the terrain.

Then they started publishing campaign books for it with fantastic scenarios in them. Got me back into fantasy gaming after a hiatus of about a dozen years. Very pleasant surprise.

For me it was FFG's X-Wing.

I have previously no gaming interest in Sci-Fi/Fantasy of any sort really, being a history buff.

However my six year old kid prompted me to buy him a boxed set. We've had almost a year of fun and now own 200+ ships.

It just keeps giving….and costing…

:-)

My son now plays historical games too.

Bolt Action: Played with the same troops many times and it's a different game each time.

Frostgrave: Decided to give it a whirl and it turned out to be one of my favorite games ever.

How lovely Zvezda vehicles are.

Takenoko link

My wife wanted it because of the cute little panda figure. I thought it looked dumb. Turns out that it's an excellent game.

Rules that I expected would probably be a dud, but acquired them and gave them a go and was pleasantly surprised to find they were a great set:

Justified Ancients (original edition)
THW Warrior Kings (remastered as Rally round the King)
Might Armies: Ancients
Fantasy Rules! (the TCE version is one I tried)

There are a lot more rules for me to try out though, so there could be some more dud that are hidden treasures.

I have recently begun super hero gaming with my daughters using legos rather than minis. No more worries about drops or scratches and the girls can customize their characters to suit their moods.

Having an incredibly intense game fighting Operation Goodwood over six hours, with half a dozen counters and a map, no dice to roll, only orders to write. Not a single figure in sight, but a much greater appreciation of the fog of war, courtesy of an umpire.