Was the slideshow easy to use?
I have been playing the game for a while, but have mostly played Age of Fantasy. You may have seen my various reports of AoF I've done on Google Photos (LotR elves vs goblins).
I love the one page. I love that most of the special rules are in a general section, rather than special rules defined for each unit.
My wife and I played this game in one evening, interrupted by going to pick up our son from work. That's a pretty good accomplishment for us. While she has played AoF with me before, she forgets, so this was like a first time for her. (This is my hobby, I guess I'm hers, she's just being nice to me.)
I'm hoping to go lots bigger. At this point level, it might get swingy. When the Mekboy's Shokk Attakk Gun wiped out a squad in one shot, I was kinda smiling nervously, having told her we were even in points. But it could have gone other ways.
I am disappointed they switched from Defense being the number you have to roll to kill a model and now use it to save. Now there are too many 2+ models, and you have to use Tough or Regeneration to go higher. For simplicity, he uses multiples of 3 for Tough, so less variation than there could be. Most of the time this doesn't bug me, since there aren't as many high Defense units in AoF. But I noticed it here.
Having the point calculation available on the Patreon 3 level, I will be making heroes with Tough(2).
While I very much love the unit activation (especially with counter-drawing), it does mean that a unit can fight in melee more than once per turn. This can lead to some imbalances. If a unit gets to charge an enemy, then fight in melee multiple times as it is charged by one unit at a time, it gets a lot more bang-for-the-buck from its melee abilities. For a while they said you only fight once in melee and had to just stand and take it if charged after you'd fought. Now you only get to fight once in melee at your Quality level. Other times are at 6+ to hit. It is a compromise, and I'm OK with it. (Officially, you fight at Quality your first time, so you can skip striking back to fight at Quality later. But that seems too exceptional to me.)
But overall, great fun. I can use the point calculator to make my own units or customize them. Pacing is terrific, both from quick back and forth and from having the rules so easy to learn. The objective system is OK, and it is so easy to add on variations, either from the Patreon level 2 full rulebook, or contributions from community. I've used GW's Open War cards for AoF.
andy
