End of year awards - The Kriegy awards 2014

Welcome to the second annual Kriegy awards. Yep, it’s award season and as I have complete and utter contempt for any awards I decided to do my own.

Why? Well, it’s because as far as I’m concerned my opinion is as valid as anyone else’s. So if you have issues with that, I suggest you take it up the with esteemed Kriegy awards committee*

*note….. that’s me

Anywho, this is totally and 100% my view on stuff. So, without further fanfare, the awards!

P.S all awards are based on stuff I have seen and done in the last year, I don’t really care when stuff was initially done or when it was released.

PPS. I'm probably not going to have the same awards every year, because effort!

The "F**k this, I give up" award

For model that most made me want to give up painting because anything I do will not be as cool as that.

For the second year in a row, this goes to a Warmachine Collosal that is so over the top it makes my brain ache. Seriously, you have to go to this page  and look at the full insanity, including videos.

In short, all it's guns work, they fire smoke, have sound effect and it's painted beautifully. I mean seriously...... this is insane and awesome in equal parts. 

The "What am I even looking at" award

For model that made me think the sculptor was smoking crack or just really really high. 

HO HO HO, MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM THE SPACE WOLVES!

This has actually been a pretty good year for GW's sculptors, and they have done some amazing figures, some of which I will mention in a later award.

But this figure is just daft.

It takes the silliest tropes of the 40k setting and powers them out to the nth degree to create something that ends up being an homage to Santa Claus. Oh, those traits are oversized models, impracticality, cultural appropriation and covering every inch of something with decorations. I'm surprised the sled isn't a brick though, most marine stuff this days looks like a shoebox with guns on it. 

Anyway, this figure is just silly. Oh, and if you don't think it looks like santa..... you're wrong. 

The Axos the Dark Rose memorial award

For best role-playing game book and or supplement.

What is amazing about this award is that it comes down to two different RPG's i've played and run this year. Edge of the Empire by Fantasy Flight Games, and Age of Rebellion, also by FFG.

So, lets just give it to FFG for creating the best Star Wars action based system yet. d20 starwars bugged me because it was d20, with all the problems that came with that, even if Saga edition was very solid. D6 starwars, while great, also had problems, mostly with character development and bloat. 

I've really enjoyed the games I've played and ran using this system and i'm looking forward to seeing how they do the hardest bit of Star Wars gaming, making force users fun but not broken. 

Last year Iron Kingdoms won, and i'm still enjoying that game as well. 

The "This isn't fun anymore" award

For the single moment that turned me off a game system. 

So, I was playing Netrunner a lot last year and in the first half of this year. For a while, I was playing reasonably well and was winning over 80% of my games on OCTGN as well as the majority in person, even with wacky decks.

I decided to enter my first card gaming tournament, and it was a small one of about a dozen players for the Wellington regional finals. Only 4 rounds of 2 games each in one afternoon, so the duration was manageable. 

I won my first 6 games and entered the final round in the lead. One more win and i would be regional champion. I then played the single worst and most annoying match of any game i have ever played in my life.

Here are what destroyed my concentration and contributed to me losing.

1.) My opponent stack shuffles. His agendas are always perfectly spaced and you can see him always shuffling his cards in groups of 5. He also shuffles in a way that shows him the bottom card of each shuffle. 
2.) He uses a non standard set up, and places resources randomly on the play area, he also tends to have 15+ things out and you lose track of where they are. 
3.) He doesn't use tokens to mark how much currency is on something, if it has a renewable amount of coin he taps it. This makes visually counting how many resources he has very difficult. 
4.) He talks at you all game, and is constantly telling you why you should be playing X and Y, and what the best counter for the last card you played is, and what he thinks is wrong with your deck construction. It's an obnoxious, non-stop barrage of how awesome he is, and you just want him to shut the fuck up. It kills your concentration. 
5.) I lost the first round as corp because i didn't see a 1 resource card he had placed near his discard pile without a token on it, so when i corp troubleshooter-ed to keep him out of a remote that i could have scored to win. I paid 1 less than i needed to, because I thought I had spent exactly enough to win. Not seeing his hidden card. And he was "oh, i have 1 more credit from this card concealed over here, oh, I guess I am through". I was not happy. 
6.) I lost the runner game in 3 rounds because i wanted to either win in 3-5 rounds or die, as I was just about to punch him in the throat.

All in all, it was the worst gaming experience i've ever had and it killed my interest in netrunner dead. I'll probably pick up the game again, but fuck playing in a tournament if I have the possibility of playing that asshole again. 

I came second, but I'd rather I hadn't played at all. 

I got some nice stuff for coming second. 

The "leading cause of paper cuts this year" award

For best card game of the year

Android Netrunner is still the best card game on the market, despite my horrible experience with it this year. 

I want to get back into the game, but I have many other things on the go at the moment. It is still a great experience of bluff, counter bluff, resource management and risk taking. I suspect that sometime next year I will start playing again. Hopefully by then, a certain person will have fallen down a sewer opening and been eating by mole people. 

The "I like where this is going" award

For best model range of the year. 

First off, an honorable mention to Privateer Press and the recent run of Trollkin models. That's some impressive work right there. 

But the king of cool new figures this year is Forge World, and in particular, the Primarch range of figures. 

They are simply works of art, no other way to describe them. It seems like Forge world and GW main are going on different trajectories, with one focusing on doing cool stuff, while the other one keeps putting out daft looking stuff. 

30k is by far the most exciting GW property around these days, and the Primarch figures are a big part of that. 

The "The distant future, the year 2000" award

For game idea/concept that could change the gaming world. 

Heroforge are doing something very interesting, and I recommend checking out their work. 

What does the scouter say!

To summarize, they have a "character generator" that is not too dissimilar from many computer games on the market. The twist is that they will 3D print your custom figure and send it to you. 

Now, until i see one in person, i won't suggest rushing off and buying a load of figures. But the potential this application and idea has is immense. 

3D printing has such potential, and if they can sort out quality issues, it can be a huge thing for the miniature gaming world. 

I'm cautiously excited to see how this all turns out. 

The "Toy soliders are serious business!" award

For miniatures game of the year

X-wing and Warmachine are still kings of the heap when it comes to competitive wargaming, but i'm going to give my award to a leftfield game that I impulse purchased, and then got dozens of hours of gameplay from. 

I got zombicide, thinking it would be a light-weight silly game with cool figures. I wasn't prepared for how tense and tactical the game would be. It's also a game my partner really enjoys and that helps a lot. 

It's not cheap, but it's simple to learn, has great tactical depth and gets very tense, very quickly. It's also a game where you cannot be complacent, as one bad move can completely ruin you.

Plus, rolling 25 dice a turn with a chainsaw is just fun!

The "Ouch, my Wallet" award

For game that ruined my bank account. 

My fleet.... missing my Rebel aces, Decimator and YT2400

This could be Warmachine, as I purchased the rest of the figures needed to finish my Cygnar army this year. But, to be honest, for Dollars spent vs Games played, it has to be X-Wing. 

I don't want to play X-Wing competitively, mostly because i know a few people locally who do play that way and they are douches. 

I'm just a Star Wars Junky, and I'm buying the figures mostly as toys. The few casual games i've played have been an absolute blast though and I do recommend the system highly. 

The "Sean Lincoln service to gaming in the community" award

For best local game support and generally being a good bastard

Goes to local Press Ganger, Chris Otton aka Palarel. 

Chris not only ran a good number of the Warmachine events in Wellington this year, like he has every year for quite a while. He also ran a long term "Iron Kingdoms" campaign with me and another 5 trouble makers. 

Anyone who can GM that group for an extended period of time has the patience of a saint. Cheers Chris. 

The "What shall we do tonight, Pinky" award

For best boardgame of the year

Hands down, my best boardgame of the year is Spartacus. 

Not that long ago, a boardgame based on any established IP was a recipe for buying a garbage boardgame. 

Battlestar Gallactica smashed that boundary, proving that you could take a TV series and make a stellar game out of it.

Spartacus is in the same ballpark as Battlestar. It's fun, it's tense, it has loads of space to mess with each other, and it's usually very close. 

Honorable mention to "Dead of Winter", which arrived late in the year and is also a very good game. 

The "Golden Kriegy" award

Overall winner For best game system of any kind for the year

A hard choice this year as my time was split between many systems and many different things. So lets list the game's I really enjoyed this year. 

X-Wing, Spartacus, Iron Kingdoms, FFG Star Wars RPG, Warmachine, Zombicide, Dead of Winter, Mansions of Madness and Eldritch Horror. 
So now it's confession time. I have been designing a game engine that will allow me to run a massive Star Wars epic campaign next year that will use X-Wing, Imperial Assault and Armada to supplement a roleplaying game. I've spent a lot of time building it, and that's because Age of Rebellion got me interested in running the campaign. 

So the Winner of the Golden Kriegy award, is Age of Rebellion. 

Oh, and if your curious about how much work i've put into the game, here's a "welcome to" document of the sector that my players and I built to play in.