Why Age of Sigmar is a good war game

War Game

noun


A military exercise carried out to test or improve tactical expertise.



The statement above is the dictionary version of a war game. In my experience a good test of tactical expertise must include the following:

• Expectation of unexpected circumstances

• Anticipation of the enemy

• Decision making ability 

• Ideally optimal reaction to the current situation

Each of these can be shown in Age of Sigmar quite easily and I will outline below. You may think that all tabletop games will have this but I don't believe any do quite as much as Age of Sigmar. 

Expectation of unexpected circumstances

Age of Sigmar is fairly unique, at least in the modern age of tabletop war gaming, in that you may bring any army of any size you wish to the game with no prior list design required. This creates a huge level of unexpectedness to each game. 

With Warhammer Fantasy and most other war games, you would likely know what army your opponent would bring and could have a good guess as to the type of list they would use. This was mainly due to unbalanced point costs, the prevalence of the Netlist and comp systems which were biased towards certain areas. 

Age of Sigmar essentially eliminates that (even when using a Pool system to build an army to some extent). During deployment you have to learn to expect the unexpected while reacting to your opponents Warscroll deployments.

Anticipation of the enemy

Now this is something that you will have to do in any war game, however this is more so with Age of Sigmar due to the turn mechanic. You have to anticipate your enemy's next turn whilst simultaneously planning for a double turn swing, this is not an easy tactic to master as I have found out. 

The double turn is possibly part of the game that is subtle in it's tactical use. A novice player will hope for the double turn so they can get extra attacks in where possible. An expert player will have deliberately set up his units to make optimal use of the extra turn. 

There is a lot to talk about on this subject which I will broach in a future post. 

Decision making ability 

From my experience with previous editions of Warhammer Fantasy, decision making was mostly done at the deployment phase with little that could be changed once the battle was underway (with a few exceptions of course). Movement was very limited in ranks and flanks and charge reactions weren't really much of a decision. 

In Age of Sigmar you have a constant barrage of decisions to make: what unit to deploy, which command abilities to use, to charge, to retreat, to summon reinforcements... 

Warscrolls in Age of Sigmar have a wide range of abilities which can hugely change a situation immediately, this really was not the case in Warhammer fantasy.  

Ideally optimal reaction to the current situation

This relates to all of the three points above, you are only as good as what you can do right now. In real life, a battle is a unique and organic situation which is ever changing, you can only do what you believe to be optimal at that time. 

This is probably the most important part to being a great tactician in any aspect of life and Age of Sigmar emulates this exceptionally well when compared to the traditional war game model. 

In summary

Age of Sigmar ticks all the boxes when it comes to testing or improving tactical expertise. You don't always know what you will face, or how big a force that may be, and you certainly can't rely on the situation remaining in your favour for very long. 

This is how it works in real life, and also how it works in Age of Sigmar.