I'm not quite free yet from having to deal with my father's estate, but I have been making some good progress on the game. I'm glad to report that we now have the first pre-alpha release done, and it's been distributed to the WarStrike staff, and some selected local testers.
I hadn't seen much in the way of people playing 40K since shortly after 8th dropped. Sales were so bad at the FLGS that the owner stopped buying directly from GW.
But I started playing Flames of War again a couple of months ago. The 4th Edition Flames rules still suck, but at least the unit cards finally came out. Making the game at least casually playable in Mid-War.
Problem is, due to the aforementioned suck, the number of Flames players has been dipping a bit. So I headed over to the relatively new Family Time Games over on the northwest side, to get some games in with new Flames players, or at least some old ones that I hadn't seen in a while.
But... What should I behold... But there were people playing 40K! Turns out, there's a fairly large group of 24+ players over there, and I didn't even know more than a couple of them. Plus the local 40K WAAC was nowhere to be seen. All the better.
So... about 3 weeks ago I joined their escalation league and made some friends. Yep, that's my old army. I tracked down the guy I sold it to in 2012 (which was no easy feat), and got most of it back last September. He made out pretty well on his investment. Turns out most of it was still bubble-wrapped. He'd only actually played with it a few times.
Anyway, on my third week in the league, a couple of the 40K guys come over to the table I'm playing at. Seems they're not entirely satisfied with 8th Edition, and wanted to know if we'd like to help test some changes they were thinking about rolling into some kind of nationally released FAQ. They were tired of alpha-strikes, and wanted to try out some kind of alternating activation system instead of "I go, you go."
I laughed, and told them that I'd been working on that problem for a while now. They seemed dubious, but the next week I brought in my testing materials (with printed book copies), and did some quick gameplay overviews. Six of them were impressed enough to want to read the WarStrike rules in detail.
And so... I spent the next week cleaning up what we had done, filled in the gaps, and we now have a PDF of the basic rules, a few missions, and some test units. Meaning that I can hand that PDF to anyone, and they should be able to figure out how to play.
I've sent copies to the M42 Staff, which now includes Stelek of Yes The Truth Hurts. He's checking the rules for anything that could be rules-lawyered the wrong way. If anyone can find those loopholes, he can. Copies have also gone to the 6 guys at the store, and some other local players from back in 5th that I thought might be interested.
We'll see where it goes from here. I'm not ready to go with a wider "official" release just yet, but I did give permission to those who have the PDF to share it with friends.
Thoughts?
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