Confrontation

[spiral]

Hey,

So Lin mentioned this minis game, "Confrontation", in the 4th ed opinions thread. I didn't want to clutter that so I thought I'd ask here.. who has played this game, how's it play, compared to things I know like 40k and D&D minis.

I read the new edition comes with pre-painted plastic minis instead of assemble and paint your own metal minis. How do people feel about that? I've always been quite into my painting, so the thought of getting pre-painted stuff is a little off-putting.. ?

If I wanted to give the game a try, what do I need to order?

Thanks!

[Lin]

Confrontation Third Edition is an excellent miniatures games. They have a fantasy theme and a number of armies that each bring dramatically different tactics to the table.

The first thing to note is that the game plays nothing like 40k or D&D minis. The game it plays closest to is Mordheim, which may or may not help. You get regular guys and characters, which have many familiar sounding stats like "attack", "strength" and "movement". Every model has at least one keyword ability, every character has three implied abilities on top of at least one keyword special ability. Most have a few and many have special text on top of that. Compared to other games, these special abilities have much more intriguing interactions and really define how you play the game (mostly).

One of the best things about this game when compared with Games Workshop games is that you play shared turns, similar to D&D miniatures, with very well designed rules for handling armies of different sizes. Also like D&D miniatures, the rules for each miniature come with the model, though the models are not randomly packaged.

Unlike D&D miniatures, once in close combat things get interesting. You've got fray splitting and other decisions here that will change how the combat goes. Its not simply get next to the opponent and swing.

In the end, though, this is a dice driven game. Its somewhat heavy rules-wise, but still hard to take too seriously since, ultimately, the game is in the dice's hands. It does often FEEL like you've got more control over things then in other games, though.

If you wanted to start, I'd first suggest NOT playing the new edition, if only because its a different scale game and as of now there are only two armies. Confrontation stuff can be gotten quite cheaply. What you'll need to play is the Confrontation 3 rulebook and two armies of roughly even size (anywhere between 200-500 points is a typical game). There used to be sites that contained the information on the army cards, but I can't seem to find them anymore. . .

On the downside, the game is no longer in production, if you use some of the theme cards from the army packs the game can get broken and there is a web supplement that changes the rules a bit to balance things that some people think swings the game too far in the other direction. I rarely got to play my Sessairs, but every time I did it was fun.

EDIT: There are now 4 armies in the new Confrontation. Its a larger scale game them the old Confrontation. A typical 400 point (average size) game had between 4-16 minatures per side. The new game is closer to Warhammer Fantasy Battle Scale.

[Lin]

Also, here's the site:

www.rackham.fr/