Meeples & Miniatures Podcast – Episode 116 – God of Battles
Download Episode 116
Welcome to Episode 116 of the Meeples & Miniatures Podcast
On this show, I am joined again by Jake Thornton, this time to have an in-depth discussion about God of Battles, the fantasy mass battle rules he has written, published by Foundry.
We talk about the rules, background, army lists and the thinking behind the design philosophy and game mechanics.
I hope you enjoy the show.
Tales of @NeilTheDwarf 
It really is a great system and deserves more coverage.
Thanks for the great interview with Jake Thornton. I hope Foundry will allow these rules to be made available in North America via PDF or from a print on demand source such as Lulu or other source. The price of this book combined with the shipping I think is prohibitive to players who would like to try them out. I believe it’s currently only available directly from Foundry. As much as I’d love to have the full color hard cover edition, I would be nearly as happy with a full color copy on PDF I could read on a tablet. Foundry stands to make much more money from a digital distribution model than their current direct only sales. I just hope to see this rules set made much more widely available this way.
Well, that answered my question even before I headed over to Foundry’s website. Dang. Shipping big books overseas is pricey. I, too, would hop right on a pdf version.
This is what my copy of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy had to say about God of Battles:
entry: God of Battles (not to be confused with the video game God of War) is a great game by Jake Thornton best known for being totally hampered by the most laissez-faire marketing approach ever attempted by any company in the known universe. God of Battles is also in contention for the most “drawn out release” of any table top game produced by Homo sapiens in the Sol System (only to be superseded by Vulcan 3D Chess, a non-existent game which only purpose was to serve as a prop in a television serial from the late 1960’s CE Earth). Happily, God of Battles does achieve some notoriety when it was featured in the planet ‘Aren’ created by the Magratheans (who in keeping with the spirit of God of Battles failed to populate the planet with over half of the planed species).
I really enjoyed this episode, the rules sound very interesting and once I finish my current Lead Mountain I wouldn’t mind giving them a go
I’m sorry…I don’t understand the use of the words ‘finish’ and ‘lead mountain’ in the same sentence.
by finish I mean start on and by lead mountain I mean mountain range
In a bit of the interview that was edited out, Jake queried why I was giving my copy of the rules away. (I think he may have been slightly hurt 🙂 )
The simple reason is that I am very unlikely to have any reason to use these rules in even the medium term. I currently only have enough fantasy figures to build a couple of SoBH warbands, so not likely to build a fantasy army big enough to use them. Well not until either:
a) I finally buy that Vendel Dwarf army I’ve been after or
b) Copplestone makes a fantasy army in 15mm to match their Dwarf one, and gives the Dwarfs some crossbows. Then I might be tempted to play GoB in 15mm.
Up until then, my loss is the competition winners game. It might shock some people to hear me say this, but you can’t play everything
yeah yeah yeah, I give you 2 months and you’ll go out and buy a fantasy army 😉
surprised you didn’t mention kings of war rules or figures and just compared GOW and foundry figs to GW rules and figures , they are a good source of reasonably priced fantasy , especially as foundry still charge 2 to 3 pounds per figure before shipping !
Andy
That is a good point. KoW is not really on my radar – the elf, orc and undead armies are OK, although I haven’t seen them in the flesh, but really don’t like the dwarves…
Neil
Looks like a fun game to play I would like to try this one out is this one the same as DUST game minatures? … by the way your podcast is really good we would like your episode to be added here on http://www.ipodder.org/
I must say I did enjoy this episode as I was driving to a meeting In Exeter last Thursday. Being a two hour drive from my home in Wiltshire it was the perfect length and left me thinking I may even dig out some of my old fantasy stuff for the first time in around 25 years! There you go again Neil Shuck!! Something else to put on the ‘Shuck Shelf’ of new things I didn’t know I would want.
don’t worry Philip we all have one of those shelves
Later you will need to move the shelves to the “Shuck Shed” for the “Shed load” of unpainted figures and unopened games!
That’d be a “Shuckload”. 🙂
Which is defined as the number of games and minis that almost, but not quite, weigh enough to cause a disturbance in the space-time continuum.
Although perhaps the only disturbance needed is “I can’t possibly hope to play all these games / paint all these miniatures within the space of a single lifetime.”
I think it’s worth a patent. 😉