Counts-as in Shadespire

[CyderPirate]

Hey folks, played my first few games of Shadespire last night and I really enjoyed it. Bloodbound and SCE aren't really my thing, though, so was considering converting up some Slaves to Darkness to replace the SCE warband, and some Tzaangors to replace the Khorne guys. The intention would be to make the models easily identifiable as their 'normal' versions. So the 'Oberyn' stand-in will need to have a 2-handed weapon, etc etc. 

Obviously the decks, abilities etc, would still be the same - I'm not proposing home-brewing my own factions.

How would you guys feel about playing a band like that? Ok or not?

What else would work as stand-ins, especially for factions that probably aren't going to get a warband any time soon?

[Killax]

For regular and casual play that would be okay with me. I'm even considering rebuilding Steelheart's Champions as a trio of Blightkings  

What I think is essential here is that you inform your opponent as much as possible, so I'd keep the deck cards the same but have the names of the orginal characters linked to something akin to it. It's very easy to confuse opponents with this.

Obviously I don't expect this to ever part of competitive play though, again purely because of the confusion that is very likely to occur.

[BaldoBeardo]

The organised play pack already published specifies that you must use the correct minis, although conversions to them are acceptable. As is the way of things, expect that to eventually become standard practice everywhere apart from your kitchen table.

But as Killax said, 'casual' play is between you and your friends, so do what you want.

[thediceabide]

You could just paint the Bloodbound as slaves marauders, they're far better looking minis. If you really want, shave off the khorne symbols and replace them with chaos stars, or leave the Khorne symbols, since there are Khorne units in Slaves. Personally mine wont be all painted red either.

[Elodin]

Ehh...  if it was just a casual game I would play with a person who is using proxies, but I wouldn’t really be super excited about it. There’s a pretty stark difference between Tzangors and Khorne imo, so it would feel weird.

 

 At the end of the day though, it’s your stuff, so unless you were planning on doing it competitively, I would just do whatever feels right and talk it over with your local gaming group. 

[someone2040]

As always, amongst friends you can pretty much do whatever you want as long as you're all happy about it.

And in competitive, it definitely won't be acceptable because GW have outright said no to it in their rules pack, which I'm sure majority of events will follow.

The area in between, casual play amongst a group, I think is more likely to side on the 'no' side also. Just because counts as where things don't make 'thematic' sense always feels weird. There's no in-theme reason why Tzeentch could be using Khorne rules, or Slaves to Darkness using Stormcast rules, so it just feels off because those are so far away from the actual thing they're trying to represent.

So personally I don't see there being a lot of 'counts as' taking place in Shadespire. At the end of the day, to get the cards you need to get the warbands anyway. So everyone has access to the correct models just on that basis.

 

[Wallack]

I'm the kind of person that if the minis are painted and easily differentiable am completely happy with any conversions or count-as. Basically when I started warhammer there was that rule, count-as, that you could use any miniature to count-as other if you wanted and if you converted it and was differentiable and not a small dog counting as a dragon.

[CyderPirate]

Cheers for the responses folks.

Kinda surprised by how downbeat people are on the idea, but I understand where you're coming from.  For me, one of the weaknesses of Shadespire is the fact that, with only a handful of warbands - and the composition of those warbands being set in stone - there's little room for creativity on the modeling side of things.  I feel its going to get pretty visually boring playing against an endless stream of similarly-painted gold-and-blue SCE and red/pale flesh blood reavers.

I'm more likely to be playing 'kitchen table' games (well, at clubs/FLGS) but I didn't realise they'd issued a ruling that the exact models HAVE to be used in competition. Thanks for pointing that out, that could've been ugly!

On the fluff justification for the stand-ins, you're right, Tzaangors aren't a great thematic fit for the Bloodbound and they might look better as marauders (minus the khorne symbols). I'd gone for an agressive, poorly-armoured unit that had enough options that I could make obvious analogues for each of the Bloodbound models, but  the rules/stats for angry humans doesn't match up well with the big birdies. 

I forgot to mention the StD warriors/chosen for the SCE stand-ins would be Tzeentch flavoured! That does make at least something of a difference as the inspiration mechanic for the SCE  (rolling a shield/critical symbol) can just as easily represent the foresight granted by Tzeentch as it does the resilience of the eternals (or indeed Nurgle, if you make 'em Blightkings!). In AOS, the rules for Chaos Warriors are very similar to those for Liberators, so I don't feel like its really that far off, fluff-wise. 

 

 

[gorthorbeastlord]

Warriors are so small compared to stormcast though

[Wallack]

Does it matter?

[Sleboda]

For all other GW games, the hobby part of things is really big. Modelling and painting are vital to their success and appeal. The models and the hobby aspect of the games are what got me into GW in the first place.

With Shadespire, I think we have a totally different animal.  For the first time in my 30+ years playing GW games, I find that I would actually almost prefer the hobby remain totally out of the game.  There are even signs from GW that the hobby aspect of this game is minimal.

• super easy to assemble game pieces (the models)
• all 4 current warbands are produced in different color plastics
• the little image in the corner of each card is of a bare plastic model
• the box and all contents show models that are not painted
• there is no reference to a hobby in the materials - not even a "you've just entered the world of hobby gaming - he're is your next step" blurb
• it appears the organized play rules discourage counts-as and proxies

This really does appear to be a very much non-hobby game from GW.  It has crossover to those of us who play a hobby game (AoS) and it links to things we all know about, but as a game, on its own, I think it's just a board game like many others (with some modern-ish game mechanics sort of stuff).

So, with that all said, I would very much prefer to play against the pieces that come in the sets, not something else, and would have zero issue with people never painting the models.

[Killax]

Shadespire is a different game, it's designed for competitive organized play. Despite tournament organisers doing this for years with Age of Sigmar and Warhammer 40.000 in most cases Games Workshop was not directly involved and it really has been years since I've seen any tournament rules made up by Games Workshop themselves. As far as I know, there is no GW made Age of Sigmar Tournament pack to begin with.

The difference between Shadespire and Age of Sigmar or regular Wargames is that Shadespire is indeed a Skirmish Arena game. The advantage is less space required to set up, much more portable and 10+ players can actually comfortably play this game in your regular small Games Workshop store aswell. If anything it's much more like Magic the Gathering or other popular card games.

Having said that though there is enough of a hobby aspect in it but it's indeed less free form as Age of Sigmar. Thing is, Age of Sigmar being the best example, not all players want to have free form (Tournament) designs and not all players have easy acces to the larger Warhammer Tournaments. Warhammer Underworlds is compact and in that sence also more restricted at the same time though Warhammer Underworlds can cover multiple armies/warbands much faster as any of the Age of Sigmar or 40K games can because it's more compact.