Opening up Aristeia!, Blood Bowl, and Necromunda for the very first time!

Greetings fans of the hobby and welcome back to your lovely afternoon reading time!  It’s been the start of weather changes here and that means priming and painting galore for many!  It also heralds the coming of new games and that’s what we are here today to talk about, new stuff!  Not like a GenCon haul or anything but I’ve been eyeing a couple of games lately and so I decided to not only purchase them but also go over my initial impressions of just opening the box.  I’m sure you’ve seen many of these games and their respective unboxings but this is from the viewpoint a guy who a) hasn’t seen any of those unboxings so I have no idea what’s in them and b) I’ve not done much research on the games in terms of how they are played.  So let’s get to it!

The three games I’ve been eyeing are Aristeia!, Blood Bowl, and Necromunda.  I know what these games are on a surface level and so I’m not completely clueless about these games.  I’ve never played a game of any of the three except for a brief trial on the Blood Bowl PC version.  Since I had no idea what I was doing, however, I quickly moved on. With the recent revamping done by Games Workshop with their respective games and some of the good things, I have heard about Aristeia! I decided that it is time to dive in and just grab the 2 player boxes to check things out.  The first box I opened was Aristeia!

So my initial impression was that the contents were packed in neatly but the first thing I saw was a guide to the rules, a quick How to Play, followed with some large booklet about the game in the Infinity universe.  Next came the board, some weird angular things which ended up being team organizer spaces, followed by the rest of the box contents.  The miniatures came pre-assembled and in their own space along with a couple token sheets.  Overall it was easy to find everything and it is one of the few times where putting everything back was a breeze. 

Miniature quality was also good and even though I heard it was PVC I was still overall impressed.  Only a couple minor quirks like the big panda dude’s staff was bent as was the old man’s revolver.  I felt like I could with minimal effort starting playing this game from the get-go.  Everything was user/new player friendly and neatly organized so there wasn’t a lot of fuss about trying to hunt down what I might need to start playing.

Blood Bowl was opened up next and the first thing I saw was the miniatures and with it some gaming aids I can presume.  Now I have no idea what the tokens/ruler thingy is used for so I had to dig a little bit past the plastic frames to start locating the board and rules.  The models seem pretty easy to put together, I’m not sure if that’s how the whole BB range is but the simple plug-and-play type of models means that for a new player assembly isn’t as intimidating.  If you didn’t want to paint the models up they were in bright green and blue respectively so that there would be little confusion at a glance as to who was part of which team.  Beyond the models, there was a cardboard insert that had some info for Blood Bowl as a community/hobby/game.

Beyond that insert, I found the board and the rulebook, as well as some other cardboard pieces which I guess, is for the team managers?  As well as some cards but right now I have no idea what they are meant for.  The board and rules appear high quality and the dual-sided nature of the board meant some variety for gaming.  Everything was neatly packed albeit without any organizational aids but that meant putting things back meant that I would have to figure out myself how to reorganize it.  I felt like within an hour I could have the models clipped off and start to play at the bare minimum level (i.e. unpainted).  Now for the rules themselves, I have no idea but the rulebook didn’t seem too thick so I figure as a newbie it can’t be that bad to pick up on them and play a game.

Finally, I opened up Necromunda and I was a little overwhelmed if I could be honest.  This is not a new player friendly set I can tell you that much.  I closed the box and asked my wife to take a look inside to see her reaction (she is quite a new player type gamer) and her reaction was a mix of “oh geez” and “yeah I don’t want to touch this.”  The sprues for the models was a true GW model kit and the level of details on the parts are standard quality.  This is not an easy peasy lemon squeezy kind of assembly though, it is full hobbyist level if you ask me.  I’m excited to assemble the gangers but if I was brand new to the hobby I would be a little overwhelmed.  I also see they brought back the templates much to my delight (I miss those templates!) and they included some nice looking wall terrain as well.

Past the kits, the cardboard insert was a giant assembly guide for the models if that is any indication of what kind of models these are.  Beyond that, the rest of the box was neatly assembled like Blood Bowl with a nice quality cardboard board, token sheet, rulebook, dice, and cards.  The rulebook was a big larger than the BB one and a bit thicker but a casual glance through reassured me in that a good chunk of the contents were lore-based instead of rule heavy.  Still, the quality of the game appears to be GW standard in terms of what I paid for, so I am excited to see how it plays.  As far as prep work to get playing it definitely feels like I’ll need some time before it’ll be ready to play.  With all of the options on the sprues, I get the feeling that the gangers will need some forethought in equipment and/or load-outs before putting them together.  So I think they could be ready after a day or so of assembly and planning.

I thought it was interesting that the order in which I opened the boxes is the same order I would place the games in order of new player friendliness.  Aristeia! was definitely the easiest of the three to get started but I also feel like it’s less of a wargame/hobby than a board game so there is probably that element to consider.  Blood Bowl certainly has the hobby element to it but the impression I got overall was that it is in that spot of being a board-game and a hobby and so it had elements from both sides of the coin.  Necromunda was on the other side of the spectrum and despite the board that it came with, this is definitely not a board game but part of a bigger hobby.  I’ve heard that in the first expansion book the rules provide a means to play Necromunda without a board and into the 3D, so that reinforces my opinion.

So there we have it!  I enjoyed letting myself get an initial impression from these games since I had the opportunity to open three new games where I have NO experience with them outside of acknowledging their existence.  I’m looking forward to trying these games out and putting together the models, or in Aristeia!’s case painting them, and I’m already thinking of color schemes and backstories for the gangs.  Maybe I’ll do a Slaaneshi Escher cult gang…  Anyways until next time folks enjoy yourselves in the hobby and may your dice favor your armor saves!