Age of Sigmar and Small and Silly Games

I recently has the chance to play an interesting little game with my nephew, and it got me thinking about what I like about games, and what my preferred approach to gaming is.

My nephew is pretty young, and not very interested in rules or competition. He does like story telling, though, and we have a lot of fun when he comes to visit just running around and making up adventures for ourselves. He's also fascinated by the miniatures I own, and we've had a great time just making up little stories around them.

This visit, I decided to try a little something different, something a bit more structured. I let him pick the miniatures and the tell me who they were, while I provided the rules, and interpreted them... loosely. This is what we ended up with:

A group of friendly ogres were wandering around the ruins of an old castle, looking for a good meal, as ogres often do. It seemed for the longest time that there was nothing to be found, only dusty empty barrels and lots of cobwebs, and the ogres were ready to move on. That was when they saw it. A turtle!

 Now it is a little known fact that ogres love turtles as friends, and while they were happy, they did not want to eat the turtles, rather they wanted to take them home. But that was when the evil and sinister ghosts of the castle appeared, who wanted to keep the turtles trapped there for all of eternity!

And that it how the game begins. It might not be high art but it was fun to make the story up with him.

The game was simple enough. Each ogre moved seperately, and had to reach a turtle. When they did, you rolled a dice. 2-5 meant a rescued turtle! 1 meant the ogre lost control and tragically devoured the turtle. And a 6 meant the turtle turned out to be a rare Turtle of Power, and both the ogre and the turtle ascended to a higher plane of existence, and were removed from the field.

The ghosts, meanwhile, were trying to steal the turtles away. They could grab a nearby one for free, but it slowed their movement down to 5" instead of 8, giving the ogres a chance to catch up. Combat was done with age of sigmar rules, but could only take place if one of the combatants had a turtle nearby.

It worked pretty well, and the ogres ended up winning, rescuing six turtles, eating two, and one ascending. The ghosts only managed to steal two. Since I was the ghosts and my nephew was the ogres, this was the ideal result.

It was fun, and I think this is the kind of game I like to play the most. The one where it's more about working together to tell a story, than anything else. I leave you with that, and this one picture