Playing with Big Dudes

I have a group of friends who actively play Age of Sigmar and a group who might be looking to take baby steps into playing Age of Sigmar. I was interested, if nothing else but to have a new project to collect and paint and thematic armies collect and paint better than most, but I didn't know how to go about choosing anything. 

I went through all the galleries of Age of Sigmar armies, and the only things that drew my eye were the giant lizard for the Fyre Slayers, the Elven flying turtle, and the Kharadron Overlords' flying ships.

That's when I realized that I wanted to play with big toys.

Age of Sigmar has done a pretty good job of balancing how and what centerpieces will exist for each army. Elves get turtles and sea horses, sigmarines get flying bird horse thing, shirtless angry dwarves get a smithy and a lizard thing.

Covetous shooting dwarves get flying boats. 

I crave centerpieces. It's odd to say that because I also crave having lots of models to push around, but centerpiece models draw the eye in and make you appreciate the scale of the game.

Monsterpocalypse is great for centerpieces. Your most important pieces aren't some tiny commanders in a kinda special looking tank (thanks, Dropzone Commander), but are rather the monsters that duke it out with their swarms of minions milling about. A 60mm base monster being the most important AND the best looking playing piece in the game is just visually attractive and fun to play.

Warmachine has come into its own with this. Their huge base models are now designed to not just be bigger combat pieces but also synergistic models that play to certain aspects of a particular army. The Supreme Guardian above, for instance, gets fueled by dying warriors, prevents a certain amount of spell casting, AND THEN it goes in to beat stuff down. It's brilliant.

Judgement comes its own with large models since ALL the models are large. In fact, Brok, the model standing beside the Supreme Guardian, is still taller than most Warmachine models due to his 54mm scale, and he's literally a Dwarf in Judgement.

Why the interest in the large models? I don' t know. They're difficult to store and transport, even harder to fly with , and sometimes they come into games underpowered (hello flying dwarf pirate ships), but next time I'm trying to get into a game or army I will look to see what their big'uns look like.