I Stumbled On Bloody Ground

Watching videos by 7th Son on the chubes, I found a flip- and play-through of On Bloody Ground, a pair of wargames by WIP Games & miniatures. 

They have one game based on the Norman Conquest and one on the Reconquista--the latter being the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula by the Christians against the Muslims. While I have a lot of other periods I'm trying to focus on, I am  quite scatterbrained, so these are kind of piquing my interest. I'm going to get The Norman Conquest book first. The other is called El Cid and the Reconquista. 

Sidenote: Hilariously, they do a bundle "deal" that's not a deal. ie; buy two books for the price of two books, which is the sort of move Games Workshop pull. Still, in WIP's favour is that their rulebooks are very cheap and they are a small 2-man band, so they're cool.

What is actually sealing the deal isn't so much the period, but the rulebooks themselves. 

I know it might seems weird, but I really (really) love clear, well spaced text, easy to read fonts, non glossy paper, where the reading experience isn't burdened by graphical multi-coloured backgrounds. I want my rulebooks to be rulebooks. 

Hardcover, several-hundred page, full-gloss, super-heavy dense paper, impossible to read unless you're holding them on a certain angle to the light, art books don't provide a good user experience for reading. Not to mention a pain in the neck and shoulders for carrying or holding up to read. If I have to change my reading experience to suit your rulebook, if I have to sit at a desk and it's literally a pain to read it where I want, then you've failed at your job.

Many gamers seem to want these beautiful collectible art books, but I find them utter shit to read. Worse, because those glossy thick pages are bloody heavy, shipping costs around the planet tend to be on the more insane end of the spectrum. And me being in New Zealand, everything is on the other end of the planet.

Oh, get the PDFs I hear. Sure, but most of them are not printer friendly. Even the ones that say they are have just turned the colour pages into black and white. Or they strip out the background image, but leave in all the other graphics such as fancy borders, or art on every page. 

As mentioned in a recent blog post, I ordered a physical copy of General d'Armee 2 for Napoleonics. Including postage, with the conversion rate, it cost me NZ$109 (and included a PDF copy).

My printer is currently out of ink. New ink cartridges cost NZ$78 for the colour and NZ$62 for the black (that's for the "XL" carts which do 400 pages at 5% yield--or 20 full colour pages). That's $140! That probably would have been enough to print GDA2 because it's got a clean background and easy to read font, but does have a lot of images, so no guarantee.

Of course, when you add the cost of the PDF, I think it was US$16, on its own which is about NZ$26-27, suddenly, it's cheaper to buy a physical book than the ludicrous price of ink for self-printing. 

Just to be clear, I'm not aiming this at GDA2. My bile is aimed at printer manufacturers who are gangsters running a racket.

And I simply can't read rulebooks digitally. Or at least, I can't play with digital rulebooks. Flipping back and forth around the book is just too cumbersome. I love and consume novels digitally, but rulebooks have to be physical for me. Technology hasn't recreated the thumbs and their ability to nimbly navigate a book at speed in either direction.

Back to my original point... After seeing the flip-through of On Bloody Ground, the pages are so beautifully laid out and clear: EXACTLY WHAT A GAMING RULEBOOK SHOULD BE! that I want to support the company and have that in my collection and start playing their games because they have made the perfectly formatted rulebook! 

Look at this:

See how beautiful that is? I'm not mental, honest. 😂😂

It's clear, it's concise, and it's to the point. Unlike me and most other rulebooks out there.

Here's 7th Son's video if you want to check it out:

WIP are also doing ranges of 28 and 10mm figures to go along with their games, and I'd love to do this in 10mm.