It's been a while, but we haven't been idle at all - never!
While most of the lack of updates just comes down to us being worthless at updating this blog (by the way, the Creations of Bile team are finished, and will get on here soon!), for the last couple of months we've been trying to make our own game!
*fanfare*
Encounter 28!
Encounter28 is a fanmade ruleset for small sci-fi skirmishes in a grimdark future. See where this is going? (As if you didn’t already have that figured out from the first glance at the cover of these rules…)
That being said, you can use any miniatures and setting you like. The beauty of this hobby is that the rule of cool is always king.
“But… There IS already an official skirmish game in the grimdark future?”
Yes. And we’ve played it quite a bit, being huge fans of the setting, the lore, the miniatures, the art - we love everything about it. Except perhaps the game itself. We’re old. Bitter Old Painters, y’know? And being old and bitter, we just don’t have the necessary memory to remember a bunch of special rules, the processing power to navigate a huge amount of synergies, and actually have a good time playing the game. We just want to play with our little plastic soldiers, and tell a good story while doing it.
Hence the “28” moniker; about a decade and a half ago, a grassroots movement called Inq28 surfaced. The idea was inspired by GW’s long abandoned game “Inquisitor”, where the story, the miniatures and the setting is much more important than things like perfectly balanced rules, min-maxed lists and winning. It grew into a huge community, and Instagram and Pinterest are absolutely brimming with amazing miniatures, converted and painted to emphasize the “Grimdark”, the “Blanchitsu” and the dark, damp corners of a gothic future. We heartily recommend searching for “Inq28” and getting inspired by the amazing stuff people come up with.
… But we digress; this isn’t a ruleset for someone looking for a tight, complex and competitive game, with constant balance updates. GW does that very nicely with Kill Team. This ruleset is made for anyone looking for something a bit lighter, much more flexible in regards to building a team, and just wanting to move their cool little plastic dudes around and hopefully have a lot of fun doing it.
We’ve gotten ideas from lots of place, too many to mention - We’ve basically taken things we like the most from the official Grimdark Future Skirmish Game, combined it with a lot of stuff stolen from a lot of different wargames, and forged it all into Encounter28.
The most important things to us were that the game should be fast to play (about an hour), easy to learn, the rules should be simple enough to quickly fade into the background (only about a page of rules pr. Action), so the story takes the lead, and flexible enough to let you use pretty much any miniature or conversion you like. If this sounds interesting, please go to https://encounter28.blogspot.com/ and check out the rules. They're completely free and will continue to be so.
We hope you enjoy it, and please send any critique or suggestions to bitteroldpainters@gmail.com; we’d love any and all feedback.
Thanks a lot for getting through this wall of text - have fun!
