Miniature Gaming is More Strategic Than Board Gaming!

0:00 Oh, I know your type. You're pushing around plastic men in War of the Ring, watching videos about minis being cheaper than cardboard, placing and maneuvering cards and Summoner Wars, drowning in an endless sea of campaign board game Kickstarters. And all the while, you're thinking to yourself, "Yeah, tabletop miniature gaming isn't for me. I'm a sophisticated intellectual. I'm a board gamer." Well, you're a fool. Miniature gaming has way more deaf and tactics than most board games, and I have four games that can ease you into the hobby. Let's start with something you can play solo or fully cooperative with friends. Rangers of Shadow Deep. Rangers of Shadow Deep puts you in command of a single ranger and a small war band of companions, exploring broken, monsterinfested lands through linked scenarios. You and your friends do your best to kill the monsters, gain new skills, and bring their scars and narrative choices into future missions as you work together across a shared campaign. First, I want to point out that this game is fully miniature agnostic. That means you can use whatever the hell you want as miniatures. You don't have to be like me and have a display case filled with little painted men. You could use your minis from one of your many bloated Kickstarter binges. Those anthropomorphic meeples from the thousands of Everdale expansions you own through the desert camels, building tokens from castles, the cats from Calico, or how about those mini Kit Kats you lied to your wife about and told her that they were all gone because you wanted to eat them all by yourself. You could use those, too.

1:23 This game is the perfect stepping stone into miniature gaming for those of you who play role playing games. It's entirely scenario-based, filled with plot twist and and big monsters to kill. And unlike Warhammer, where you're pushing around anonymous units, looking at random charts, you get a real sense of progression narratively and through your character's own advancement. You go from a level one nobody, tense because everything around you can kill you, to a beast of a ranger wreaking havoc across the battlefield. It's a hell of an experience, feeling more powerful as new tactics and strategies open up. This is one of those games that I think fully rewards player investment. And the rule set is surprisingly simple. It's just a d20 system where you roll, add modifiers, and try to beat a target number. That simplicity lets you and your friends focus on the story and enjoy some genuinely cinematic moments.

2:12 More than any other miniature game I've played, Rangers is doing its damnedest to tell an interesting, cohesive story that I think pulls it off most of the time. Plus, it's great to finally play a miniame built for cooperative and solo play. Anyone with any experience in miniature gaming knows how rare these types of games are, and this is a fantastic one. Think about it. You're paying for all of these gigantic dungeon crawler campaign boxes that cost you hundreds upon hundreds of dollars and take up an entire bookshelf of space. And they can't even achieve a quarter of Rangers of Shadow Deep's powers when it comes to cooperative storytelling. And all you need to own is a PDF for the rules that they sell on their site. That's it. The rest of your money can be spent on better things like like joining our Patreon and enjoying monthly videos and channel updates. Or you could just subscribe. That's good, too. So, go grab the PDF and start finding cool crap around your house to use for your Rangers. But not my Kit Kats or mine.

3:08 Now, we have one of the best miniature games I've discovered in years. Maliction. Maliction is a miniature card game that plays in 90 minutes. You build a custom deck around your leader. And instead of setting your whole army on the table at the start, you summon units onto the battlefield as the game progresses, all while casting awesome spells from your hand of cards and collecting relics scattered across the map, which provide new powers to your units and give you points to defeat your enemy. This will sound strange, but playing Maladdiction had me thinking about Mage Wars Arena, a game I absolutely loved. Both games have you summoning units onto the battlefield as you play instead of picking a team before the match even starts, which just makes it way more fun and strategic. It keeps you adapting to whatever your opponent throws at you, deciding in real time which unit helps you in that exact moment, and you're building a full deck and casting spells from it in the same way that you would Mage Wars or Magic the Gathering. Malad addiction blends some of the best aspects of board gaming into miniature gaming, making it an easy starting point for board gamers. Now, you're doing all this to capture husks, which transform into relics once you grab them, almost like a like a capture the flag objective since you can lose them as well. Gaining a relic lets you draft from a shared pool of cards that gives your unit new abilities. So, you're constantly building your synergies and racing your opponent to draft the powerful cards first. That's a different kind of interaction than the usual miniature game objective of just simply wiping the other side's models off the table. And figuring out which unit best pairs with which relic gives

4:38 the game some serious depth despite how easy this game is to understand. As for combat, anyone who's played Dungeons and Dragons will understand this system instantly. You roll a d20, check for crits, failures, and attacks of opportunity, and compare the role against the opponent's armor. And there are no misses. If you roll low, you still deal the reduced damage off your model stat card. It's a pretty simple system, but it keeps every turn feeling like it matters since nothing really kills momentum and excitement in a game like this, like like just missing completely. And thankfully, unlike Warhammer, the entry price here is really low. Models come as STL files that you can print yourself. But if you'd rather skip the hobby side entirely, the starter box comes with standies for every single unit and flat terrain pieces. Mal addiction is a seriously great game and I am thankful for all the viewers who recommended it to me in the comment section.

5:29 Whoa, wait a minute. Boy, you can't just tell them to use standes. We need them consuming more product. Boy,

5:36 who the hell are you?

5:37 I'm Dan the Adman and I'm here to make some money. Boy, now go on and get a look at this beauty right here. This is the Bamboo Lab A1. An incredibly accessible 3D printer that doesn't require a lick of 3D printing experience. I bet you think these terrain pieces were printed with them their resin because they look so smooth. Smooth boy. Well, ain't no chance. These here were printed with a bamboo lab A1. So, no post processing and no toxic chemicals were used. Now, I couldn't test this theory on myself. Reason being, I have no lungs. So, I tested it all on you and printed right next to your head while you slept. Clean and quiet, boy. In all serious though, this is probably the best experience I've ever had with a filament printer. I've been printing for a very long time. And with this one, I just kind of like I just print it and then I just forget about it. I don't have to take a piece of paper and start leveling the bed or unclog the nozzle or a bunch of do a bunch of crap. It just it always just seems to do it all on its own. And all the prints like they come out looking really similar to resin. Like I'm honestly considering just starting to print miniatures. I Yeah, this is just a fantastic printer. Highly recommend it. So go on and get yourself a shiny new bamboo lab A1 boy. Links in the description. Next we have the most charming miniature game in existence.

7:02 Moonstone. Moonstone is a light fairy tale fantasy skirmish game set in the whimsical world that feels straight from the stories you remember as a kid. Players command a fairy tale faction fighting to capture moonstones that have crashlanded before the sun rises and the stones vanish. Whoever grabs the most stones wins. Think of it like an area control board game, except here you can pick the area up and run like the naughty little trinket goblin you were born to be. I have been singing this game's praises for a very long time, and I think it deserves every bit of it. It is a wonderful entry point into miniature gaming, not just because it is a simple rule set to learn, but because it's so delightfully charming. The lore and models feel like you've stepped into a whole different world into something something straight out of a Jim Henson's Dark Crystal or his lesserk known storyteller. But beyond the aesthetics, what I find most engaging are the mechanics, especially the combat. The melee deck has six card types, three copies each. When you attack, you draw two more cards than the melee stat of the attacking character. So, a brawler might draw seven, while the scrappy little girl he's picking on only draws two as the defender. From there, it's a back and forth duel. both players playing cards trying to read each other's minds and get the perfect counterattack. I might play my cleave card, but if my opponent plays a rising attack, I'll take damage. I have to do my best to deduce what my opponent will play during combat. This game just encourages constant bluffing and mind games. And here's the thing that makes it special. If you're coming from board games, you almost never feel like you've lost because of bad luck. When you lose a round in this game, it's because your

8:33 opponent outsmarted you. Moonstone is a surprisingly deep and strategic game that requires a lot of planning and adapting. In a hobby space that can sometimes lean a little too hard into tedious dice chucking and lucky card flips, it's nice to have a game that manages to be light in rules, but incredibly deep in tactics. More importantly, Moonstone asks you to engage with the person sitting across from you at the table, not just the models. I'm watching my opponent's face looking for a tell while still having real information to work with. It's a mind game hidden inside of a miniature game, and that's why it should absolutely be one of your first miniature game adventures. Next, we have one of the only race games you will ever need. Gas Lance. Gas Lance is a vehicular combat war game where you build a post-apocalyptic demolition derby out of toy cars equipped with guns, spikes, blades, and whatever else your imagination can muster. Movement is done through templates and rolling dice to shift gears, hopefully avoiding a slide or wrecking your precious death car before you blow up every single opponent and win the race. Gas feels like it was sort of designed in a Beaver Dream. I picture the designer sort of sitting down with a bunch of kids asking them what they think is cool and and just tossing all that stuff into the game. The whole experience is just pure joy and it's generally welldesigned, too. There's a strategic game here.

9:46 You've got you got luck. Yeah, especially through the dice rolls, but the player who built his team right and made the best decisions is going to win the race. This is a game that can be as serious as you want or as silly and dumb as the beer and pretzels in your and your friends systems currently allow. You build your entire team before the race. First, you pick a sponsor, which is basically like your faction, which gives you special bonuses. Then, you spend a pool of points called cans on vehicles, weapons, perks, all to obtain the most murder potential out of your budget. The whole process is sort of like shopping but for cool And your back doesn't hurt afterwards. And even that process of shopping is strategic as you plan the perfect combinations. Like maybe getting a gatling gun up front and something spitting oil at the back or or a giant claw that brings cars closer to you so you can slice them up with like a spinning drill or giant rotary blade or maybe you get like this. The best part of this game is that you don't even have to buy expensive models. You just go to the dollar store, you get a few Hot Wheels, and that's it. You're done. And if you want to be fancy, you can 3D print some weapons with the Bamboo A1 and glue them onto your toy cars. If you wanted a fun little side hobby to do with your kids, this is it. I can't even fathom the joy I would have felt as a kid if my dad sat down with me and helped me build custom killer cars because this whole game is just pure unadulterated adolescent joy manifested on the table. When I play Gaslands, I feel like a six-year-old boy again, just crashing cars together with not a single care in the entire world. Any game that captures that feeling while also

11:17 delivering an incredibly rich and tactical experience is one hell of a good accessible miniature game. And I out no, I outright demand you try at least once. Seriously, it's just a book. That's all you have to buy. It's just this book. So, that is it for today. I hope you enjoyed this video. Let me know in the comments section if I convinced you to become a miniature gamer or if there's any miniature games, whether they're these ones or some other ones that have sort of had you teetering on the edge of embracing this side of the hobby. I promise you, you don't have to do all the stuff that I do. You don't have to have all this like terrain and plastic stuff. You don't have to paint your miniatures. Sometimes you don't even have to have miniatures. And and there is a ton more depth and strategy than you probably think there is because you are probably only aware of like games like Bloodbull or or Warhammer.

12:04 And there's just so so much out there that is just so much fun and so so strategic. Don't you agree, Mr. Puppet? Oh, I definitely do. I do declare that was my I was I was trying to do a southern accent, but I'm I'm Canadian, so frog horn leg horn is just that's that's all the exposure I have to southern accents. So, I will see you in the next video. join a Patreon and you you can fund this. This is this the Patreon members that are on the screen right now. They're responsible for this. Think about it. That's a quality investment, right?

12:46 Do I want you to be the puppet? No, I got it. Look.

12:51 They can see my arm. Well, I failed as a puppeteer. Yeah, you can pump it if you