Quite a few of us here at Privateer Press are what I like to call “multi-dimensional” gamers. Sure, there are a few hardcore miniatures gamers or roleplaying gamers, but most of us fit into that multi-dimensional breed and will never be happy with only a singular gaming experience.

I’m not going to name names—partly so I don’t leave anyone out by mistake and partly because it’s a long list to type out—but plenty of us around the office enjoy miniatures games, roleplaying games, video games, card games, board games, and social games. Some of us are even into this “sports” thing I keep hearing about, which seems kind of like a game where you propel some sort of ball with a part of your body or a sport-specific object instead of rolling dice or playing cards. Sure, I guess that counts, too.

Personally, one of my favorite aspects of gaming is the diversity of experiences available. I recently went on a vacation with my wife’s family, and it highlighted a very different sort of gamer than those I spent time with at Lock & Load GameFest last month. We played some party games and family games, but I also introduced them to Bodgermania and Zombies Keep Out, and I showed them a little bit of the Iron Gauntlet coverage from Lock & Load. Granted, I lost them during that last part, but I hope they found it intriguing as well as confusing.

At any rate, it made me think about the broader picture of the gaming world and how there’s no one right way to enjoy games as a hobby.

Most of the time when you design a game, you have to pick a very specific audience or at least a targeted variety of gamers—be it an age range, some band of casual versus competitive, genre preference, etc. It’s always rewarding, though, when a single game can reach multiple audiences.

That’s something Will Shick and I hoped to accomplish during the design process for WARMACHINE High Command and HORDES High Command. We wanted to appeal to folks who liked strategic card games (CCGs and LCGs), tabletop miniatures games (WARMACHINE and HORDES), and card games played around the kitchen table. That led to a few decisions that may not have made it a perfect fit for all of these audiences but that were important so as not to alienate anyone.

For the audience who typically reads Privateer Insider blogs, one of the decisions that might not have been a perfect fit was our choice to keep the core sets relatively simple in terms of the location cards and how decks were customized straight out-of-the-box. This allowed us to reach the casual crowd but left the competitive gamers wanting a bit more.

Fortunately, the additional releases of army card expansion products and, most notably, campaign expansion products has allowed High Command to grow in strategic depth and options in a way that provides the more competitive segment of gamers what they were looking for.

If you fall into that camp, I’d strongly encourage you to check out the Invasion of Sul campaign expansion. It’s already shaking up High Command gameplay quite a bit, and the upcoming Castle of the Keys campaign expansion promises to do so all over again soon enough.

One High Command community in particular has really picked up on the growing depth of High Command gameplay and has started its own podcast about tournament-level High Command. Growth like this has me very excited to see the High Command tournament events and open play at Gen Con this year, and I hope many of you have the opportunity to participate in some Kingmaker events at a convention or a local game store.

Multi-dimensionally,
—DC