Godsgloom: A New “Use Any Mini” Wargame | Essen Spiel Interview
If you’ve been in the hobby for a while, you probably have “the shelf.” It’s where all your cool, retired, or proxy models live—miniatures from old games, amazing 3D prints, and D&D monsters that were just too cool not to buy. Godsgloom is a new mass-battle wargame designed for that exact player.
It isn’t a miniature company; it’s a ruleset company. Their goal is to let you use your entire collection in a fast, competitive game. At Essen Spiel, our CEO Bart sat down with the team to learn about their brilliant “Gloom Base” system, their app-driven rules, and their “use any mini” philosophy.
Our Interview with the Godsgloom Team
A Ruleset, Not a Miniature Company
Bart – Head of Studio:
Could you describe your game, the system that integrates all your models? What makes it stand out? What’s the main selling point for new players?
Godsgloom:
The key selling point is that a lot of people own a lot of miniatures. And we already have some miniatures which are unusable because the rules change, and so on. That’s why we are not a miniature company, we are a rules-set company. Normally, the miniature companies are like doctors and pharmacists in one – they prescribe the medicine, and they make the medicine. And that’s why all that balance goes systematically. We want to be an exception about that, and we want to produce only the rules, and only the rules that stay, that you learn, and they don’t change and don’t grow overpowered.
Also, the idea is that nowadays mass battles, not skirmish but mass battles, normally take two and three hours. We want to distill the rule set so that you can play a mass battle – you can get a mass battle feeling – in one hour, one hour 15 minutes. So, it’s fast and competitive, but it’s not a “beer game,” let’s say that. We want to distill the rule set so that it won’t be about knowing all the rules; it’s about decisions that matter. Where to use the activations, where to not, where to focus your attention, and so on.
So, everything is not about the tons of rules, the rule to wound, the rule to hit, the rule to save, the roll to ward save – no, everything is very fast and very, as we call it, distilled, which brings things that really matter.
A Mass Battle on Your Kitchen Table
Godsgloom:
Even some things like deployment are made not on the playing field, but at your home. You already know the map—each scenario has a predetermined map in each season-so you pre-deploy at your home when you build your army. So, it’s even faster than that. Also, as you can see here, it’s a quite small table that you can fit on any kitchen table. I don’t know any games on the market that can give you a mass battle on your kitchen table.
Also, as you can see, there are the hexes, but we collaborated with Geeky Studio to make the mat, which has hexes that don’t get seen from afar and don’t make the ugliness of a wargame. But it speeds up the gameplay and makes it very clean. You don’t need to argue about the millimeter, “You get line of sight,” “You don’t get line of sight.” And there is no measuring tape, so there is no moving of the table, and nobody’s pushing your miniature in a tournament. We try to be as clean for a sporty play as possible.
A Wargame Driven by an App
Godsgloom:
Also, everything is in the app: all the rules, all the profiles.
Bart:
So, an application exists?
Godsgloom:
We are a theoretical app company. We don’t write books; we will have a really powerful app, which speeds up the play as much as possible. Theoretically, in the app, you have – when you’re in play mode and you’re paired with your opponent – you get your own roster, you have your hand, like Gambit spells or whatever, and you also know your opponent’s roster. So you don’t need to ask him, “Oh, it’s a tier number three unit?” “Oh, they have that and that.” So it’s very cool. And, of course, the scenario which you are playing.
In the beta mode, we already even have a dice probability calculator built in the app. So, if you are really geeky, you can look how to… where is a good attack vector.
Bart:
Is this a standalone application or a web-based one?
Godsgloom:
It will be a website-driven app, but there will be the technology which… it’s possible from a web app that it will run on full screen. But for half a year, when we are in closed beta, we are speaking and tracking everything. And later, the app and the ecosystem behind the app will go…
Positioning and Army Archetypes
Bart:
Is this system exclusively for fantasy battles?
Godsgloom:
Yes, it’s for fantasy battles because the main idea is that everything is about positioning and maneuver. Each unit has a front and back, and in this game, it’s not so important who you face against who.
Here, of course, there are some rules which relate to, “You are a monster,” or, “Somebody is better against monsters,” but it’s not so important as the positioning itself. If you attack front to front, nothing will really be strategic. But if you attack from the back, from a forest, and that unit is engaged, the probabilities to beat that unit rise dramatically. So everything is about modifying the positions of the units, attack vectors, and that makes it very tactical. Because you don’t need to know the rules for that, you just need to think. It’s not like knowing the game is not about knowing thousands of special rules.
Normally, some companies that say, “Use any miniatures,” still have some the same army ideas. If it’s Orcs, it’s Orcs. We don’t have that. All our armies are based on deep archetypes. It’s like if it’s the archetype of a Horde, it’s just a Horde archetype. You can use how you imagine a Horde. You can use your own Orcs, your historical Barbarians, or, I don’t know, even the Tyranids can go for that. Or even nowadays, 3D printing comes more and more popular, so you can design your own faction from really a thousand models which are on the internet.
If it’s an Unliving Host archetype, it’s any models or army which can revive. So it can be classic Undead, it can be some Golems, it can be even Mechatrons, something Steampunk idea. So how you imagine it. It’s not only like we bring the creativity of creating the army not only about painting your Space Marines into an original color scheme, but also designing your own army from even different games. You can see here a monster, a Chronicle Packs, which is…
Bart:
I see, you’re referring to Blood Rage. It’s similar to Warmachine, Dungeons and Dragons, and Age of Sigmar. I even spot a dragon that looks like it’s from Archon Studio!
Godsgloom:
So, and as you can see, everything can blend together as one army. So, we are wanting to open the creativity of the players.
Bart:
So, players have the freedom to customize their imaginative experience, right?
Godsgloom:
Yeah.
The ‘Gloom Base’: An End to Table Clutter
Godsgloom:
And everything is combined by our Gloom Base, as we call it. It’s the base, which is also a common model. We have a lot of connectability. It can be square bases, it can be a round one. It has the health bar, it has the marker/ticker for morale, it has the marker holder for other states. So, when you move on the battle, there is no table cluttering.
And it’s also about the activation on and off. It also has the number of each unit, so it’s possible to identify them. So your opponent knows without asking who is who very easily.
Bart:
That’s really clever.
Godsgloom:
And we also have magnets here, so it’s very easy to set up the army. You don’t have to sacrifice your miniatures from not going into another wargame. You just take units from other wargames, put them on, connect them to the Gloom Base, and play.
Bart:
How can larger models be deployed, specifically those exceeding the currently available 40-millimeter base, to accommodate the players’ more substantial models?
Godsgloom:
It’s around 60 millimeters max. We specially designed that the biggest model with 80-millimeter bases are still valid. They’re a little bit bigger than our standard hex by 7 millimeters, but it still works. Because if you don’t have 10 dragons with 80-millimeter bases, it still works.
Bart:
This base design is quite clever, especially since all tokens can be placed directly on it instead of scattered around the models, which is a fantastic feature.
Godsgloom:
And we also have a common panel, which is like it has the command tokens, activation, the rope mechanic which we call momentum, and it’s also the like a token holder, and it’s the same as the box for transporting and everything.
Bart:
Very great design, to be honest. Thank you so much for the interview.
Your Collection, Your Army
Godsgloom is a great game for the true collector. It’s a game that respects your hobby history. That dragon from Blood Rage? It’s your monster. Those Undead you 3D printed? They’re your “Unliving Host.” That Warmachine construct? It’s your golem.
This game gives you the freedom to build the army you’ve always wanted, using the models you already love.
But there’s one challenge: how do you make a Warmachine model, a D&D miniature, and an Archon Studio dragon look like they belong in the same army?
That’s the part we love.
A strong, consistent paint scheme is the glue that binds a “use any mini” army together. It’s what turns a random assortment of models into your Unliving Host.
Your job is to be the creative director, digging through your collection to build that great army archetype. Our job is to provide the skilled paint work that pulls them all together into one, impressive army.
Book a commission here.
