Yesterday I played my first match of Hobgoblin. It was a delight, and an epiphany.

I’ve wanted something like this for years. I was in middle school when I got a copy of the core rulebook for Warhammer Fantasy. I read through that book cover to cover, and then I read it again. I bought a faction’s army book (for the Skaven) with all their special rules and abilities, and read through that over and over too. I bought my first box of models. I yearned to play.

I never did.

For one thing, I didn’t have the patience—didn’t feel the satisfaction—for building armies of miniatures, let alone painting them. It didn’t help that I’d picked a faction that demanded tremendous numbers of troops for any given army. I’d fixated on the horde-based ratmen who were supposed to swamp their enemies in wave after wave of troops, but I could barely motivate myself to assemble and paint my first regiment. I didn’t like cutting out the units from their plastic sprue, I didn’t like the epoxy fumes, I didn’t like struggling with each model’s posture in succession… everything was so fiddly. I was overwhelmed.

I still wanted to play.

But beyond my own lack of enthusiasm for making my army, there were other issues. First, the whole damn thing was extremely expensive. Building and painting a basic army would cost at least $100, and that was a little more than my middle school allowance would… allow.

Second, there just weren’t many other people to play with. I knew perhaps one other person who might play with me. Warhammer Fantasy Battles simply didn’t have a big following where I grew up, probably for the aforementioned reasons.

So while I clung to my enthusiasm for the idea of a tabletop fantasy battle game, I never played one. Strategy video games sufficed, for the most part. I thought wistfully of games I’d wished to play, and moved on.

Enter Hobgoblin.

Decades later, I see a Kickstarter for another game from Mike Hutchinson, the creator of Gaslands. I’ve read through that game and appreciated its design, though I haven’t played it on account of getting my copy immediately before COVID lockdowns hit. But what I’d seen of Mike Hutchinson’s work, and his design aesthetic, impressed me.

So I’m excited to see that his new game, Hobgoblin, is intended to fill the same genre niche as Warhammer Fantasy. The difference is that Hobgoblin is intended to be fast and brutal, with a minimum of fuss or fiddling. Most games of Hobgoblin are meant to be played in perhaps an hour and a half, tops, and—crucially—the game emphasizes making up your own armies and using whatever miniatures you want.

While I’ve seen videos of people playing Hobgoblin with beautifully painted big blocks of units, I’ve also seen folks showing off test games with random boardgame pieces to mark their units. There’s none of Games Workshop’s focus on selling specific units with specific pre-made rules and abilities, a focus omnipresent in their various Warhammer games. Instead, Hobgoblin embraces not only making up your own units and armies within the game’s underlying customizable ruleset, but also using whatever miniatures or objects you want to mark your various units.

Obviously anyone who wanted to could have played any Warhammer game at home with whatever stand-ins they liked. But Hobgoblin is designed with precisely that in mind, and the final result feels radically different.

The game I played last night used a single old miniature to mark each unit, while the unit’s footprint was tracked with index cards with a few words scribbled on them. That was all we needed. Apart from struggling with the art of moving index cards without fumbling our units all over the map, play was extremely smooth and resolution was fast—like someone had thoughtfully gone through, taken note of every place we might get caught and slow ourselves down, and then filed all those edges off. It was an excellent experience.

Better yet, it felt like a game with relatively low planning investment for designing a given army and moderate in-game variance. I didn’t feel like I’d wasted my time or effort, my mid-game maneuvering choices felt impactful, and nothing felt pre-determined until the last few actions of the last turn. Maybe that’s because I won, but my friend said they’d enjoyed it too despite losing. We’re both looking forward to another match.

I eagerly await the next rules preview, so that we can play with something more polished than the quick start.