Strategic Elite: Skirmish Wargames for the Discerning Strategist

Welcome to the Strategic Elite: Skirmish Wargames for the Discerning Strategist weblog! I'm your host and founder Bob Faust.

Here at Strategic Elite, we strive to bring sharp, fun, and challenging miniature skirmish games to a market of customers and players seeking something more out of their wargaming experience. More what? You ask?

More Challenging tactical and strategic game play for starters! The consumer market is flooded with fast play, easy entry, beer & pretzels Kitchen Table Games of nearly every stripe you can imagine. And while those games are fun to play, I've spent the past 15 years watching feedback from players and have found a small minority of them to lose interest because the games didn't truly have rich tactical play, no matter what their marketing blitz said. It's these hardy few players that are looking for the type of games SE provides.

Our flagship system is Brink of Battle: Skirmish Gaming through the Ages. This was my first release and has the foundational mechanics of what has come to be known as the BoB skirmish system. BoB's core mechanics feature many unique rules that 12 years later have still not been replicated. Many of the obvious features like alternating activations between players so no one sits and watches their entire force get blown away, and the use of d10 dice instead of the ubiquitous and limited d6 have become commonplace in many skirmish games since I'd decided to use them as core components back in April of 2006. But the mechanics that set these rules apart are still unique to our stable of products. I will write a blog article in the coming weeks about these unique mechanics.

After Brink of Battle, which was a purely Historical set of rules allowing players to recreate small squad level actions from ANY time in history up to present day, we released Epic Heroes: Skirmish Gaming in the Realms of Fantasy. I say we, because my close friend and brother in phantasmagoria, Drew Davies came on board as my #1 BoB fan and co-author on Epic Heroes.

Drew & I have an interesting and highly effective dynamic, where I have a whirlwind in a bucket of an idea, and he knows whether it sucks or not! :) He once said, "I don't come up with the ideas like you do, but I know what I like." And he also can honestly tell me what changes we need to make or whether its just a shit idea, and we work very well that way. What we end up with on the other side of our process is gold.

We had a perfect storm of self-publishing hell through two different vendors that single-handedly murdered the successful marketing of Epic Heroes almost right out of the gate. Consequently its the best fantasy skirmish supplement you've never heard of! Lessons learned the hard way for sure.

Our 3rd outing with the BoB mechanics was a little earlier than I had planned. After Epic Heroes, my marketing plan was to release its sister supplement for Sci-Fi, and then after that, put the two together and do a Sci-Fi/Fantasy Post-Apocalypse book paying respects to Jim Ward's Gamma World role-playing game.

Buuut, Osprey Games offered us the chance to do the Post-Apocalyptic book first! We jumped on that, and Scrappers: Post-Apocalyptic Skirmish Wargames released on April 20th, 2017 on my 47th birthday! That's significant because I started writing BoB on April 20th, 2006! Kind of surreal.

We have shifted gears back to Fantasy, but this time with the help of my close friend Mike Todd, we're diving into the sub-genre of Metal Sword & Sorcery! The Sword Marches: Metal Sword & Sorcery Skirmish Wargames is currently in Global Play Test with our Ashcan download from the Brink of Battle website at www.brinkofbattle.com in the Downloads tab, or from our Facebook group here  https://www.facebook.com/groups/714808465525512/

So, if being rewarded for your tactical acumen, or battle scholarship is important to you, we invite you to come play with us! Our games are not for everyone, but for a Discerning Strategist our games give you what you need!

Noch Weiter!

Bob Faust

You can find our products here http://www.brinkofbattle.com/ in the Where To Buy tab, and Scrappers here https://ospreypublishing.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=scrappers