My wife and daughters purchased me the starter box of AoS at the local games workshop shop this past weekend for me as a birthday present. This came about because I brought back my copies of Hero Quest, Advance Hero Quest, Battle Masters, and my copy of the first Warhammer Quest that had that awesome campaign book right in the box. So, my loving family went to the shop and the guy sold them this box. The game seems fun. I looked at the new WarhammerQuest but I hate dungeon tiles. I like just fixed board.

It's actually kind of remarkable how much GW has already changed under the new CEO.  A few well thought out supplemental products (Age of Sigmar: Skirmish) and pricing strategies (bundles at an actual discount) and the game has changed from something I decided to something I'd recommend (and have gotten into myself).

The Skirmish supplement drastically reduces the model count of the game and is actually fun.  There's also a full renown PDF on The Grand Alliance forum.  I'd definitely recommend the Skirmish book 100%.  I don't actually play the normal version of the game I like the skirmish version so much.

First GW ripped off Law and Chaos from Michael Moorcock (he thinks so anyways ) now they are pilfering the Eternal Champion.

Poor fucker.

There is no question that GW's Chaos is inspired by Moorcock. Back in the early days of Warhammer, there was more focus on Law opposing Chaos, instead of the Man vs. Chaos which it has become.  As for the Eternal Champion, there's always was the question if Sigmar is the 40k Emperor. Back in the day, you saw more crossover between fantasy and 40k and stuff was teased, but not made canon.

This has been an odd thread, in that the first 9 pages were more beefs about GW (as legitimate as most of those are) than "what is AoS."  I've been a role-player and boardgamer for the past 40 years and I'd never done miniatures gaming at all.  But I have a friend who has the desire, resources, and artistic skill to do 90% of the heavy lifting in acquiring and painting minis for AoS, so we starting playing about 8 months ago, and have gotten more serious about it in the past 3 months.  We just came back from our first minis con and there were several dozen tables playing AoS (only 40K had more - a lot more).

We tried 40K before AoS (7th edition 40K) and, while I love space marines fighting monsters, I *hated* the rules with a passion.  I endured them and was never enthusiastic to play.  When my friend told me that AoS was more streamlined, I was interested.  We tried it and I thought it so much better.  So maybe my appreciation of AoS is born of a) lack of knowledge of other minis games and b) comparison to a worse rules set.  But I really like the game.

As for the fluff, I think it's pretty cool and more interesting to me than old WHF stuff, which I know from the role-playing side of things.  It is very well-suited for fantasy army battles forever at war and it re-dresses some old stereotypes in some interesting ways.

So I like the game a lot and am happy to be playing it, but I had to do almost none of the heavy lifting to be able to do so, so I'm lucky that way.