well lets see I've played space hulk about 10 times now and am trying to write up rules for including other models like gaunts, regular marines, imp guard and so forth pretty fun game really with a bit more tweaking it can be loads of fun more than GW ever anticipated.
That's what I miss about the wayback old White Dwarfs -- they used to do this with their games. They would publish actual content in the magazine, and expand their games to make them even better.
About the only thing I can say about dread fleet at the moment is that the models look cheesy, cartoonishly implausible, over exaggerated, and trite. What makes a game fun isn't the models, its the rules, with a good set of rules you can have triangular blocks of single color painted wood to represent the ships and it would still be fun.
I get that point... but then you're paying us$115 (or whatever your local price is) for a set of rules and a bunch of plastic stuff that you don't like. The extra price tag on GW stuff is -- in my mind -- for the quality of their figures. Otherwise, I can find shelves worth of $50 boardgames with great rules and crappy playing pieces (whether plastic, wood, card, etc.)
£70 is a lot for a boardgame but compared to the money i've spent on other miniatures, is is really that much? Hell, my unit of greatswords cost almost as much as Dreadfleet and at today's prices, it would cost more!
That assumes that the price of goldswords is reasonable -- which they are not. Comparing it to something else that's overpriced is a bit off the mark.
However, that said, I do think that if you like the figures, the game is not over priced. Like I said above, $50 +/- for a boardgame isn't unusual. This one comes with what appears to be a really nice looking game mat, detailed figures, and as you said, all the terrain you need. I think that's a pretty good value if you like the rules and the figures.
Plus there's skullz and you can never have too many of those.
At this point, I've had my Skullz limit, and further OMGskullzEVERYWHERE from GW is just a further turn off from their products. At some point they found a line of "too much" and rather than just casually cross it, they loaded themselves in a great cannon and shot themselves way beyond it.
