9th Age What the hell happened to Slann High Magic Loremastery?

No game that includes any element of chance is 100% balanced, so rook and scrabble do not fit your 100% claim, but your point still stands as they are fair games that have a limited amount of chance incorporated. Technically even Go and Chess has the advantage given to the player who goes first, much more obvious in Go (komi help, but only approximately mitigates the relative advantage taken), which makes them not 100% balanced either.

Warhammer with all its dice rolling is very heavy on chance, but the general's job is to weigh and mitigate those chances throughout the game while still accomplishing their goal through rolling dice. I have a hard time comparing Warhammer's (or many miniature games') gameplay with other games; the blend of the type of strategies used when every phase of the game you are trying to minimize losses and maximize gains, but still leaving chance to ultimately resolve conflicts. I have a hard time equating that gameplay to any other well-known game (other than other miniatures games). Hopefully someone can enlighten me.

 

Chance does not = unbalanced, to be 100% balanced you would have to have the exact same options, rules, and abilities of your opponent afforded to you by the game i.e. playing darts is 100% balanced but due to the inability to remove chance from the game there is always room for a difference in play. A game that is 100% balanced without any element of chance would be tic-tac-toe and that is impossible to win due to the lack of chance.

Go and Chess do tend to lend themselves to the 1st move more, but that is not always the case, there are also times where it is better to see your opponent make a move before you react. And you can always play two games in a set to remove even that very small amount of difference and to have 100% accuracy in judging skill.

There are a great many games that have the same basic core as warhammer or other miniature games, Yahtzee is a great example as it uses dice but it is up to the player to determine where and when to apply those dice rolls, and a lucky beginner is often beaten by an average or unlucky veteran. There is also risk, or D&D, even backgammon, sure none of them are exactly the same or else it would be called warhammer, but they all have dice used as a basis and utilize strategy to mitigate weakness and maximize strengths. At the end of the day warhammer is just a much more complex dice game, like chess is to checkers.

 

I think poker is a good comparison... It's got tactics when you decide whether to check raise/call or fold and on the other hand you got chance/luck with your hand cards and the flopp turn and river... (Texas holdem)
I guess warhammer is quite similar according to this... Point systems are similar to shuffling the cards before playing and so on... Really hard to describe when the games are so different to each other, but I hope you get what I mean...

 

Risk's area control really makes its basic strategies much different from Warhammer. I had considered Poker, but the real game is playing the table and reading opponents; knowing how/when to place bets (as resource management) is the biggest part of the game.

Backgammon and Yahtzee are great comparisons to Warhammer's basic stratagems of actively managing chance yet still leaving all outcomes to chance. Very appropriate, thank you!