Brief Review

[ricardo440]

Hi,

In the rules thread I was asked if I'd put together a review or battle report.

We played the game 3 times last weekend. We used 40mmx20mm bases and a 2ftx3ft board. I think our terrain features were probably a bit large. I was stuck on a hill for pretty much an entire game.
So here are my first impressions:

Good Bits:
Overall it was fun
We picked up the rules quickly. We made a few mistakes in game 1 (e.g. forgot CPs can only be spent 4BW away). But I think by game 2 and 3 we were playing most things right.
It is quite quick. As I say we completed three games in a day, starting from a point of never having played before.
the Commander was fun. Deciding what to invest him into each turn was good fun and very important.
Shooting is effective.
The points system was great, really easy to pick an army and it seemed very balanced.
The terrain placement worked well. Quick and easy and no chance of crying "foul" to ones opponent.
Combat and shooting are very simple. The core mechanic means you don't need to worry about lots of modifeirs.
I love the rules about protection rolls being worse when near the edge of the board. No hiding in the corner!!
Wizards were not a necessity. At first I thought a wizard was going to be a points tax you couldn't do without. But in game 3 my opponent decided to keep his army simple and didn't choose a wizard. With the extra points he got two beefy units and the game was a good one. It is nice to play a game where the points system is good enough that you don't NEED a wizard.

I absolutely loved the protection mechanic. I think it is genius. Your save isn't per the number of times you are hit, but if fixed, allowing spread out damage to be shrugged off, but concentrated damage to really make a mark.

Cons:
Motivation can be very frustrating. Just by random chance certain units can do nothing in the entire game. It is a problem with any game that has random movement.
It was also annoying when you had two units side by side and you roll well for the first, but you can't really move it off full speed because you don't know what you're going to roll for the other one yet. So good motivation rolls were often not fully used but poor ones always clobbered you.

Some of the spells seemed rather good. (Zeal of the dragon king). Fear was also amazing, but the points cost for it are high so that worked out ok.
The game doesn't really have any paper scissors stone element to it. So certain troops being good against some types and weak against others.

CPs are very random - large variance.
The other downside with CPs is if you roll one success you don't notice. But when you spend CP after CP trying to get something to move or a critical protection roll or whatever and you fail every time and use up 4-5 CPs you do notice. And it happens multiple times in a game.
It left the players feeling mightly frustrated, and not in a fun way.

So the main question will I play it again? Yes, certainly.

[Ken]

Nice write up.

How did you feel it played with the smaller bases and table?

[jchaos79]

Didn't read the rules yet, but can you share one picture to see the feeling of the game?

[Gunhit]

Thanks for the write up.

There is the group move rule which allows movement of multiple units together as long as one is the command unit. I prefer the CP mechanic to move units rather than the nothing or all mechanic of warmaster.

Adrian

[ricardo440]

Yeah. You have to have your commander in the group. And you can't spend CPs (presumably to stop the entire army getting 6 moves in turn 3)

The commander move was useful early in a game, but when the action kicked off it was far too risky. If you fail the roll NOBODY moves!!! Also your groups had broken up by that point responding to various threat about.

[ricardo440]

Nice write up.

How did you feel it played with the smaller bases and table?

It was fine. However when the rules say "don't worry about a mm here or there" it is a lot worse in BW=40mm as 1mm is 2.5mm in BW=100mm (if that makes sense) so being out by 2mm is the same as a mistake of half a centimeter in 100mm scale.

This was all fine until I parked my artillery on a bunch of scrub land. Every time I moved one a tiny bit I ended up shunting the other units. And a 4d6 powerful shot was really significant where they were pointing.
I think I should have bluetaked the feature to my board, that would have fixed it.

[getagrip]

Nice review Ricardo,  very balanced 

[Luddite]

Nice review Ricardo.  

So the main question will I play it again? Yes, certainly.