Today I Bought

I’ve bought a number of unexpected gaming things over the last couple of weeks, so I thought I’d give a quick overview, since some of them look quite interesting.

The Old World

Firstly, I finally decided to break down and by Warhammer: The Old World. This is, I guess, the latest edition of the game that I first played the 2nd edition of back in the late 80s/early 90s. The first thing I noticed about the new edition is that about the first 90 pages aren’t anything to do with the actual game, but is all background fluff. This was surprising, and seemed a little odd. I would have thought most people would be interested into diving into how to play the game, so though a brief introduction to the main factions would make sense, a full detailed account of their histories, religions and society seemed like an odd start. Especially for newcomers.

I haven’t dived into the rules in depth, but they look very similar to older editions. Warhammer is a game I really want to like. I do love the settings. Not just the fantasy setting, but the WH40K setting also has an appeal. The fantasy world though is a lot of fun, and there are some interesting factions. I guess that’s why they put the background front and centre to try and get people hooked.

As a rules set, it also scales well. You can play 500pt, or 1,000pt or 10,000pt and the rules still work. Unlike Saga or *Rampant where there are assumptions made about both unit size and number of units.

There are aspects of the rules I have problems with though. The initiative system in particular I’ve never liked, which seems to greatly favour offensive units over defensive ones (this seemed particularly true in the Ancients variant of Shieldwall, where shieldwalls never worked. Figures get killed before they can hit back, so you always lose every combat).

Since I’ve mostly finished re-basing my figure collection from square bases to round bases, and Warhammer is very specific about base shapes and sizes, it’s highly unlikely that I’m ever going to play this. But I mostly purchased it as reading material. In that sense, it has very high production values and is a good book to have sitting on my shelves.

I did go on to get the two army books – Forces of Fantasy and Ravening Hordes. I can’t complain about it not including army lists in the main book, since a lot of other games do the same. Again, I mostly wanted them to get an idea for armies for other games, and to look at the pictures. Miniature porn is a thing.

Brethren

Another wargame I picked up was Brethren, a Skirmish Tabletop Wargame. This is a new game to me, and is very much a skirmish scale game rather than a big unit game like Warhammer. The quality of the book is also very different to Warhammer, but that’s really not surprising. I’m assuming that it’s print on demand, since it says it was printed by Amazon, and the paper has a cheap feel to it. It’s also considerably thinner, at about 40 odd pages, and much cheaper.

I haven’t read it in detail, but it looks like the main ‘unit’ consists of individual figures. It does have formation rules though. So forming a shieldwall out of individual figures, gives those figures a bonus. Confusingly, it refers to “units” throughout the rules, even when a unit is often going to be a single figure.

Each unit can take multiple actions, though this is normally limited to two, and these actions are things such as run, move, shoot, aim etc. This feels more complicated than a game like Saga or *Rampant, but I guess it’s designed for much smaller army sizes.

Similar to Warhammer, there army lists are in separate books, which I don’t yet have. It does look like something I’d want to try a game or two of, so I’m going to leave a full discussion until later. It feels like the game would work best when set within a village or other battlefield with lots of buildings rather than on open fields. Which brings me to my next set of purchases…

Terrain

One thing that I’ve been looking for is good science fiction terrain for 28mm wargaming. There is stuff out there, but it is expensive, takes up space and requires painting. Battlesystems is a range of pre-printed colour cardboard terrain. You pop it out and stick it together using special connectors.

The first I got was the Northern Settlement. This is a nordic style set of buildings, including a mead hall, three houses, a barn, a couple of towers and some walls and a gate.

It’s actually not too bad. Objects like the palisades are very two dimensional, since they’re just card popped off sheets. The buildings though look quite nice. They’re not perfect, and some are better than others. The roofs of the watch towers are a bit unsteady, and some parts of the buildings don’t fit together as well as you’d hope.

But all in all, it’s a nice collection of buildings which is good enough for wargaming. It requires no painting, and is probably reasonably portable. Since they can be disassembled, the roofs can be taken off which allows for action to happen within the buildings as well. They do have floor tiles as well, but I haven’t used them in the following pictures.

They are reasonably robust, though I can see bits being knocked off during transportation. At least they can probably be put back on again. My resin buildings are sturdier, and look better close up (though the Battlesystems ones look better from a distance), but are likely to chip if knocked during transportation, making them harder to fix.

They can be pulled apart and different buildings made. In that way, they are flexible. There are videos on how to make the standard buildings, though the videos can be hard to follow (I find they tend to speed up into timelapse during the bits where I want them to go slow), and it’s not always clear what type of clip should go where.

You do also have to be careful when popping the pieces out of their sheets, and I did get a bit hasty for a few items and tore the graphics off the card. Nothing serious, and there’s generally enough pieces to be able to work around it.

However, it’s good, and I’m thinking of getting more. It also better fits the building sizes that Saga wants to use than my resin buildings do. A lot of resin/plastic buildings I’ve looked at are too small. It may also fit Brethren quite well, since that probably works well for battles running between buildings.

The later medieval style sets will probably work with Lion / Dragon Rampant, though I’d need to check to see what sort of rules these games have for buildings. At the very least, a castle wall as a feature on one side of the table could work as a siege game. I do already have some polystyrene castle walls, which look good. However, you can’t get them anymore so I have a very limited set of it.

I said I was thinking of getting more, and I still am, but I also did. I said originally that I was looking for SciFi terrain, and Battlesystems also do that. After putting together some of the Northern set, I decided it was good enough to try out the Shanty Town core set. This is part of their urban apocalypse range, though it could have just been named the Fallout range.

This is a lot more generic that the fantasy set. Whilst the fantasy set had some specific buildings for you to build, the urban set just gives some random generic walls, ceilings and other parts for you to stick together as you see fit. This is both a boon and a downer.

A boon because you can build whatever you want. You could with the Northern Settlement, but there were some pieces (especially roofs) which were sort of customised for a given building type. The downer because not all the pieces looked like they fitted into a well designed whole. Yes, it’s a shanty town built from random bits of whatever could be found, but there were some parts which didn’t tile as well as the fantasy set.

Parts which looked like doors or machinery, which just ended half way through the graphic, and there were no matching other halves on other pieces.

However, again, from a distance it all looks good. And it’s good enough for a typical game. It fits my 25mm figures well, even though it’s designed for 28mm-32mm.

There are some ‘colour’ parts, such as advertising signage and the like which looks cool. The furniture, and this goes for the fantasy set as well, doesn’t feel as good. For small items like crates, chairs and tables it looks like its bits of cardboard slotted together. I do already have some ‘scatter’ terrain such as this which is made from resin, and I think this will work better. There are also some nice looking shipping containers I’ve seen (though I can’t remember where) which would work better than the cardboard ones which come with Battlesystems. I also have some ‘dungeon’ terrain tables, chairs and shelves which I think look nicer.

For the main buildings though, it works really well.

I would really like to give it a try with a game of Xenos Rampant, or even 7TV. I’ve got a planned Xenos game coming up, and I think a scenario involving the defence of a settlement would be interesting to try. We could just use them as solid terrain that can’t be entered if there’s no suitable building rules.

Over all, I’m happy with my terrain purchases. We’ll see how well it all works when I get a chance to put it into use, but I’m optimistic about its usefulness. The SF terrain can definitely be torn down into individual flat parts without a problem. The fantasy terrain, because it’s more set pieces which would be harder to rebuild might only work with a limited tear down. But it’s something to be experimented with.