Whenever I say Warcry is the best game Games Workshop has made, someone always chirps up to reply that I am wrong, that title belongs to Blood Bowl. It was hard to argue about a game I have never played. Blood Bowl is Games Workshop’s skirmish fantasy football game. You are basically playing Jervis Johnson’s take on American Football. Now having finally played, I have to admit it is pretty wonderful.
My friends and I decided to get start a league. I grabbed the Imperial Nobles team, and a rule book. I more or less instantly regretted not just grabbing the starter set, as I could have sold one of the teams, gained a pitch and tokens, and come out ahead price wise. So, don’t make the same mistake as me. The Third Season of Blood Bowl has tweaked the composition of all the teams so you can field a reasonable team from one box. This small change is what got my friend excited about playing. It’s really what sucked us all in.
My friend had played Blood Bowl in the 90s, so helped the game move along. When I first looked at the rule book I felt there were a lot of rules to make the game go, something I mentioned to my cousin who played in twenty years ago. He scoffed and replied the game was easy! Now having played, I would agree. It’s all quite intuitive. It does feel a bit like football. There was some looking stuff up here and there, but we got into the swing of the game quite quickly.
Blood Bowl is played over two halves. One team will kick the ball to the opposing team: place the ball on a square and roll to see where it ends up and bounces. It’s then up to the other team to grab the ball and move it up the pitch. If you make it to the end of the field, the end zone, you score a touch down. You activate all your minis one by one until there is a turnover. There is a long list of cases that can cause you to lose your turn, but they all eventually boil down to: one of your models falls down or you lose the ball. When this happens play flips to the other player and they take their turn. Each half is composed of 8 turns in a normal game of Blood Bowl.
Your players can move, pass the ball, hand-off the ball, catch, block, secure the ball, and foul players who are knocked down. The actions do what they say on the box. Because you are trying to avoid turnovers, you will generally attempt safer actions first, before riskier ones.
Movement simply has you move down the pitch (a grid) a number of squares as dictated by your move stat. You can rush up to two times, letting you move an additional square each time on a roll of 2+ on a d6. But if you roll a 1 you fall over. In our game my fried Dylan’s catcher fell over getting into position. Play turned over to me, and my turn ended the exact same way. We somehow rolled 1s back to back when rushing. That’s Blood Bowl.
Adjacent players can block, attempting to attack the other player. There are custom block dice to roll that tell you what happens. Hopefully you push the person out of the way and/or knock them down. It’s possible you might get knocked down yourself. Like typical skirmish games there is an advantage gained by having more of your players adjacent to the combat. The offensive players gains strength for their friends, similarly for the defensive player. You roll one block dice if you match the opposing players strength, two if you beat it, three if you more than double it. The player with the higher strength choose the result. (So tackling stronger players is a bad idea.) A lot of the game is positioning to try and gain extra dice for your block roll.
Moving the ball down the pitch will involve passing, catching, and hand offs. The further you attempt to pass, the more difficult the dice roll required. Players have a pass stat, and need to beat their attribute score. Catching and picking up the ball require making an agility score roll. So you could make a perfect throw, but still fumble the catch. You could run to pick up a ball off the ground and fall over. That’s blood bowl.
The secure the ball action is new to this edition of the game, a way to help teams with low agility gain control of the ball in a more conservative way. You secure the ball if you roll a 2+ on a d6, it doesn’t require a roll against your agility stat. The catch is the action triggers a turn over. It never came up in our game, but I can see how it would be useful if you have strong guys who can protect the ball and move it up in the subsequent turn.
After two halves the player with the most touchdowns wins. I lost my first game. That doesn’t matter. I had a lot of fun all the same.
Blood Bowl plays more or less exactly the same as it did in the 90s. An impressive piece of game design. The game is fast and feels really dynamic. There is a lot of back and forth due. Grid movement and no line of sight to worry about helps keep everything snappy.
We were playing sevens, a smaller version of Blood Bowl. You play on a smaller pitch with a smaller team and a smaller number of turns per half. It’s a way to speed up the game. The rules are basically unchanged. Was great, no notes.
I will report back once we have started playing our league and have played more games. Like Mordheim, the campaign system for Blood Bowl is apparently a source of much fun. Is the game better than Warcry? I’m not so sure, but it is certainly one of the greats.
I came close to going the whole year without playing a single game of Mordheim, but a visiting gamer from Vancouver put the call out to see if anyone in our Mordheim league was free to play while he was in town. Of course I said yes. Another regular from the store’s Mordheim posse joined in, alongside someone who had never played a game of Mordehim before. We had planned to play 2-3 games, but we all forgot that multi player games usually take a while. We got through one, but it was a fun one.
I used my undead warband again. They are the team I feel most comfortable playing. After the last campaign my vampire leader, Lord Volchyakrov, was killed. I was tempted to try and paint a new vampire before this game, but didn’t have the time. I have to assume the necromancer Gallean the Mad helped bring the vampire back to un-life. As usual, I prioritized bodies over equipment. My warband consisted of my vampire, a necromancer, and 3 dregs, who were accompanied by 2 ghouls, 7 zombies, and a dire wolf. (Though in my case my dire wolves are dire rats.) I actually have wolf models now I should build and paint. Maybe before the next big league or campaign takes place.
We played a pretty crazy scenario, themed for the holidays. There were 6 building that contained presents for us to steal. Each building was guarded by d3 peasants armed with spears. All the units in your warband were carrying a torch they could use to set these buildings on fire, after they had fist been explored (and then number of peasants inside had been determined). The game ends when all the buildings are burned down, or the last team routs. The session had some real old-school D&D energy. It felt very violent and chaotic.
The peasants proved to be surprisingly tough. In true Mordheim fashion, one peasant held off my dreg and a zombie for basically the entire game. Another peasant single handedly held off a team of dwarven slayers. That old man was only killed when my team set his home on fire and it collapsed upon him. (Killing a few dwarfs in the process.)
I hadn’t played Mordheim in ages, but I quickly remembered how it all worked. The game has lots of little edge cases, but its core is quite simple. Our new player, who had only played 40K, really loved how evocative the game and its rules were. It really is the gold standard for narrative gaming. (Though perhaps Trench Crusade will soon carry that torch?)
Hopefully we’re manage to get another game (or more) in before the holidays season is over.
Space Gits an odd duck of a game by the man himself Mike Hutchinson. Mike asks the question, “can you model a game around drunk-ass orks being drunk asses?” I would have to say the answer is a resounding yes: this game is inspired.
Before we get to the game, let’s talk about the rule book. This was another book waiting for me in my brother’s flat. A small A5 hardcover I’ll be able to smuggle back to Canada with whatever I end up grabbing at Dragonmeet. Mike did the layout himself and it’s impressive. The book is neat and tidy, easy to read, but with lots of flourishes that give the impression of drunken ork messiness: crumpled paper backgrounds, edges and borders that are almost always some sort of torn paper effect, etc. The miniatures and their photography by Tyler Russo (Billion Dollar Clown Farm) are fantastic, as one would expect if you’ve seen his YouTube channel. He did a great job converting minis for this game. Till Förster’s illustrations complete the package. Absolutely frenetic art. I’m happy I grabbed the book.
Mike opens the rule book with a discussion about what he was going for with the game. He does something similar with Hobgoblin, though the discussion comes at the back. I suspect he appreciates his audience is likely a non-trivial number of indie gaming nerds who want to know how the sausage gets made. You can read the rest of the rule book with their goals in mind. Perhaps the clearest form of expectation setting. (I am reminded of Apocalypse World and its progeny that love to make the point of the game particularly explicit.)
Players take turn alternatively activating models. Each model can scoot, shoot or boot. The games central conceit is centred around dice moving dexterity. Your orks will build a tower of dice when they activate or take hits. When you move your orks around you must move their dice tower along with them. Knock over their tower, the ork has fallen on their ass and their activation ends. Opponents can steal bottle caps from fallen orks, the games currency and how you score to win. This is the boot action. Bottle caps are scattered over the board when you start the game. Scooting is how you move. It will involve dexterity as well, though more likely luck. You roll your orks movement dice into the play area. The ork will move the number of inches indicated on the dice, directly towards the dice. Movement neatly models the drunken meandering motion of the orks. If you bump into a bottle cap you will pick it up. If you bump into an orc you will fight. Shooting is a similar sort of action. You roll dice into the play area, and your ork will fire their gun in the direction of the dice, but this time the distance their bullets travel are dictated by the weapon they use. The die’s value needs to beat the target’s toughness to score a big hit, otherwise the target takes a weak hit. Hits cause an ork to gain more dice for their dice tower.
After 30 minutes to police show up to break up the party. Players create a siren dice pool that starts with 2 dice. Before players activate they’ll add a dice to the pool and roll all them all. If they roll triples the game ends immediately. (The game will certainly end after 13 activations, as it’s impossible not to roll a triple after that point.) You can pour yourself another beer and play again.
Space Gits is such a unique and unusual game. I can’t think of another skirmish game I own that attempts anything like this. I won’t pretend to have been interested in a dexterity based skirmish game, and likely wouldn’t have picked it up if not for the fact it was made by Mike Hutchinson. Everything he’s produced seems particularly interesting. I’ll need to write about Hobgoblin at some point. A game I’ve actually played! As it stands I was at a pub drinking an ale and reading this book, so this is the review you get.
I finally took my posse of Heretic Legion models and played a game of Trench Crusade with Raff at the Sword and Board. Trench Crusade was created by Mike Franchina, the main artist for the game. The rules were designed by the legend himself, Tuomas Pirinen, of Mordheim fame. There is so much to love about this game, where to begin?
Trench Crusade takes place in an alternate version of earth where rogue Knight Templars open a gate to hell and the the next 800 years or so are all about people fighting demons and that sort of nonsense. The game’s present day is 1914, the start of our WWI, just another day in this worlds never-ending war. Mike Franchina’s artwork helps bring the setting to life, elevating it beyond just another Weird World War sort of game.
The rules for the game are nice and simple. There is a single resolution mechanic: roll 2d6 and try to score above a 7. A 12 is a critical success. The number of dice you roll can be modified based on a model’s profile, equipment, situational rules, etc. In such cases you’ll add additional dice to your dice pool. The rules refer to this as +DICE and -DICE. A +1 DICE and a -1 DICE cancel each other out, so you’ll end up with a pool that contains 0 or more +1 DICE or -1 DICE. This then works like advantage or disadvantage in D&D: you will roll all your dice and take the highest two, or the lowest two, depending on the make up of your dice pool. This is the roll you’ll make to shoot or attack. You’ll also make a roll like this when taking ‘risky actions’, like trying to climb a wall or make a diving charge. If you shooting or melee attack is successful, you will make a similar roll on an injury table. Rolling a 9+ takes a model out of action. A 7-8 will knock the model down. A 2-8 will also cause the model to gain a blood token. These can be spent to modify die roles. The opposing player can spend them to make your unit less effective in combat, or make their own units more effective when targeting that model. All in all it’s a nice and tidy system: it’s fast to play.
There is almost no looking anything up, no complicated tables, etc. There is far less rolling lots of dice to accomplish nothing, a common feature of Mordheim. You don’t have to track wounds, as there is no hit points. Tougher units will have an armour score that reduces the results of the injury die, making them more likely to survive. The blood tokens act a little like wound markers, as a unit with blood tokens will be easier to kill in subsequent attacks, but it’s dynamic and not a sure thing. In our game we I was constantly spending the tokens I had inflicted on Raff’s elite demon monsters to make them less effective in combat, trying hard to keep my little heretic troopers alive. I also managed to get some lucky rolls, resulting in one of troopers almost killing Raff’s super-demon. That model is Tough, so when it would be taken out of action the first time it’s simply knocked down. It got back up and demolished that little trooper on its next turn.
We played a one-shot, but as soon as it was done I wanted to start a campaign. The rules look very similar to Mordheim. The models in your warband can get injured, explore, level up, buy new equipment, etc. I’ll need to dig into all of that later. The book also has a healthy set of scenarios that look quite good. The default assumption is players will play 12 games in a sort of escalation league, the last game being the final free for all conclusion to the campaign. You start the campaign with a 700 ducats spending limit, and a limit of 10 models on your team. You end the campaign with a limit of 1800 and 22 models. You could field quite the platoon.
The rules are available online for free—fantastic. The digital rule book takes advantage of the format, with hyperlinks to help you navigate through the document with ease. There is way finding in the left side margin of each page, to help orient your place in the book, but which also serve as hyperlink navigation through the book. The layout and design is lovely. The rules are well written and clear. There is a simple presentation of the rules that takes up about 8 pages and explains the whole game. This is followed up by a longer presentation of the rules which goes into a little more detail, providing additional clarity and examples. The simple rules are likely all you’ll need to read to play if you’re familiar with war-games, or need to refresh yourself on how the game works. Seeing a rulebook like this from a small indie company makes Games Workshop’s “we only sell you overpriced hardcover books that are out of date when you buy them” stance extra annoying.
I currently have enough models to do about 800 points. Evan kitbashed a Commando for me, which I’ll need to prime and paint. I want to try and kitbash more troops as well. Get to a point I could field a bigger posse for a bigger game.
I’m hopefully we will start a campaign in the city, and I can experience the fuller game. This game certainly is meant to be experienced as a long running campaign. That said, as it stands the rules work well for a fast standalone game. This is a solid skirmish game. Well worth checking out. I mean, it’s free!
My friends were over to kitbash minis and play Warcry to celebrate our friend Richard’s birthday. There was a small posse of us, so Richard came up with a simple and ingenious way to play mutli-player co-op Warcry that matches the random spirit of the game. We wanted to play a 3 vs 3 game. Each of us took our warbands and split them up into the Dagger, Hammer, Shield groups as usual. We then randomly assigned each group to each player, so each player would bring one of the groups for their team. (For a 2 vs 2 game, you could just one player from each team bring two of their groups, rather than one.) In our game the ways things shook out ended up giving a slight advantage to our opponents, they had a few more points than us, but I don’t think it skewed things thast much. You could grant the underdog team bonus wild dice based on the point differential, though how many is left as an exercise for the reader. Since by the rules you must make your groups with as even a split of minis as possible, and with this format you don’t know which group you’ll take, it likely will lead to fairly even splits anyway. Playing this way means you don’t need to mess with any other rules or the balance of the game. Each team had about 1000 points of minis, would roll initiative dice for their team as usual, etc.
Some friends were discussing how one might approach making RPGs play a bit more like skirmish war games. From my perspective, playing with minis and measuring distances are the only ingredients you need in order to change how a game feels. A good wargame will make the choices you make around positioning matter.
It’s often the case when playing D&D using “theatre of the mind” that characters simply move from monster to monster, fire their ranged weapons from anywhere to anywhere, etc. It’s hard to keep track of where everyone is, what the complex state of the game world looks like. To mitigate this I will sometimes sketch on paper (or on the screen) when playing to help players better understand their circumstances, what they can and can’t do. I am just as likely to simply eat the messy abstraction: it makes combat play much faster. When I was playing 4th Edition D&D a single combat might be the bulk of a gaming session!
Approaching running a skirmish style RPG by looking directly at indie narrative skirmish wargames might be interesting and fruitful as well. Games to checkout include: Forbiden Psalms (based on Mork Borg) and it’s many variations, Brawl Arcane 28, A Song of Blades and Heroes, and Sword Weirdoes. These games feel like they could form the basis for playing an RPG in and of themselves.
I love this: nicer warband and campaign sheets for The Doomed, aka Grimlite from traaa.sh. If you haven’t seen traaa.sh before, it’s such a well designed blog. They always post useful stuff. So this is really par for the course. Evan and I have been playing The Doomed recently, continuing our epic multi-system neverending Warhammer 40,000 campaign. I’ll have to write about those games soon. I have been tracking everything in Google Sheets. Looking at these sheets gives me ideas for how to tweak my digital set up, though I like the idea of writing things out on paper. That feels more legit.
Played a game of Song of Blades and Heroes today because the D&D Encounters game I was expecting to play wasn’t starting till next week. It was the first war game I’ve played since high school. (And high school was a very long time ago now.) Skirmish games are fun. Tempted to get some miniatures. - Me, 25th October 2012, on G+ (RIP)
Many years ago I would attend D&D Encounters on the same night the Toronto Historical Wargaming Club would host their meet-ups. I would hang out and chat with the club members before and after my D&D games. On one such occasion I ended up playing A Song of Blades and Heroes, which was such a charming game I went out and grabbed the PDF. I never played again, but liked it so much I also bought the book in print a few years later. Fast forward a million years and I am stuck at home with a pretty healthy collection of painted minis. So, I decided to make war bands out of my Warhammer Underworld miniatures and play games: Ram vs. Ram.
A Song of Blades and Heroes by Andrea Sfiligoi is a dead simple skirmish game. You play battles between war bands comprised of about 5-15 miniatures. The game can be played quickly, something I never managed to accomplish playing Kill Team with Evan.
Units have two attributes: Quality and Combat. They may optionally have a few special traits that impact the rules, like “flying” or “savage”. Everything about a character is abstracted into these two attributes and these traits. Even different weapons are undifferentiated. People who like a lot of customization may find it a bit disappointing. I find it refreshing. Making your own units is easy. There is a simple point calculator online so you can make your own units that are balanced against everything in the book and everything else you might make. It’s remarkably easy to make units that feel the way you want them to feel.
The game has an unusual turn structure. On your turn you need to ‘activate’ a model to use it by rolling up to 3 dice. Each roll equal to or greater than the unit’s quality is a success, otherwise it’s a failure. Each success lets you perform an action with the unit: move, fight, etc. If you roll 2 failures you don’t get to activate any additional models and play flips to your opponent. You can obviously play it safe and only roll 1 dice, but you won’t accomplish much. It’s satisfying rolling 3 dice and getting those 3 successes; surprising when you roll snake eyes with your high quality unit.
This is (basically) all there is to the game: that simplicity!
Andrea has built many games on top of this chasis. There is a slightly more advanced version of a Song of Blades and Heroes, with a name you can likely guess, and then a million variations with names you likely can’t. His catalogue of games is all over the place. He’s an impressive and prolific game designer.
I love this game and I can’t recommend it enough, but I would be remiss if I didn’t spend a small amount of time moaning about the books frumpy layout and information design: it’s frumpy. I feel like a good editor and graphic design person could turn this book into something superlative. As it stands, it gets the job done.
Anyway, I am reviewing the game not the book. The game is fucking great. If you are interested in miniature war games this is the one to grab.
Now that I am basically a full on war gamer I was happy to see that OSR superstar Emmy Allen’s latest endeavour was a skirmish game. The Dolorous Stroke is inspired by Inquisitor, the Lord of the Rings skirmish game, Arthurian stories, and Dark Age Of Sigmar / AoS28 kit bashed miniatures. I am down for all of that.
I have a few miniatures from Kingdom Death that might work in this sort of setting. I could likely make a neat Dark Souls inspired knightly retinue. The game has a really lovely implied setting—which I will now ignore for the rest of this post. I have a ton of Warhammer 40,000 miniatures, and I’d really like to use them with these rules.
Emmy provides a ton of advice in her game about how to make your characters. For each stat she outlines what reasonable numbers should be. She provides various examples for different types of characters so you can get a sense of what a scholar knight or a monk or an acrobat might be. Using a model’s stats from 40K as a guide it shouldn’t be too difficult to use the rules of The Dolorous Stroke to play games set in the Grim Darkness of the Far Future.
In 40K we have the following stats for a character: Movement, Weapon Skill, Ballistics Skill, Strength, Toughness, Attacks, Wounds, Saves, Leadership. We can use these as a guide to creating characters for The Dolorous Stroke, whose attributes are: Speed, Accuracy, Prowess, Strength, Toughness, Wits, and Education.
Movement maps to Speed and we can more or less use the value as written. 6” movement in 40K is quite common, but in Emmy’s game it seems like 5” is closer to the norm. You should probably subtract 1” from most 40K characters Movement attribute to get your new Speed score. (Note that this may make some characters—like Plague Marines—particularly slow.)
Ballistics Skill maps to Accuracy and Weapons Skill to Prowess. In Warhammer you roll over your skills on a d6. A Ballistics Skill of 3+ (like that of a Space Marine) would be equivalent, more or less, to an Accuracy of 6. Here we use Emmy’s advice that you are usually trying to roll low on a d8. The way you roll with your Prowess stat in combat differs from how your Weapons Skill is used in 40K, but I think it’s reasonable to map scores the same way.
BS/WS
Rough Accuracy/Prowess
2+
7+
3+
6
4+
5
5+
3-4
6+
1-2
Strength and Toughness serve the same purpose in both 40K and The Dolorous Stroke, though the way the numbers are used differ. Emmy suggests you use the value of 4 or 5 for a typical human. In 40K most human characters have a Strength and Toughness of 3. Space Marines have a toughness of 4. Plague Marines a toughness of 5. Numbers of 6 or higher are usually reserved for giant robots, tanks, dreadnoughts, etc. I think I would map things as follows:
40K S/T
TDS S/T
2
2-3
3
4-5
4
6-7
5
7-8
6
8-9
7+
10
Characters that have multiple attacks in 40k (an Attacks score greater than 1) should be given combat abilities in The Dolorous Stroke that highlight the fact they are proficient fighters. Characters with high Leadership scores may also deserve some skills to highlight that—like the aptly named Leadership skill for example.
A characters Saves attribute in 40K is usually an indication of how good their armour is, or some hint at their natural resilience. Space Marines generally have a score of 3+, with Terminator Armoured characters or heroes being given 2+ saves. The lighter armour of a Guardsmen is usually a 5+ save. These numbers can be used as a guide when deciding the bonuses of the armour in The Dolorous Stroke. I would treat a Guardsmen as having +1 armour (Light Armour) while a Space Marine would be +3 (Heavy Armour and a Helment).
The last two attributes in The Dolorous Stroke, Wit and Education, don’t map to anything in 40K. You should likely use your judgement here, based on how you imagine your particular character.
All characters in The Dolorous Stroke can take at most 7 hits before they die (as you lose 2 Blood cards per hit). You will likely die sooner because of injuries or other circumstances. To represent characters who have more wounds in 40K, you may want to give them skills that limit the ways they lose blood or take injuries.
I would treat Psyker’s in 40K as Magic-Users in The Dolorous Stroke. You can re-skin existing spells or make up new ones as required. In 40K a Psyker risks danger when they manifest powers from the Warp. I would tweak spell casting in Dolorous Strike so that drawing an Ace or a King results in possible peril from the warp. The most straight forward thing to do is have the Psyker lose some number of Blood cards. If the Psyker dies you should have the units around them affected by the turmoil of the Warp. Maybe they explode. Maybe a demon erupts from their body.
I would simply re-skin existing weapons in The Dolorous Stroke for your 40K characters, using their existing Weapon Profiles from 40K as a guide. You can represent weapons that do more damage in 40K by having them result in the loss of more Blood cards. The Dolorous Stroke is straightforward enough that coming up with bespoke weapons should be easy enough.
I haven’t actually tried using any of these suggestions in a game. I haven’t even played The Dolorous Stroke yet! At first glance it looks to be a very cool game, and I suspect a lot of people will be talking about it sooner rather than later. I’ll report back if these ideas work out or not. (Or, maybe you can tell me if they worked for you.)
