Frank Branham: Rant 9 and Battlelore Review

You know, one think I really hate is everything. I mean there is just so much of it, it gets in the way, and half of the time (at least at our house), it is covered with cats.

A hatred of everything really does apply to boardgames beca........SKRRRICK

We interrupt this regular scheduled rant because I have Battlelore and you don't. I've spent the last week trying to get at least a few games in to write a reasonably comprehensive review--pausing only one or twice to lord it over folks that I have a copy of Battlelore.
Battlelore -- Review

Battlelore is revision 4 of Richard Borg's revolutionary Command & Colors system. For this round, the system and scenarios are tailored for a medieval fantasy era. Days of Wonder seems to be aiming the release straight at fans of the $80 big box Fantasy Flight behemoths, as well as the droves of collectible minis fans.

Every wargamey reference has been systematically purged with new vocabulary. Scenarios are out, and "fantasy adventures" are the order of the day. The traditionally dry historical backgrounds of the battles are replaced with less informative but more dramatic fake diary entries. This is not the kind of game that has the Black Prince....it has the Black Prince and a giant spider. It also has a massive 72 page rulebook, which adds 3 wholly new rules systems on top of the C&C revised core rules.

The Bits

The $70 price tag does invite comparisons with Fantasy Flight's offerings. Last year, that company boldly trotted over the $50 board game line by producing back-breaking $80 games. Battlelore has quite a lot of stuff in the box. It weighs 7 pounds, enough for Sandi to try and nab up the UPS box one-handed on her way in and have it slip out of her hand. (But not as bad as the deceptively small 50 pound box of dental plaster.)

The box is actually kind of tiny for the stuff that is in it. The board is a hard map-roughly Memoir '44 sized, there are 3 decks of cards, 12 dice, sorted tokens, terrain tiles and two flats of minis. Tiles, tokens, and minis are completely sorted in trays, requiring an amazing lack of assembly. The cards are not as nice as early DoW games, which may mean that DoW has finally caved and is getting their cards done in China. They don't have the nifty linen finish.

For all the work that went into the packaging, it has some issues. The banners and banner figures occupy about one and a half of the two minis flats, while the other 2/3 of the figures are crammed into a tiny well on one of the flats. Seriously crammed. Many of my mounted figures are quite bent where the hooves meet the base from being shoved into their little Black Hole. I'll have to rip out the plastics, loose pack them in bags, and hope that a little warm water will reset the figures.

As it comes down to the quantity of bits, it does seem as if there are rather less of them than War of the Ring. The figures are slightly harder plastic, and they are molded from two separate pieces which likely had to be hand glued together. Combined with the elaborate packaging does tell me that constructing a copy was majorly labor intensive. I'm just annoyed that at least some of that labor went into making horsey pate. Why they didn't go for a larger box and minis tossed into a bag is beyond me.

The minis themselves are....ok. The colorful banners with pre-attached labels have a nice tattered flag look, but the figures are...humans with swords and bows. Or perhaps, humans on horses with swords. Or dwarves, or little nondescript goblin things. There is a decent bit of detail, but the poses and characters are your pretty basic fantasy dudes. I suspect that the Rackham stuff is spoiling me on these points. Their dwarves and goblins look like something new, their sculpts have so much character, poise, and just ooze cool. These minis are clean, with no obvious flash, and the swords don't all seem bent out of shape. UNLIKE the softer Fantasy flight minis, the bases are very flat and not warped at all. There is a slight ground texture on the base that will look nice painted.

One thing that is interesting is that the banners are extremely visually important to the game, because all of the unit information is on them. The rest of the figures are actually kind of unimportant. There are different sculpts for light, medium, and heavy foot dudes, but you can easily add whatever ones you wish under each banner. Visually, they don't stand out compared to the oversized banners. This is really nice, as it is so very obvious which units have which capabilities.

The rules and artwork on the cards are GORGEOUS. I've been reading some of the Rackham minis stuff, which has beautiful layouts and the best character design in gaming. I think some of DoW's artists have to be looking at the same stuff, as the layout has a similar style. Many, many layers of subtle and complex work are piled into even the most basic of pages. Even the character art is nicely evocative, with a lot of elaborate and slightly unusual costume detail. The female rogue has a blank-expression face mask on a chain clipped to her belt. There is a goblin cleric on a stool under his robes carrying a staff topped with some kind of weird angel/mermaid hybrid.

The Game

...is really good. Of course when it comes down to it, it is quite close to C&C Ancients, and that is a superb game. Of course a lot of the game is still rolling dice well. Eurogamers who just can't get over the dice thing aren't going to start oohing and aahing over Battlelore.

Command & Colors' basic idea is that you play a card which only allows you to move 1-4 units on either the center, left, or right of the battlefield. You have a hand of cards with the same limits and the nifty part is that you have some idea about how much you will be able to do with those same units on the next few turns. Combine that with the simple, primary objective of wiping out so many enemy units per battle, and you have a simple, but quite compelling game system with some reasonably tricky decisions and quick, dramatic battles.

(Obligatory C&C intro paragraph over. Time for details. By the way, I have a copy of Battlelore, and you don't. Nyah.)
Like C&C Ancients, there are light, medium, and heavy foot, mounted, and archery dudes. In Battlelore, this is handled with remarkable grace and consistency. The figure's "weight" and foot or mounted class entirely determines how he moves, and how many dice he gets to roll. The figure's weapon determines his range, and the actual outcome of the dice he rolls. Sometimes, weapons are less effective against certain types of targets, as specified on the weapon card.

That means that the basic unit types (4 weapons + 6 "weights") immediately creates a potential pool of 24 different unit classes. However, the rules for how these units work fits onto only 6 cards. The differences are not as dramatic as the three types in Memoir, but quite present.

A light bowman moves two hexes, fires at a range of four hexes, and rolls 2 dice. He only gets one die if he moves, and only hits on a 1 in 6 per die.
A light short sword guy moves two hexes, hits adjacent things, and rolls 2 dice. He hits foot soldiers on a 2/6 chance per die, and closer to a 1/6 chance when attacking mounted units.

All this because of the differing weapon symbol. They are both green foot units.

The basic game is rather less deadly than its predecessors. The only ranged pieces are bowmen, and they don't cause a lot of damage. Foot soldiers don't hit as frequently either. You throw the same number of dice, but they aren't hitting nearly as often as the other games.

The big rules change that will be new to some folks is Support. If you are adjacent to two friendly units when somebody attacks you in melee, you get to hit them right back for free. (But only if you survive, and don't retreat.) The end result of these two rules is why everyone is raving about C&C Ancients. Maneuvering matters a lot more in this game than Memoir '44. You have an incentive to keep your units together, and sending your cavalry into the middle of a line is a death sentence, unless they can actually break the line.

It is all strikingly medieval, and makes for a rather good game. It is also reasonably easy to teach thanks to the consistency and rules summaries. One entire card deck is devoted to little rules summary cards. Added to Battlelore are really useful summaries of retreats, and follow-on attacks. (Cavalry units can advance and attack again if their target retreats.)

There are other elements of classification as well. Units have Morale, which determines how they retreat. Bold units get to ignore a retreat flag and possibly fight back. Frightened units run two hexes per flag. The Support rule ACTUALLY works by making units Bold. This doesn't seem very important at all until you start adding all of the other rules.

Terrain is handled by restricting the number of dice a unit can battle into and out of. This works so well. Light, nimble units can use the terrain to survive the big, nasty slow units. A bunch of light archers sitting in cover of the woods is a common sight. It also means that the potential for long, weighty FAQS is much reduced. The couple of years of concentrated cleanup, development, and classification really show through.

The end result is a little slower than Memoir, and just as satisfying as C&C Ancients. Agincourt (A classic battle where English longbowmen mostly abused French Knights.) feels nicely balanced. (Bowmen are mostly good for reducing troops, but are not all THAT deadly. ) The scenario plays kind of like the Memoir beach scenarios. The English hang back and shoot lots, the French rush forward and try to get up to where they can attack. The difference here is that the archers aren't even half as deadly as German artillery and rifles. Go figure. See the Zulu Wars for more detail on this phenomenon.

Hey, you got magic in my wargame! No you've got wargame in my magic!

The above makes a really nice C&C medievals package. The 10 scenarios are all based on real battles, and....wait a minute...what the heck is this other 50 pages of rules?

(A lot of it is a detailed glossary and details about terrain types. But it is terrifying to have finished the base rules and feel the weight of all those pages in your right hand. )

There are 3 big new things hiding in the rules, and one minor one.

The minor one is dwarves and goblins. Dwarves are Bold, Goblins are frightful. And they get different bases. I think that this occupies 4 pages with 2 pages of art, and a recap of the panic check rules from the Morale section. (When it comes down to it, there are also LOTS of examples in the rules. And quite a few duplicate mentions.) These mostly work like the occasional special troops you get in the other C&C games. Dwarves are dangerous, though.

Big change #1 is Lore. There is a lore deck with spells you can cast. You get a combination of 2 lore points or cards at the end of your turn. You also get lore points when you roll lore symbols on combat dice. These are pretty much to full rules, but they occupy a disconcerting 8 pages. The 8 pages go into lots and lots of detail explaining which phases you can play cards, and detailed explanations of the effects.

Lore is interesting. It is clearly designed for the collectible minis folks, as it adds whimsy to the game. You are never entirely certain what can happen. In my game, I reinforced the center by teleporting a heavy cavalry to start mopping up. It would have taken years to move him into place otherwise. It also adds a needed deadliness back into the game, and ties those to named events.

I finally won our game not because I finally rolled the right dice to take out units. But because I combined the nifty Rain Sky with Arrows card (Archers fire twice but cannot move), with Magic Missile. (+2 dice and Lore die faces count as hits.) Blood ran, and it made me happy.

It does make the game more random, but budgeting Lore for REALLY cool stuff is kind of addictive. And it opens up possibilities which are nifty.

Big Change #2 is the War Council. Mostly this is just Advanced Lore 201. Instead of using the tiny Wizard Lore deck, you get levels of multiple different mage-type characters. Some of the scenarios choose your council for you, some allow you to pick your levels.

The boring one is the Commander. Your skill with him determines your hand size. The rest are each tied to a set of cards like the Wizard cards. The cards are all unique (I think), and you build the game's Lore Deck according to the characters chosen by both players. If you draw a Lore card that you don't have a character for, you can still play it, but it costs you 3 more Lore. And, as most of the card effects scale according to the level of the caster, a fireball from a level 3 wizard is cause for concern.

On top of Big Change #2 is the idea of Landmarks. If you have a level 3 character, you get a special landmark terrain tile to plop down on the board at the start. The most interesting one is the Rogue's Den, which allows you to create one secret passage to basically teleport units through. The Warrior gives you a camp that allows you to upgrade the color of one unit who trains there.

Big Change #3 is Critters. (DoW calls them Creatures. I prefer to live in a world where a 20 foot tall spider that eats people lives out back in the Cement Pond. ) These are one Critter units that take up a full hex. They die on one Critical Hit. (That means any dice which would normally hit are rerolled and kill the Critter with a 1 in 6 chance. I think that means that a Heavy Cavalry which rolls 4 dice would take out a Critter on 4 out of 18 attempts. )

Critters don't have THAT many dice on attack, but because of that Critical Hit thing, they don't die a lot---you really don't want to attack them. However, they have special Lore Attacks. When they roll Lore dice, the tokens can be used immediately for a special attack or saved for a more powerful Mushu-like attack. (That spider has a web which keeps armies from moving until activated to be freed, and poison, which causes the target to lose another figure every time a Lore is rolled against it for the rest of the game. )

Like Lore, Critters pretty much just adds wackiness to the game. In the scenarios, they are balancing one critter against a level of the War Council. That may be a guideline to implement it in other scenarios. All of these extras really seem designed for the tweaker and scenario designer, as there is a lot of little new rules that are modular enough to be dropped in and out.

By the way, there isn't a mention of the promotional creatures anywhere. They could be dropped in in place of the Spider or perhaps enterprising folks will be cooking up weird scen..."fantasy adventures" involving a few of them against a mixed human army.

And that's Battlelore. For the most part, if you want it, you actually really do want it. If you don't care, then you probably really don't care. The only new people I can see this going to are the roleplayer/fantasy minis crowd that don't tend to read this website much. There are a ton of them, and this game has the variety and a so much more refined system and scenarios then those clicky games.

Although, if you are a wargamer who was turned off of Memoir and Battle Cry, you should take a look at the Agincourt scenario or C&C Ancients. The base system works really well with these time periods, and is a trickier game. © 2006 Frank Branham

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Comments:

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Well THAT is entertaining to read. Thank you for the review. Posted by Olivier Reix on Nov 9, 2006 at 04:15 AM | #

Thank you for this nice review. I was almost sure about that (I have played it in Essen) but now I’m really really happy to have preordered a copy! I think (hope) I’ll have it in less than 2 weeks. good play Liga Posted by Andrea Liga Ligabue on Nov 9, 2006 at 05:04 AM | #

Whar are these Rackham minis of which you speak?  Do you have a link handy you could put up, so’s us “mini-curious” can check them out? Posted by Jim Clapperton on Nov 9, 2006 at 09:57 AM | #

Jim, http://www.rackham-store.com Posted by Olivier Reix on Nov 9, 2006 at 10:02 AM | #

Thanks! And apparently I’ve created a new word by combining ‘what’ and ‘where’ into ‘whar’!  Feel free to use that y’all. Posted by Jim Clapperton on Nov 9, 2006 at 11:01 AM | #

Oh dear lord, don’t look at the Rackham stuff. Even their website is so very pretty (but functionally pretty awful). The game designs are kinda clumsy when it comes down to it. Dubious English translations, and a system that is mostly special rules and exceptions. But the minis, character illustrations, and paint jobs are so beautiful (and check out the prices on those minis. Eek!) Hybrid is a weird Space Hulk kind of gridded skirmish game. It is a pretty good deal (by Rackham standards), and the rules are quite approachable, and you get a nice selection of tiles and minis. This is the incredibly well done part of Battlelore. There aren’t exceptions, and the rules are *SO* well categorized, classified, and mesh together nicely. The development crew and playtesters totally earned their Mountain Dews. Posted by Frank Branham on Nov 9, 2006 at 02:08 PM | #

Jeebus, Frank! Just when I’d convinced myself I really wasn’t going to buy Battlelore.  argh.  gah.  I love C&C:A.  ugh. Posted by Brett Myers on Nov 10, 2006 at 08:01 AM | #

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