William's Wargames

Having seen Oldhammered demo Space/Sword Weirdos on YouTube I was intrigued, and a conversation with EdAble and his fondness for the rules led me to take the plunge.

I set up a quick 60 point battle of four figures per side – the Halflings had two Fighters, an Assassin, and a Berzerker. The Orcs had an Archer and three Fighters. There was quite a learning curve with so many archetypes, weapons and traits (for both your men and their equipment) but with the help of the Warband Builder I got it down onto a couple of sheets.

The first thing that struck me was the alternating free-form nature – 360 degree LoS, large movement ranges and lots of actions that can be taken. Play was frantic with movement all over the place.

Though uncontrolled and quite random, I enjoyed the manouvre system. The Halfling Pirate Barbossa (far left in the following picture) was particularly effective – spending a global ‘manouvre’ token permitted him to make an immediate attack on anyone who charged him outside of 1 stick range. The axe wielding orc (bottom middle) was able to spend a manouvre token and three actions to get +2 to his attack roll in combat.

There’s an obvious neccesity to add a bit of window-dressing to the rules so you’re not just picking figures up every time a dice is rolled, so for combat there are +/- modifiers to dice type used in opposed roll-offs, then +/- modifiers to the roll itself, and then a further attack result table.

I did enjoy how a bad roll on the attack result table would generate some kind of counterattack – a free disengage move, returning ranged fire or literally striking back.

I enjoyed painting the 28mm figures, but I’m not sure I’d play the game again unless my opponent wanted to. Pushing figures and rolling dice is fun, but ~as a solo gamer~ I think I prefer just a bit less chaos!