First Reading: Broken Legion

This ruleset my bro calls Warhammer d10. And he has right. Autor is EX-GW and there is a lot of G2U mechanics you find in the game. However it worked with Warhammer Fantasy Battles, huge regimental game, where the randomness is mitigated by sheer number of rolls.

So let’s talk about the game mechanics. The game is designed as skirmish level game, with small warbands about 12 models. There is alternate activation in three of four phases decided by random Initiative roll in Initiative phase, the other are Action, where move and ranged combat take place, melee and Recovery. The game used base mechanics of d10+Characteristics+malus/bonus vs either solid nbr. 10, this is called test or there is a conflict with opposed dice rolls. So far so good, its very much the same in many games. Unfortunately what is not the same – the mechanics copy the WHFB rules. So there has to be only 1 movement and only before any Action (like shooting) taken.  Models are joining to combat only via random chargé move.

Once in combat, every player needs 4 rolls of dice for one attack in case he is successful and has only one attack. Two of them are conflicts, one is critical die and one is morale test. The phases are very similar to WHFB. First you roll confict to hit + critical die. If you roll 10 on critical die – you have scored additional wound (not hit, direct wound) and if the result is 1 its fumble and the defender has attack of opportunity. Back to To hit rolls. If you miss, nothing happened. If the result is success you have to roll the dices to wound, that’s again a conflict. Success is a wound. If the model is wounded, there is morale roll if the model runs out of combat. Now the defender activates a model of his choice and all of this is repeating. If my calculations is good, if you are successful, and there is one-on-one combat you need total of 14 dice rolls + Charge and Possible Recovery to get result of such combat (with me, two times Attacker:  To Hit, Critical die, To Wound Defender: Melee, Armor, Morale). Now, imagine you are learning the rules. One round should take you an hour to get all appropriate bonuses and maluses. After all combat is done there is Recovery phase where you can rally your soldiers.

Romans vs Barbarians by Alan Lathwell via Mark Latham blog

There are special beings, Heroes and magic users in the game who are standing a little bit apart. Heroes have fate statistics allowing them to survive even the mortal wound and heroes can challenge other heroes to standalone combat. The magic users can cast spells obviously. The mechanics for casting spell is Presence test and critical die is called wrath of god. Its either miscast and you get the wound or the gods smiles on you and you have one wound healed.

There is total of eight different factions and all has unique list of members, which has or has not special keyword abilities, same as weapons or wargear. There are several types of the warband members, Infantry, cavalry, war engine, etc. You can modify the basic lot with different equipment or special rules. And you can hire mercenaries.

Finaly lets speak about the scenarios, there are five of them and well, they are pretty classic. One of them is obvious Last Men Standing , one is exploring, the other three are about controlling the objective marking. What is cool, there can be wandering monsters in the dark! There are small campaign rules included for those who can link the scenarios. You will need 2 to 4 square feet table dependant on the size of the warbands, and some pieces of the scenery. But no need for a lot of them – at least according to the rules

Well I do not know what to say about the game. There are a lot of Warhammer Fantasy Battles golden cows inside the game. I was looking for some setting depth, and I did not get it. In some game you can feel the inspiration and the concept is rich even though the rules are generic (Ronin, IHMN, Blood Eagle, AFOKF). Here you are looking after objective markers – like in warmahordes. Also the sheer number of rolls is a warning to me. I thought we will try some games just to test it, now I am not that sure, that I want to loose more time, then reading and writing this review.

For me big disappointment, as I was not looking for Warhammer Ancient Skirmish. However the writing is clear, there was a lot of testing and generaly, the mechanics can say hello to a lot of people .  

autor: Dalcor