Horizon Wars - Review

Horizon Wars Review

Even though the Horizon Wars have been published in April 2016, it made it in our hands quite recently. Horizon Wars is combined arms sci-fi wargaming ruleset written by Robey Jenkins. It is intended to be played with 6mm-15mm miniatues and mechs.

My brother Dalcor (he made most of these pictures, by the way) is big fan of Battletech universe and I have also played Mechcommander and Mechwarrior video games so when he came up with the idea of trying out Horizon Wars for some battlemech rumble with Battletech miniatures, I decided to give it a try. And it was a blast. We have played some more games with inclusion of conventional forces and here goes the review. As usually, sorry for my english.

Core Mechanics

Regular readers know I don’t like too complex rules. One of the best selling point of this game is that the ruleset is quite simple, innovative and quite intuitive. All the miniatures are formed to elements. Element can be squad of infantry, a tank, self-propelled howitzer, mech, aircraft or so. More on this below. Each element has 5 attributes of Presence, Movement, Firepower, Armor/Agility and Defence. It can also have additional special rules depending on the element type.

Each element can only activate once per game turn and within the activation can make two actions. The actions are pretty streamlined: cautious move, double move, tripple move (for some fast elements), move and shoot, shoot, charge and restore. You can also skip one of your actions to keep the opportunity to react on enemy element within line of sight.

Shooting is one of the very innovative things in the game. The attacking element takes the number of d12 dice equal to it’s Firepower and rolls. The defender then takes the number of d12 dice equal to it’s Defence and compare the individual results on the dice to each other, cancelling the same results. Therefore if attacker rolled 1, 7, 8, 11 and the defender rolled 2, 6, 8, 12 attackers result of 8 is cancelled. Then the attacker adds the numbers on attack dice to make groups equal or higher then the effective range to target is. For each such group, he scores a hit and damage is taken by the defender. This way of solving shooting is amazing as every inch and every move matters to the shooting.

Do you see the red mech in the distance. It now ceased to exist...

The elements take damage in form of reduction of their attributes, so they are getting weaker and weaker. It’s quite difficult to „Kill“ an element as it takes quite high number of hits (or some critical hits) but it can be seriously crippled.

Army Building

                Every army starts with a Command HQ. If you want everything more simple, you go for mech CHQ and then buy whatever elements you want. If you want to play with it a little bit, you can go for conventional forces CHQ. Then you choose a unit type of your CHQ and the funny part begins. First of all, you must have at least one element of the chosen type per 5 points of Battle Force (so you need at least 4 elements of chosen type for 20 points battle force).

My 20 points 6mm Light Infantry CHQ Detachment

            This limit represents that your tank commander spent all his life as the tank crew in tank battles. He raised through the ranks of tank crew to become tank commander and then he became tank squadron commander and tank brigade commander etc. He saw enough tank battles to understand how to fully utilize tanks. So he favors tanks. So you must have tanks when you chose tank as your CHQ. I hope it’s clear now.

But then you alter the costs of other elements as well. Your heavy tank division then have easier access to elements which complement their kind of warfare (so you pay less points for Heavy Infantry, Heavy Artillery and light tanks), some of the other, lighter elements are hard to get (you pay extra for light infantry, special forces or airborne infantry). This systém allows wide variety of possible forces which make sense together and avoids MIN/MAXing the force.

Scenarios

                „The game is strongly scenario-driven.“ I heard this sentence several times and in most cases, it’s a lie! One of my friend told me that Hordes is a scenario-driven game. You know, there are two pieces of paper meaning whatever-wannabe-objective area on the table and it makes it a scenario-driven game. Or I heard that W40K is scenario-driven game because you need to get to specified location and fight there. Or you can just kill all your enemies to win.

                Horizon Wars is scenario-driven game. The scenarios in the book are deep, well-thought and well-specified. The attacker and defender each has exactly specified objectives, which are contradictory to each other yet still very specific. In our yesterdays game we played „Deliberate Attack“. The attacker invades defenders garrison in force. His mission is to cripple the defences, be aggressive and brutal. He wins if he disable most of defenders army. The mission of the defender is to stall the attackers advance and steal it’s momentum until the reinforcements arrive. The bad thing for the defender is that he only deploys about half the force then the attacker and reinforcements are slowly moving in.

Anti-Aircraft equipped mech with his prey downed.

                How is such a scenario balanced? That’s a weird and once again innovative point. After both players build their Battle Groups, chose scenario and assumed roles of attacker or defender, the one who is favoured by the scenario applies Loss. It basically means that part of your Battle Group is not present at the battle.

Example from yesterdays battle: Defender had 20 points Battle Group, however only deployed maximum of 6 points with the rest in reserves and maximum of two units could come from reserves every turn. Attacker had 15 points battle group (5 points loss) but deployed 12 points with rest in reserves.

                The systém loss is very unusual and can lead to frustration in case you spent last 20 minutes with hard decisions of how to build your army and then you are told to remove ¼ of it. On the other hand, it makes balance in the scenario-driven game.

Beside set-piece battles you can also play in Adventure mode. Adventure gives you bigger context of war raging all around you. It’s not entirely a campaign systém per se, it just brings more depth to your fighting.

Reinforcements!

Summary

                Wow, this gets long. Just to summarize, there is quite a few things I would point out as negative. These might be the lack of some types of conventional forces (anti-aircraft vehicles, APCs, stationary defences comes to mind) and occational discrepancies in terminology (the author uses „Battle Group“, „Battle Force“ and „Detachment“ for what seems in context the same thing).

                As highlights I must point out all the innovation and good ideas in the game. For me the most important thing about any game is how it feels. And in Horizon Wars, you have the feeling of combined arms warfare. The forces are so variable that you have to be prepared for anything.

Pros:

-feeling of mass warfare without overly complicated rules

-army building

-scenarios and Adventure mode

-invention

Cons:

-lack of some specialized elements

-minor terminology discrepancies