Albino Squirrel wrote:

I wonder if Warlord Games will be doing miniatures for Konflikt 47.

chaos0xomega wrote:
How is Horizon Wars different from Tomorrows War (which I believe they also published)?

 Silent Puffin? wrote:

Albino Squirrel wrote:

I wonder if Warlord Games will be doing miniatures for Konflikt 47.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:
How is Horizon Wars different from Tomorrows War (which I believe they also published)?

Bigger scale conflicts, probably; it does say 6mm, after all. Epic, to Tomorrow's War's 40k.

 Silent Puffin? wrote:

Albino Squirrel wrote:

I wonder if Warlord Games will be doing miniatures for Konflikt 47.

I think it will be another company, there was some concepts or something similar floating about a few months ago but they were by someone else.

Its Clockwork Goblin

I had thought TW was intended for 15mm primarily?

HorizonWar is a three-volume set of games from One Pound Wargames that allows you to play battles in the 6-10mm scale with a fast, intuitive and customizable system. Volume 1, MechaWar, is a mech-combat skirmish game. Volume 2, AirFrame, takes to the skies for high-adrenaline air-to-air combat. Volume 3, BattleGroup, will introduce the rest of the group forces of infantry, armour, artillery and special forces. All three sets are fully compatible and Precinct Omega is constantly releasing new, free DLC for HorizonWar.

MechaWar is the first title from the One Pound Wargames imprint of Precinct Omega Publishing. The game gives complete rules for building your forces of mighty mech walkers and pitting them in intense tactical combat against your opponent.

Use simple resource allocation to build and customize your force of mechs in minutes.
Play on any flat surface with a few pieces of terrain and any collection of mecha miniatures.
Skirmish-style action with alternating activation, each mech operating independently.
Intuitive combat uses dice to generate both range and accuracy for shooting as well as to resist and repair damage.
Manage your actions to pursue your objective or react dynamically to your opponent's manoeuvres.
Works for scales from 6mm to 15mm.
Includes advanced rules to customize your mechs as engineer, minelayer, commander or assault mechs.
Includes three starting scenarios.

I was listening to episode 99 of Meeples & Miniatures and the guest on the show (Robey Jenkins) mentioned he was working on a line of rules that were playable in under an hour and easy on the wallet. The first in the series is Mechawar, so I headed over to the Precinct Omega website and noticed it was only a single pound to buy them. After I paid, I got an email with a password and logged into the site and downloaded the rules.

The PDF is 21 pages. It is spartan in appearance, but clear. There are some mecha illustrations which are cool. I think the rules are clear enough given their simplicity.

It's a very simple system-- I can see how you'd easily be able to play a large game within an hour. You alternate activating mechs and there is also reactions.

Each mech only has 5 stats. It's mass, it's firepower, how hard it is to hit, how hard it is to damage and how fast it is.

When you activate something you can choose to shoot, move and shoot with half dice, run, charge or repair. When you react, you can shoot, move, move & shoot, and in some instances, counter charge a mech that tries to slam into one of your mechs by charging it. Though you can only react once per turn with each mech.

The game actually uses twelve sided dice. Though there's a simple mod to use d6s if you don't like d12s.

All various weapons a mech might have are abstracted together as a single firepower stat. You roll that many d12s and your target number is the range to your attacker plus the stat that reflects how hard they are to hit. But you get to add the dice together and as many times as you meet the target, that's how many hits you score. The stat that reflects how difficult it is to hurt the target mech is then rolled, and each number that matches one of your attack dice numbers removes that die. So if you rolled 5, 7, 11, 8, 8, 1 and the opponent got a 3, 4, 4, 8, you lose one of the eights.

When you take damage, you lose points off those stats. The owner of the mech chooses, unless a critical hit is rolled (you do damage and one of your dice is a 12) then the critical hit goes where the attacker wants (likely the stat that gets the mech closer to destroyed).

Close combat is ridiculously dangerous to both sides. Both sides roll their mass in d12s and pick the highest, with the other side taking half the result rounded up.

All in all, it looks like it works. The alternating activations plus reactions beyond just defensive fire will probably produce some very tactical play as you need to both worry about where your opponent is and what they might attempt to do and what they might do during their reaction.

The designers notes talk about non-mech miniatures and give a sample statline for a main battle tank, and the author mentioned in the interview that the next game will be Aeroframe, which will be a atmospheric air combat game compatible with Mechawar. Sometime after that will be a third game that will be about tanks, infantry and the like, also compatible. I like the idea of stand alone games that can work with one another, but don't require one another. And if I end up getting all three it'll cost me £3.00

chaos0xomega wrote:


It was billed as a scale-neutral system, recommended for anything from 15mm - 50mm+ but usable at 6mm as well IIRC.

 Manchu wrote:
IIRC TW is not "optimized" (not sure what this means) for any scale. The pics throughout the book are all -- so far as I remember -- 15mm and mostly Khurasan. I haven't looked at TW for a few years but I cannot recall any reason why it would not work at 6mm or 25/28mm.

 Manchu wrote:

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
And I want a sci-fi version of Frostgrave.

Dunno how much like Frostgrave it will be but Osprey is releasing this:

Spoiler:

As for sci fi riffs on Frost Grave, I can imagine a game in which a bunch of robots take the field with their operator.

 Manchu wrote:
Pretty sure you are misremembering. Just generally, balance has nothing to do with scale. But more specifically, TW includes published factions only as examples. There are even suggestions about how to build custom forces. I particularly remember the aliens section as I bought TW intended to do something with Colonial Marines and xenomorphs.

 Manchu wrote:
I read the review of Black Ops in the most recent WS&S and found out it uses card-driven unit activation. I will give Black ops a chance but I am really skeptical of that mechanic and have not liked it in other games.

 MLaw wrote:
I'm not sure how much of it is wargame material. Things like Bug Hunts and Dino Hunt.

 Manchu wrote:
Dice and cards are not necessarily interchangeable. The probability of drawing a certain card from a deck changes as cards other than the one in question are drawn while the probability of rolling a certain result on a die remains the same across rolls. For activation purposes, dice are usually used to "test for" activating a unit chosen by the player while cards are usually drawn to see which unit or type of unit may (automatically) activate. I'll have to go back to the WS&S review for a better sense of what's up with Black Ops but IIRC it was draw to see which unit type activates. My reservation with that is, it takes a pretty important decision out of the player's hands. I like the Bolt Action gimmick the best, where who gets to activate a unit is randomized but the player's get to choose which unit activates.

Muskets and Tomahawks (French & Indian War skirmish) also has a neat activation system, also using cards, where each unit has four actions but their actions are divided over multiple cards. So a regular unit has two cards in the activation deck, each allowing that unit to perform to actions on its activation. There are, by contrast, four Indian cards in the deck and each allows Indian units to perform only one action. So Indian units will activate twice as many times as Regular units per turn but only get to do half as many things per activation.

I hope Black Ops isn't just "card = type" ... I feel like that takes control out of the player's hands without giving anything interest back in return.


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 MLaw wrote:
I'm not sure how much of it is wargame material. Things like Bug Hunts and Dino Hunt.

Neither of those is a wargame rule set and neither is the Headless Horseman book. Osprey has been doing some fantastical books (see also: various mythology books, Nazi occult book, book about Atlantean warfare, Cthulhu v US government, etc). They're okay but of limited use to miniatures gamers, except maybe as inspiration.

chaos0xomega wrote:

From what I recall, Konflikt 47 is the name of Warlords upcoming Weird War Bolt Action game.

Next up, we have two games published by Osprey, due to hit the shelves in 2016 (announcement here). The first, and the one in the best shape currently, is Broken Legions, a game of fantastical skirmishes in the Roman Empire. The idea behind the game is that the Roman Empire teeters on a gladius-edge, and has sent out hard-bitten bands of legionnaires under the watchful eye of the Frumentarii (Roman secret service) to retrieve occult artefacts of great power. This, they believe, will stop ancient, foreign gods from threatening the supremacy of Rome, and secure Roman rule for a thousand years. Of course, the servants of those ancient gods aren’t best pleased, and so everyone from Egyptian cultists to druidic warbands are out to stop the Romans. There are even secret cults within Rome who believe that dabbling in the affairs of gods is unwise, and so they too oppose the legion.

This is a fantasy skirmish game, which has at its heart a granular D10 system, with a campaign play mode reminiscent of my old Legends of the Old West game. The faction-building rules are pretty freeing, drawing upon a wide range of ancients and fantasy ranges, and it occupies an ‘alternate history’ space, allowing you to field werewolves in your band of Germanic barbarians, and khopesh-wielding mummies with your Settites. Oh, and in some scenarios, you might encounter wandering monsters controlled by a simple ‘AI’ – anything from Minotaurs to flocks of Harpies.

The other game, which is farther off, is Chosen Men. No more details on this yet, save that it’s a Napoleonic skirmish game, where you control a small company of skirmishers, either operating under their own initiative, or fighting on the advance lines of a wider army, with various rules in place to represent the big battalions that are advancing ‘off-table’.