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I've been casting around for a mass battle game for my fantasy stuff for a while. I wanted something element based but scale agnostic, that has some "friction" in the command and control part of the game. Relatively rules light and easy to teach, but with a bit of depth to it.

I was going to do some conversions on Hail Caesar units to make them into Fantasy versions, but then I found that the proprietor of the MogsyMakes blog, James Morris, was making his own game that ticks all my boxes. I'd found his page looking at his awesome conversion of a Schleich Dragon into Glaurung from the Silmarillion. He's also posted an awesome battle report for the Battle of Five Armies:
https://mogsymakes.net/going-large-with-midgard-heroic-battles-tolkiens-battle-of-five-armies-part-1/

The game is element based, with the frontage of an infantry unit being the basic unit of distance in the game. The recommended is 12cm for a standard 6x4" battlefield but I'll be doing 16cm to fit in my 25mm based minis in sufficient numbers for my aesthetic preference. Everything is scaled off this frontage, so it scales up or down really easily.

There is a unit creation system that lets you make whatever you like along with 12 example armies of various themes from historical to legendary to fantasy. The basics are heroes, infantry, light infantry, heavy cavalry, light cavalry and monstrosities.

The rules are IGOUGO with a fair bit of interactivity, and the heroes have special abilities a bit like the Might point abilities in LOTR SBG. All the stuff you might expect is there, bonuses for holding obstacles or hills, rules for forests, rules for supporting combat, and a simple "killing zone" rule to allow you to do board control through positioning. Victory is achieved through gaining reputation points while avoiding reputation loss. You gain reputation for defeating units, and especially for your heroes leading aggressively from the front, but you can lose reputation if they get killed, bringing a nice element of risk-reward to the game.

I dunno, I was pretty excited about it when I got the PDF, I know there's a lot of Fantasy mass battle knocking around between Oathmark, Kings of War, Warhammer the Old World and Hobgoblin, but none of those met my preferences as well as this game seems to. Looking forward to trying it out!

Yeah I would say your characterisation of the game as more historical than marketing driven is correct.
The guy that made it used to write stuff for Warhammer Ancient Battles and does a lot of historical wargaming AFAIK.

I like Kings of War too, but I'm a bit over "new editions" and the general GW way of running a game. KoW is a good game, but it's not the kind of game I really want any more.

On the frontage point, I wanted a frontage that multiplies by 40mm because I'm using my LOTR SBG minis for it as well, so I can do 150mm for 6 25mm infantry or cavalry with 5mm to spare on either side for ranking them up easily, and 160mm for 4 40mm based cavalry (or trolls or whatever) in two ranks for a unit of 8 cavalry. So my units are 12 for infantry and 8 for cavalry, with bonus that this makes my unit trays also work for Hail Caesar so I don't have to make a second set.

But that kind of flexibility is the best thing about it - if I had an opponent who wanted to do 10cm frontages I could easily knock out a bunch of 10x5cm trays and use the same minis (although my Cavalry would look a bit cramped!).

And yeah, the book version of the Battle of Five Armies blew my tiny mind as a kid and one day I will re-enact it at 28mm scale! I've actually got most of the miniatures for it already, but I need to paint them. Shame the film wasn't very good or well received so GW never really did much with it, and I missed out on the 10mm game they released back in the day.

Yeah it's designed so that you can make your own forces using the force creator, though it gives a bunch of examples too. He recently put up some War of the Roses examples on his site.

My impression is that it does best in the dark ages sort of setting and it doesn't go very specific on any particular era - it's modelling the idea of leaders leading from the front so I think there's a natural point in history when that stops being the case and it might start to feel inappropriate - for something like Napoleonics for example I don't think it'd work.

But it's definitely not only for the viking era, though that is obviously a favourite of the author (and one of my favourites too).