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Which fantasy battle with what you already own rules do you prefer and why?

I personally love, love, love Hobgoblin.

It has some slight issues of it's own, like how ranged combat cannot outright kill standard units (only skirmishers) to help force the game to not rely on gun lines and to keep visceral melee combat between troop blocks as the focus of the game. It's not in any way a game breaker, just something unique to the game that might be unexpected to some.

Other than that, the game is excellent. It is an all-encompassing ruleset, by which I mean everything is in one rulebook, from unit creation rules to a terrain and battlefield condition generation system that can make every game feel different even if the same scenario is played back to back. With the unit creation rules, you can really create just about anything with some imagination. I also like how the rules are designed to be quick and decisive when it comes to combat.

There are no unit conditions to keep track of other than "Doom" which functions nicely as both unit health and a morale system, especially with how the systems quickly deals with units being destroyed degrading their nearby allied units.

No rank n' flank game can truly be a "beer and pretzels" level of casual but it comes pretty close.

I haven't played Midgard yet, but it was the one that appealed to me. Strong "dark ages" flavour, a mechanic somewhat similar to Might from LOTR SBG and otherwise relatively simulationist over gamey "grounded" rules.

The way things are atm for me it'll be a while before I get to play. I must pick up the others and have a look. I was disappointed with Oathmark but aspects of Hobgoblin sound appealing.

Was excited for Midgard until I watched the authors' gameplay video where one of them visibly dissociated halfway through and started to forget mechanics which was awkward because there is only one mechanic.

The pot of victory points is crazy clever tho, it's one of those concepts that all game designers from this point on should at least be aware of.

I've played some fantastic battles, which gave us some fun times. Cool movement and formation rules. Perhaps a bit heavy on the damage tracking, and a bit shame stands can't be removed from formations until they all break. Overall cool ruleset though.

Oathmark I've bought, but not yet playtested. Perhaps too restrictive army lists to draw in people with existing collections.

Shoutout to fantasy warband by pendraken. Very light hearted game with wide army selections.

I've just ordered Warhost (expansion for Baron's War, by Hobday & Hicks), which sounds interesting to me.

I tried Hobgoblin, and wasn't that excited by it. A bit too simple, maybe? Perhaps I like the flavor of factions, and am less keen to "build them myself", though I can understand why others might like that.

Oathmark was fun, but after a game or two, our group never picked it up again. Sigh!

Never heard of Fantastic Battles.

Love Oathmark. Simple but very effective mechanics: orders, cascading panic, fast combat resolution. And great campaign rules. Absolutely like it.

The campaign rules for Oathmark are my favourite part, and very portable too. I hacked them out and made a LOTR SBG version.

 Da Boss wrote:
The campaign rules for Oathmark are my favourite part, and very portable too. I hacked them out and made a LOTR SBG version.

If there's any irony in my experience with Oathmark it's that I don't care for the campaign rules being so tightly integrated into the core game.

I'm a busy grownup who only gets to push minis around a table every so often. Campaigns are just not likely for me! But overall, I dig the game.

Would lean towards Hobgoblin of those mentioned, though. Seems like a simpler, more refined take on minis-agnostic rank and flank than Fantastic Battles.

I looked into Hobgoblin, but ultimately decided that the design goals they set out to achieve (which, AFAIK, they did) were not the same as what I wanted from my games.

I think it is probably a pretty good game though, and I'd definitely be willing to play it if someone near me wanted to! But I'm in the position of choosing the games I play as the provider of all the miniatures and terrain for my games, so I get to be picky.

As to campaigns, well, I've done a few really fun wargaming campaigns, but they were all in university which is a long time ago now. I've also done a lot of RPG campaigns, but that's also just a much lower investment thing. My dream is to be able to provide everything needed for a wargames campaign - tables, terrain, models and rules, and so make it as low investment as an RPG campaign for my friends to take part in, and then to do some!

I liked the Oathmark system because it seemed to avoid some of the issues I've had with detailed map or experience based campaign rules before but it still gave you a sense of progress.

But I hacked it a bit to make each terrain type provide troops for Evil and Good armies - so forest territories provide various kinds of elves for Good but Beastmen for Evil. I know the mixing of types is a cool part of Oathmark, but I like my fantasy battle games a bit more tolkienesque so the divide between good and evil is something I like to make more clear.

The core rules for Oathmark though I found a bit lacking - it stood out to me that the balancing for the units was a bit slapdash, and I have grown to really dislike mass battle games that are going to use movement trays anyway requiring me to base my dudes in a certain way. Mass battle with movement trays should be base agnostic or allow multibasing.

On that note, I have been looking into Dragon Rampant and it seems like a fun game.

 Da Boss wrote:
I have grown to really dislike mass battle games that are going to use movement trays anyway requiring me to base my dudes in a certain way. Mass battle with movement trays should be base agnostic or allow multibasing.

Amen brother. Add in casualty removal as a silly mechanic for mass battle games too.



I have not played any of them, which could be a gap my rules review ouvre.

It does tend to give you a very scrappy, bitty looking battlefield in the later turns. The only advantage really is that it's an easy and unobtrusive way to track damage to the unit - tracking casualties with dice or markers can end up making the board look very cluttered.

Kings of War is still king of rank and flank in my book, despite taking another firm step towards "no model, no rules" with the edition update. I'd honestly be happy just playing 2nd or 3rd forever, it's not fully build-your-own, but ain't nobody chewing through all the army lists in one lifetime anyway.

Kings of War is a very good game for sure. I just have some specific to me niggles about their army lists but I'd happily play 2e KoW any time.

(If you want to know, I don't think Orcs should get crushing strength by default because it is in the GW paradigm I've sort of soured on rather than the Tolkien paradigm.)

The one thing it's missing for me is that friction I was talking about. But if I wanted to return to the Old World I would 100% play KoW and not any version of Warhammer. I actually picked up the 2e hardback with that in mind.

I always wanted to play KoW as I see it as a good enough rank and flank game, but never had any local scene whatsoever

 Da Boss wrote:
It does tend to give you a very scrappy, bitty looking battlefield in the later turns. The only advantage really is that it's an easy and unobtrusive way to track damage to the unit - tracking casualties with dice or markers can end up making the board look very cluttered.

I actually really love this look; a few handfuls of battered, exhausted survivors gearing up for the final clash is a great contrast to the serried ranks of the first couple of turns.

Hobgoblin looks interesting, but I've been firmly dug into Oathmark for quite a bit now. It hits a whole bunch of my wargaming buttons - campaign-focused, supportive for narrative by design without pretending balance doesn't exist, not hung up on what models you use and all about Your Dudes, quick and simple without being simplistic - and I've been casually playing a campaign with a friend for ages now. If I've found a fault, it's that the campaign itself feels a bit endless. In theory, one of us could conquer the other's capital; in practice, we just don't roll battles with stakes that move us closer, or at least when we do, the attacker doesn't win! That's possibly the fault of the dice and not that much of an issue, honestly. This apparently isn't an existential war, our young 'uns and ambitious types just hop over the border every now and then to draw rude pictures on foreign oathmarks and steal cattle. Very excited for the second edition, it sounds like he's planning on just the right amount of refinement and balance pass without redoing the whole thing!

I'd love to play some old-school Mighty Empires with the system, shouldn't be too hard to hack, but that's more of a matter of space and time...

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Kings of War is still king of rank and flank in my book, despite taking another firm step towards "no model, no rules" with the edition update.

I'm not sure that I would consider KoW "generic". Not anymore.
Sure, common Fantasy tropes are represented and one can usually fit their models into the game.
However, it's very much fitting your models into the Mantic system,
Every update seems to make it slightly harder and recent new releases are quite unique to Mantic.

Dwarfs, Elves and undead are due an update, so we'll see if KoW stays partially open to generic armies.

I'm completely sold on Age of Fantasy and especially Age of Fantasy Regiments for big battles (Company level).

It encompasses nearly every fantasy faction and unit one can imagine and does so within a game that is fast and fun. The current crop of special rules has brought a level of unit differentiation that may have been lacking in the past
All this goodness made even easier by the best army builder program in the industry that happens to be free!!

Formerly I would enthusiastically have said Kings of War is my tops. I've played every edition except for the current l and I'd still be up for a 3rd Edition game anytime. However, the shrinking army lists in 4th really puts the squeeze on my armies that I'd be using in the game and there isn't a faction from Mantic that I like enough to want to collect.

The rest of the group feels similarly so none of us have bought into 4th and we've been playing AoF: Regiments instead. Additionally, I'm finding that I like casualty removal and alternating activation in a rank and flank game.

I did try Oathmark, but it failed to impress.

I prefer massive battles or very small warband skirmishes (love Mordheim and Song of Blades and Heroes ) but for a modest platoon sized battle, Dragon Rampant is very nice. It is more generic, but also more realistic with more interesting activation mechanics.

I played AoF Regiments very early on and concluded it was interesting but ultimately lacking in diversity due to the nature of the game.

It sounds like it's been improved since then, so I should give it another look!

I mostly play AA games these days and so KoW is actually a nice break from that. I think IGOUGO is not so bad when units don't really lose effectiveness from shooting very often, at least in the early game, so being shot up isn't a huge problem because you will almost certainly get to reply.

I also like that KoW is element based because it means my round based figures can be used along with my square basers - important for me because I started doing a lot of my more "dark ages" stuff on round bases to use in LOTR.

I have stuck with 2e though. I think it stays the closest to a warhammer replacement, which is what I actually want. I find most of Mantic's own worldbuilding to be pretty poor and I don't like their miniature ranges for KoW very much with some exceptions. I have the army supplement, the siege rules and the Dungeon Saga campaign book, so I don't need much more. I've always felt that sort of balancing that they do is only of interest to tournament meta chasers (in fact, I think it only exists to create a meta for them to chase, because otherwise the game will stabilise). I'm playing with my own collections and I am not trying to build extreme armies so I don't need all that stuff.

I've been bitten by the Old World bug but have no interest in the official project, so I've been plotting repairing my armies and fixing up my movement trays and busting out the old gang.

No interest in 4th KoW, already had enough at the switch to 3rd tbh. But there's something really nice about blocks of troops at 28mm, no matter how silly and ahistorical the unit sizes are!