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I was kind of worried that Firestorm was going to be a half-baked phoned in campaign supplement like most of their later and modern works have been. I can say today after having gone over my box that I was very wrong.

First off, if you've been around anything I've posted over the years, you know that I am a big campaign player. I love map campaigns. I came up on Mighty Empires from the 1980s where campaign systems were in depth and about kingdom building as well as tabletop victory.

GWs last real solid campaign supplement in my opinion was the 2002 General's Compendium. The campaign systems presented in that book, which I consider probably their greatest book they have ever released gaming-wise, was used for years by myself and the groups that I played with.

Firestorm's map is a solid board game quality. Its shiny and its well put together, and also very well done graphically. The labels that you can affix are also not glued down stickers as other company's have done (such as FFG's Armada campaign which used stickers). They are static and can be removed with no damage to the map or to the labels themselves, providing for replayability.

There are a number of decks of cards for map building.

The main rulebook itself is fairly thick for a campaign supplement (again I was expecting something like a dozen pages max filled with large pictures and very little word count). There are strategems like 40k you can spend points on (a feature I was adding to Azyr Empires as well, I will be borrowing some of these), and of course abilities for various factions via the allegiance rules that the internet has been discussing for a couple weeks now.

There are rules for enhancing your territories, and there are Time of War rules for the different sections of the map, making multiple areas on the map have their own special rules and making each battle feel unique and not just playing the same old same old over and over. Additionally the book comes with new scenarios to play as well.

This is the first GW product I've given my own 5 star rating to since General's Compendium. If you're a narrative or map campaigner, this is worth picking up IMO.

My main issue is it's clearly written for 3 or 4 friends playing it together and isn't very hostpitible to running a league. Some of the rules, like altars and the realmgate, seem like they add complexity without really making the game any better and that development time would have been better spent on more domain/secret objective options.

That said it is a great supplement, the board and stickers are high-quality, and for anyone willing to do a bit of rewriting it is a fantastic resource for almost any type of campaign. I was particularly impressed with every territory getting time of war rules and that none of those rules were overdone in terms of power or modifying how things are played.

Yeah its definitely more on friendly campaign play and less on competitive matched play. Though they did well to tie in to points instead of making us use wounds ... I still don't believe that people are still doing that (using wounds as a balance mechanism)

Glad to hear you are so impressed with it. I am eager to get my copy and check it out.

 auticus wrote:
Yeah its definitely more on friendly campaign play and less on competitive matched play. Though they did well to tie in to points instead of making us use wounds ... I still don't believe that people are still doing that (using wounds as a balance mechanism)

I meant more in the sense that it doesn't have any rules support to accommodate more than 4 people.

Ah. Well to accommodate more than 4 people I put my players into teams and groups and just use factions.

Awesome to hear. I just picked my copy up but haven't had a chance to go through it. My only worry is it seems really geared for having 1 of each Grand Alliance, but then again if the various cards aren't that thematic and specialized, may not matter. Worst case I can do some little hacks to figure something out since it seems like everyone other than myself in my little group of 4 are Order-loving nimwits.

Edit: Ok, busted it open and took a quick look. Seems like the cards are all identical other than the back color, so that will work out just fine. And a read through of the book, I agree, this actually looks really well done and should be a lot of fun.

I did note the section saying you could use it for "any number of players," so long as you got one box per 4 players. Mostly for the card decks, I'm sure.

Thanks for the review! I'm excited about this one, so it's good to know i have cause.

This has made me regret that I've cancelled my pre-order. After seeing the add-on benefits for the army's allegiance I didn't saw the point. It's likely no one that I play with will want to play with those rules in effect. Extra scenarios are always welcomed.

I'm curious, why is it called Firestorm? Is this "Firestorm" the secret weapon the forces are fighting over? Is it a literal firestorm that sweeps the area periodically (it is the realm of fire) so you only get to play for 15 turns or whatever? Is anything mentioned in the rulebook?

May you please go into more depth. I was thinking of getting this but when I saw the $80 price tag I forgot about it or ignore it until I read this thread. I was hoping when I saw "review" in the title it would explain what the game is. Yes I know I can go into GW site and read about it, but that is also "hyped" to make it look good when a lot of their products were bad in the past. So I was hoping to see a review of someone who is very critical of GW but also praises them when they deserve it.

I will quote you where I would like more explanation to see if I should get it or not.

 auticus wrote:
I was kind of worried that Firestorm was going to be a half-baked phoned in campaign supplement like most of their later and modern works have been. I can say today after having gone over my box that I was very wrong.

What makes you wrong?

Firestorm's map is a solid board game quality. Its shiny and its well put together, and also very well done graphically. The labels that you can affix are also not glued down stickers as other company's have done (such as FFG's Armada campaign which used stickers). They are static and can be removed with no damage to the map or to the labels themselves, providing for replayability.

That is good to know. I don't know anything about FFG's Armada but it's good to know there is replaybility. How long do you think they will last for with constant use?

There are a number of decks of cards for map building.

I do not understand what you mean by map building.

The main rulebook itself is fairly thick for a campaign supplement (again I was expecting something like a dozen pages max filled with large pictures and very little word count). There are strategems like 40k you can spend points on (a feature I was adding to Azyr Empires as well, I will be borrowing some of these), and of course abilities for various factions via the allegiance rules that the internet has been discussing for a couple weeks now.

Are you saying we are actually getting an actual book and not a pamphlet? This I am really interested in. How many pages is the book? I was disappointed in the book we got for Blightwar.

There are rules for enhancing your territories, and there are Time of War rules for the different sections of the map, making multiple areas on the map have their own special rules and making each battle feel unique and not just playing the same old same old over and over. Additionally the book comes with new scenarios to play as well.

What do you mean by enhancing your territory? I never played any games before like this, so I don't have a clue. How many other scenarios are there? How are they like? I don't expect you to explain them all, but is it like the scenarios we have for Blightwar or are they different?

My wife and daughter are starting to like the minis, (wife orks, daughter plaugebearers) so I am wondering if this would be a good idea to start off small and make the games bigger as time goes on. If not, I might have a friend who could be interested in this. How time consuming is this? Is this something that needs dedicated time or can be used from time to time when there is time for gaming since we can't meet up on a frequent time.

Also anything else you can say? As I said before I was uninterested in this, but after reading your post, I am interested in it now, but I would like to know more. As GW prices are sadly, it's hard to buy books when they cost the same as minis. So I rather buy more minis, but wondering if I should get this.

Thanks for the review. Now my pocket book dislikes you.

What makes you wrong?

GW hasn't produced a decent campaign system since the 2002 generals compendium for WHFB 6th edition. I was assuming that this was going to be some slim pamphlet of like 2 or 3 pages of "rules". It turned out to be a lot more than that.

Map building means that the game focuses on a map element with territories. The decks of cards help define whats in your territories which determines things you can field in battle.

Its not as complex as I really enjoy but its complex enough that you could play it with others who hate complexity and have some substance too (its a compromise between the old way of doing campaigns (complexity) and nu-game design (simple as possible))

As with any campaign, you would set it up to run whenever you had the time to do a game. A campaign is a linked set of games. You don't usually set out to accomplish a map campaign in a day it usually takes many game sessions over time to conclude.

Thanks Auticus. I will see if I can find a copy in person so I can read the cards to see if they will be fun for us or not.

Absolutely, thats the best bet. I picked it up to see if I wanted to lift anything for my Azyr Empires campaign.

Is there much interesting / new fluff?

There is background on the region and the cities.

For a person invested in the fluff you won't be missing out on anything important, but there is a decent summary of the background and different cities.

I'm just kind of sad that they seem to have excluded all the skaven :/. I have no idea what the fluff of reason would be there, but that means I can't participate at all when my store runs their campaign of this.

As with everything in sigmar, to much randomness in it.

But that's personal to me, just not a fan of card draw systems were you end up with a massive difference in forces to the point of a 700 point deficet. Rather annoying to put a list together only to find out you need to hoge podge it to fit in to requierment. You effectivly can loose an entire compaign If you get gak luck of the draw.

Map is cool, but it's def not made for a league or comp, more for a group of people who want reason/we structure to a narrative play.

Correct it is a narrative campaign, not a matched play structure. They said that when it was announced that it was a product primarily for narrative play with rules for people that maybe interested in it for matched play but that was a bolt-on secondary consideration.

 Backspacehacker wrote:
As with everything in sigmar, to much randomness in it.

But that's personal to me, just not a fan of card draw systems were you end up with a massive difference in forces to the point of a 700 point deficet. Rather annoying to put a list together only to find out you need to hoge podge it to fit in to requierment. You effectivly can loose an entire compaign If you get gak luck of the draw.

Map is cool, but it's def not made for a league or comp, more for a group of people who want reason/we structure to a narrative play.

If you are getting 700 point deficits it's because one of the decks has been upgraded way more than the other; the core decks players start with yield numbers around ~1300 pretty consistently. You are right, it's catering to narrative play and not made for leagues, but imbalances won't be THAT bad aside from maybe a few unusual games and one game won't win or lose the whole campaign.

True, but I do believe it's going to be a lot more fun for narrative use IMO