Friday Night Book of War

Special night, special time -- this is actually a game we played here on Christmas Day. What could be better to get in the holiday mood than a desperate tooth-and-nail struggle against a seemingly endless horde of hellish undead from beyond the grave? I guess that's how we roll here. (And also hopefully lots of 6's.)


Start -- 300 points, Advanced Game with Expansion Units. At top, my opponent has picked a small group of pricey units -- a 10th-level wizard with a fireball wand, 10 figures of pikemen bodyguards, and also 3 figures of war elephants carrying archers (representing 100 pikes and 30 war elephants). And at the bottom, of course, you can see my legion of 75 figures of skeleton warriors (i.e., 750 skeletons). The only terrain are the two section of Woods placed by my opponent to slow down my already-meager movement.



Turn 3 -- The opponent made one move forward, and then opted to hold her ground and make use of missile fire against my advance. I've pushed my skeletons forward as quickly as possible (it would be nice to move forward in a unified line, but as long as I'm in the open on the right, it's best to be as aggressive as possible). Here you see combined elephant-back archery and fireball missiles wiping out half of my middle unit (7 figures, or 70 skeletons, going down on this turn).



Turn 5 -- My skeletons make first melee contact and achieve 1 hit on the elephants (remember that they have 6HD). In response, the elephants turn and start stomping all over my skeletons in melee combat (in fact, they automatically hit!). Also, the wizard fireballs one figure of skeletons in the unit in front of him.



Turn 6 -- The pikes go into hedgehog formation (so as to defend all sides), and I decide to charge them. Pikes are always going to lay out hideous damage when you do this, but I figure it's going to happen at some point anyway, and with lots of skeletons and immunity from morale, maybe I'll get some through; you can see the result of that clash below. Also on this turn (outside the picture) I've wrapped units all around the war elephants, and so with lots of attacks and rear attack bonus, managed to knock out one of the three elephant figures.



Turn 8 -- On the prior turn, I actually routed the pikes, but pinned in between multiple units, they had nowhere to flee. Not so for the wizard, however, who has broken off and run for freedom alone! Here you see me finishing off the last of the pikes, and I've also eliminated a second figure of elephants, although I've taken a lot of casualties in return.



Turn 11 -- The wizard commences a run-and-gun strategy. My skeletons are trying to chase him, but he fires off some fireballs and then runs back past them. I do, however, manage to finish off the last elephant figure.



Turn 14 -- I tried to trap the wizard in the top-right corner of the board, but he's too fast for me. Here he turns around and lights up my remaining skeletons again with more fireballs.



Turn 16 -- There goes the wizard past my encirclement again, dammit! At this point it's clear that my slow skeletons can't catch him, so I concede the game. Victory for the wizard, standing alone on the smoking field of battle!!



Commentary -- This was partly a test of the skeleton units for a game that would come later. One of the extremely important results of the test is that they quasi-break the overall structure of a Book of War game.

The important realization is this: Perhaps the greatest part of the pacing and tension in BOW flows out of the Morale checks; based on a single dice roll, a player may or may not lose an entire unit of figures. Thus, both players are eagerly watching for those rolls, and the game usually tips one way or another in response to them. But with the undead having no morale checks, the game frankly turns into a fairly predictable "grind" of attack-dice and a few figures lost each turn. You might say that a good part of the "fun" was lost. (And the game went long in turns, if not in actual time played.) Not something I realized before this game.

The secondary issue here was the bit at the end with the solitary wizard being able to hold off all my remaining skeletons. That's a weird corner case in that (a) skeletons have the slowest move of any basic footman, (b) the wizard has the highest, (c) the hero-type can make turns without any move penalty, and (d) the wizard can make wand-missile attacks with presumably no limit on charges. If you'd taken out any one of those items, this would not have worked out this way; or if my opponent had made any mistake in the endgame, I might have still caught her (but: no such mistake). Looked at another way, in D&D, this would probably be an opportunity for a wizard to start flying and blasting fireballs freely from the air. But in reality, you probably wouldn't really want to come to the table with absolutely nothing but basic skeletons, anyway.

So about the undead: if you're a DM and you want to use them in your game, then you should be cognizant that using them very much changes the flavor and flow of the game. Option #1 would be to accept that flavor, and commit to a drawn-out war of attrition against a rampaging wave of mindless bodies, something like you'd see in a Dawn of the Dead movie or whatever. Option #2 would be to make sure and add some other spice for interest, like necromancer wizards, other high-level monsters, interesting terrain features, or the like. That's what we decided to do in the later follow-up game, and I was very glad that we did so (more on that later).