Kings of War

As I type this up, we're experiencing the first sunny day in recent memory.  The entire past week has slowly regressed from beautiful Fall weather to the cold, damp doldrums of Fall that no yoga-pant clad woman drinking a pumpkin latte can escape.  

In other words, it's perfect weather for my buddy Brian to take a weeks vacation.  

He came up Saturday to take a break from his stay-cation and crack open his next addictions, 3x3 felt cloths from Michael's and  Mantic's Kings of War. 

I haven't been into full scale fantasy battles since Warhammer Fantasy Battles nearly broke my bank with Skaven back in '94.  The GW core mechanics for their games are pretty simple, it's the twelve million special rules making units feel obsolete, if not useless that I dislike.  

After a perusal of the book and a quick game of dwarves versus lizard men it looks like you can play a game of basic units, mix in some variety and still keep the fate of the armies up in the air until the last turn.

I think this might be problematic...

The stat lines for KoW vs WFB are pretty similar.    The fact that the units rolled the same number of attack dice no matter what their casualties confused me.  The idea that a nerve test for one measly casualty could cause a unit with the worst luck to rout was intriguing.  I love the idea of just the current turn holder rolling all the dice for attackers and defenders.  It might be my first game jitters, but we communicated stats and special abilities better with each other than with a normal game.

I set up my dwarves horribly, forcing me be move them to get proper lines of sight.   Ranged attacks were pretty much neutrilized with either poor to-hit chances or tough defender armor.   We traded off units, Brian's giant lizard men dudes rampaging through my ranks, and my other dwarves charging his other units just to avoid the carnage.  By the end of the game, Brian's lizard men leader was killed by my king, and he's standard bearer blown up by a lucky cannon shot.   Brian just had the giant lizards and his triceratops crossbow weapon roaming the table.  Final score Dwarves 395 points left Lizard men 350, just enough for a (very) minor Dwarf victory.  

The Dwarf King distracts everyone...

The book is gorgeous (and only $40)  and it looks like I can already throw together 600 points of goblins with the future "Martians" I sagged on eBay long ago, especially with the unit customization rules.