With thanks to the almost biblical-sounding quartet of Ed, Mark, Luke, and Jason for putting this post together.

“HOW IT ALL CAME TO BE…” – THE PREAMBLE

Just after Christmas, several members of the Bedroom Battlefields hobby community decided that it would be brilliant to put on a big multi-player game of Warhammer – the kind of thing that would look right at home in the pages of White Dwarf, back in the golden age!

A central location was chosen, with the majority of the interest parties being based in the UK, and community member Mark managed to hire his local village hall at bargain-basement prices – less than the price of a box of Age of Sigmar golden space marines for the whole day 😉.

Jason, Knocker-down of Internal Walls, answered the call to be the ultimate Games Master; not only providing two HUGE 8,000+ point Empire and Orc & Goblin Armies but also enough terrain to fill a 15’ x 6’ table!

Not content with providing sufficient 28mm miniatures and terrain to open his own GW shop, Jason also devised and prepared a fantastic baggage train ambush scenario, ‘Through the Barrow Downs’, that was full of fantasy flavour and fun surprises – all using the fast-moving Warhammer Fantasy Battle 6th Edition rules.

With the date set to Saturday 13^th April, two more community members, Luke and Ed, jumped on board, travelling to Staffordshire from Yorkshire and Sussex for nine hours of pure retro Warhammer goodness. A day fueled by nostalgia, enthusiasm, packed lunches, some very nice alcohol-free Cava, (courtesy of resident sommelier Ed), and a multi-pack of Frazzles (which GM Jason requested on his rider).

“…AND HOW IT CAME TO PASS” – THE BATTLE REPORT BY JASON STOCKWELL

Entering the Barrow Downs…

Forward scout parties had discovered evidence of massed goblinoids on the main path. They estimated numbers in excess of one thousand… 

Engineering guild representatives decided to seek an alternate path through the Barrow Downs. Advance scouting parties were sent out to explore the possible paths and establish their threat levels. Many parties did not return. 

Of those that did, reports were made of large, heavily armoured Orcs in massed ranks advancing over the slopes. One long-disused path through the old river valley was estimated to have the least concentration of these foul creatures. But the guild must advance now as the Orc scouting forces had spotted the Empire scouts and had surely reported back. Who knows how many would concentrate their numbers, descending on these valleys in the days ahead? The guild scouts had not completed their work, but time was against the marching column, and a decision had to be made!

Once the column had reached the head of the old river valley, it was suddenly apparent that something crucial had been missed from the initial assessments; in the base of the valley, the river had dried up into a stinking marshy swamp. Fortunately, the bridge was still in place, but the orcs had started to crest the neighbouring hills. There was only one choice that could be made; the guild must dash to the opposite ravine and reach open country at the foot of the dwarf holds. 

With Sigmar’s will, the guild could only hope they could do so before reinforcements arrived.

Objective for the Orcs: capture supply wagons and gun limbers. 

Objective for the Empire: deny the enemy supply wagons or get them off the board at the north end of the road for victory. 

As a pre-game setup we randomly drew out some magic items from the 4th edition magic set, this magic set was the best magic system GW ever produced (in Jason’s opinion) and works brilliantly in other editions too. It was also used to draw for the wizards’ spells. Two commanders per side donned their hats of office and decided on their colleges of magic. Each side had a Level 4 magic user and a Level 2. 

Neither side knew what magic the other had until the game revealed it to them during play. Using the old power card system created a great sense of a game-within-a-game with some proper moments of tension waiting for reveals and lots of ‘should I do this now or not’ moments thrown in.

Magical highlights included: 

• Double bluffs on power card betting to destroy enemy spells.
• Whole units being rendered immobile through ice storms.
• A thoroughly luckless boyar suspended in mid air for three turns!! He watched his unit of winged hussars run around like headless chickens and get cut down before he was released to run about, narrowly avoiding massed goblin artillery which missed him!
• The giant Cromwell steam tank being raised in the air and held there by the very same spell!

The Empire deployment was predetermined; the Orcs could pick and choose where to send their troops in the respective deployment zones. Tactics would shift radically depending on Orc commanders’ choices. 

Other pregame moves included secret recorded deployment of scouts; where were they!?!? Oh bloody hell, they were hidden on the rocks at the end of the paths!!

After deployment, outriders got some free manoeuvres to put pressure on straight away. The warg outriders lept towards the mid-column, forcing a response immediately in turn one. The engineer guild outriders sped forward in the hope of bloodying the orcs’ noses and stemming the tide long enough for the head of the column to get off the bridge and make a proper show of itself. 

The wargs did their job perfectly; the Empire minced towards the enemy and missed every shot for two turns in their wild-eyed panic at finding they were utterly useless in real battle. They should have stayed at home for their sakes and, more importantly, for the sake of their comrades’ morale. It was pathetic watching them fail in such a mediocre fashion. They later died out of hand.

But not to worry! The orcs had decided they hated themselves, and a round of terrible animosity rolls (cheers, Luke!) had the effect of showing us one unit of Uruk-hai really disliked the pikes in front of them. They killed the whole regiment to an orc. 👍

Lee, the giant, bravely died on a steam tank and, in his death throes, fell on it to damage its hull quite disastrously. 

The head of the column had largely collapsed by Turn 4, but no wagons had been captured. Plenty had been blown up by misfire rolls or by enemy artillery. The only chance for the orcs to gain victory was to capture one of the central war wagons. Enter the valiant Hussite hero, known here as Stalwart Stan, who thoroughly saved the day by being the most impossible nut to crack against a horde of black orcs. Completely improbable defence was made!

In other news, a load of spiders had found the empire surprise of a howitzer hidden in a supply wagon, manned by two arachnophobic halflings!

The rear of the Empire column had finally started to catch up when two things happened: the night goblin reinforcements arrived. Took a look. And half of them ran away! 🤷🏻‍♂️

The night goblin reinforcements were just about to lure the Empire to turn and face them. BUT! As the Empire came about, the Stargate activated and some strange looking fellows arrived with magic staffs and blasted molten fire upon everyone in sight!

Finally, alas, the elven host sent to scout out this unusual orc activity by their high elven master, stumbled across the beleaguered Empire column too late to aid any victory. 

The result was an inconclusive engagement; neither side gained victory, neither side lost everything. The first big engagement of the Wizard’s War has concluded. The dwarfs are unsure if business with the Empire can be as reliable as it once was.

The Orcs had proven their capabilities in war, now the continued advance into the Count’s border territories can begin. Three areas are now under threat from orcish invasion, 

• The Norscan sea ports at the river mouth were relied upon for fishing, which fed the populace of the northwestern plains. 

• The dwarf mines of Mount Zee-Da-Guld, responsible for the stable imperial mint. Losing this would force the count to dangerously destabilise his currency and many peasants could starve in the resulting inflation. Not to mention the loss in trade from the very miffed dwarfs who expect their mine protected by the counts forces!

• The sacred Temple of Amon Hen is at risk of falling to enemy hands. Such a wealth of ancient artefacts and power would surely be a boon to any necromancer wishing to rob the graves of millennia in the temple crypts. Rumours of armies buried alive long ago exist around that holy place’s history. 

To be continued…

“WENT THE DAY WELL?” – REFLECTIONS FROM THE PARTICIPANTS

Jason, Empire co-commander, said, “The scenario turned out very well. It had a few options of tactics for both sides and would allow us to replay it and get a very different game each time. I would try to link up the Empire forces next time, and use the wagons as defensive points to rally around. Weaken the Orc forces then attempt a breakout manoeuvre later in the game to dash a supply wagon or two to the finish line. I found the game thoroughly enjoyable and flowed really well, it was great to meet chaps who like to game narratively and it made it a winning experience of a tabletop battle spectacle for me. I look forward to the next engagement in our tale! The roll out mats from Lidl recommended by Dr Spork are a winner! We used only 5 in this game to make a 6×15 foot board. A 6th mat exists which would give us a 6×18 foot table but we would need more players for that!😉. Finally, sorry I ate all the Frazzles, chaps. They were lovely though!”

Luke, Orc co-warlord, said, “I came to this game not knowing much about Warhammer 6th edition, I haven’t played in years and my hobby time is aimed more toward the collecting and painting side, so I was a little apprehensive about joining a massive game like this! Thankfully Jason was a great teacher/Games Master and pointed us all in the right direction. My first impression of the table was that it was so massive that we wouldn’t have enough men to fill it, but on cue jason produced box after box of stacked units (on movement trays for our convenience!).  Ed and I worked together on the side of destruction with an army of Orcs & Goblins. Ed was a great player and a quality team mate, we talked through the options on deployment and his familiarity with the game’s principles really helped me immerse myself in the game. The game was thoroughly enjoyable and watching our miniature army perform pitched battles against the backdrop of an expansive and visually appealing gaming table really made it something special. Some of the highlights (or lowlights!) of the game for me was when the orcs managed to charge their own unit of pikemen (and wipe them out) in a badly rolled moment of animosity; when a stone thrower misfired and all the crew were tragically lost; and then near the end when one of the objective wagons looked like it it could be rallied and potentially give the imperial army a victory point,  Ed’s trebuchet performed a superb shot across the table and destroyed it in its thundering tracks. Well, ‘if we can’t have it, no one can!’. Overall it was a great experience with a great group of people, thank you Mark and Jason for inviting me, and I’m really looking forward to the next one!”

Ed, Orc co-warlord, said, “What a fantastic day of gaming. My first time playing Warhammer Fantasy Battle and we went straight to a roughly 8k point massive battle. Thankfully with Jason’s calm and helpful guidance and knowledge of 6th ed WFB the whole day was a breeze. Once the board was built and the armies prepared the teams were chosen. Luke and I both wanted to play the Horde and ambush those measly little hummies! The animosity between the orcs was on display early on as they broke ranks and killed each other before a move could be made. Whilst this internal animosity was prevalent on the table it never came between the players, who all added moments to the battle with the choices they made and the spirit in which they played the game. I learnt the importance of positioning units in the game, that movement can make or break a battle plan before contact with the enemy, that the magic system in 4th edition rocks and that a well timed use of an artefact can turn back even the greatest knights in the realm. I look forward to the next opportunity to play with Jason, Mark and Luke, who all brimmed with enthusiasm for the hobby and were great fun to spend the day with. Sorry I had to cut and run at the end, next time I promised I will stay and help pack up!”

Mark, Empire co-commander, said, “Well. What an amazing experience! This was my first time playing Warhammer for over 30 years, and quite possibly my first time playing by anything close to the rules! Great fun was had by all, and the visual spectacle of this amazing game is going to lodge in my memory for years to come. Who said big games are dead?!”

Through this site and the Tabletop Miniature Hobby Podcast, I’ve had the privilege to interview some of the industry’s household names. During these interviews, I’ve used some recurring questions, one of which was:

Tell me about a particularly satisfying mechanic you’ve either created yourself, or came across whilst playing someone else’s game.

As you can imagine, it’s thrown up some interesting replies. This post is intended to document them all in one place. It features responses from Gav Thorpe, Andy Chambers, Tuomas Pirinen, Jervis Johnson, Alessio Cavatore, and Joe McCullough.

Alessio Cavatore

In terms of somebody else’s, it was Massimo Toriani who showed this game that he designed, and he was using D10 as scatter dice. All the other polyhedrons are platonic, so they are symmetrical. There is no direction in any way. There’s no arrow, no verse this way or that way. But the D10 is not a platonic solid; it’s artificially made to be ten-faced, but it is not. It definitely has an arrow shape. Each face of the ten faces is an arrow and has a number in it. So it was just like, well, you don’t need scatter dice and distance, et cetera. You just roll a D10, and that tells you distance and range in the same roll. And I was like, oh, my God. Yes, of course. Why didn’t we think of this? So, since then, I have done that as well in games I design, and, yeah, it just works. It’s so obvious.

As for my mechanics, the drawing of the action dice from the bag in Bolt Action, because of the dynamic that creates for the game on the other end. Of course, I hesitate to say that’s a mechanic I created, because drawing chits has been done before. I kind of added the fact that the dice actually have the orders, and therefore, you can then use the same thing you use for the drawing as the marker on the unit. So that kind of does a few jobs together. But, yeah, writing the game and sticking to that logic was cool.

But again, I don’t think it’s as original as perhaps when I invented the rattling gun. The mechanic for the rattling gun, which, as far as my mentors tell me, they hadn’t seen it before. That’s a good thing because, normally, I go, “I have this great idea. It’s completely new”. And Rick goes, “Well, that was done in 1976 in this game.” I was like, oh, it’s not new, right? But this one, now, they went, oh, wow, that’s a cute little mechanic that we never seen. It’s fun.

Basically. Is it like a minigun – a Gatling gun. It’s a rattling gun because it’s a Skaven weapon. But it is the mechanic where you roll a dice, and that’s the number of shots, and then you can stop safely, just basically cranking, doing one turn to the crank. Or you can go, no, let’s have two turns. And so you roll two dice, adding them together, so more hits. However, if you ever roll a double, then something goes wrong, and there’s a chart of wacky nastiness that happens. So basically you can roll maybe up to six dice. If you’re incredibly lucky, you don’t get any doubles, but there is a point where you go, “Statistically, I should stop, but maybe I need one more crank, one turn to this.” That is fun because it kind of challenges your greed towards the potential punishment if you go wrong.

Full interview with Alessio Cavatore

Gav Thorpe

My favourite mechanic is when Jervis created the blocking dice for Blood Bowl. It took a really complicated game with lots of sets of tables and looking things up and modifiers and stuff, and turned it into a really simple roll, one, two, or three of these dice, and then depending on how you roll, something happens. And it was so streamlined and so simple and made the game so much more playable. Yeah, it was just genius. That’s been one of my favourite mechanics, I think, of anything.

And because it was a physical thing as well, it was the idea that we can do stuff with dice. They don’t have to just be D6s. They don’t have to have equal weighting between the six roll results, and actually rolling multiple dice and picking one, not necessarily having to add them all together or all that kind of stuff. Third Edition Blood Bowl is just a beautiful piece of games engineering based around those very simple mechanics. And I loved it when it came out. I loved playing it

in terms of mechanics myself, I suppose when I did Inquisitor. It’s very narrative, and what you do is you nominate what your character is going to do, what you want them to do. You, rather than having a set of action points to spend, then you just go through and do them, you say, “Oh, well, they want to run over here. They’re going to hide behind a barrel, and then they’re going to shoot at that sort of like cultist over there.” And then you roll a bunch of dice, depending on their speed. And each four plus actually allows you to have part of that action. So what you’re doing is you’re never quite sure exactly how much of your intended actions you get to actually resolve. So there’s always a tension between trying to do stuff and playing it cautious. People have spoken to me and said that – that it’s kind of quite core to the game, and that’s one of the things that makes it fun. Again, that plays back into the Blood Bowl idea of the turnover, the idea of the failure.

I think, for me, narrative comes from unpredictability. Sometimes, the things we remember most about the games are the things that we didn’t expect to happen. When units charge in and crush that goblin unit and run them down, you go, “Well, that’s what they were supposed to do.” But when the goblins charge in and crush the knights and run them down, that’s a story. And the same time when your dwarf general flees, or the thing goes bad (or particularly well), that will be remembered.

Full interview with Gav Thorpe

Jervis Johnson

One mechanic I came across recently and really like is used in a series of games called Table Battles, published by a small company called Hollandspiele. The games recreate various famous battles from history and use cards to represent the major formations of each army.

In your turn, you roll six dice, and then allocate them out to cards in your army; each card needs certain combination of dice to be able to carry out an action. So one card might need a pair of 5s to attack, while another might need you to place a 4, a 5 and a 6 on the card, and so on. Any dice that are placed on a card can’t be rolled again until they are used, so the dice are a limited resource, and you need to think hard about where to place them. At the start of your turn, before you roll the dice, you can carry out an action you have set up with your earlier dice rolls.

What I especially like about this mechanic is that sometimes, when you attack, you will force your opponent to make a reaction, and this will stop them from carrying out their action in their next turn (they are reacting to your attack rather than unleashing their own). These simple mechanics do a lot to represent command and control issues, and they also capture the idea of one side gaining the momentum in a battle, which is something I have read about in lots of historical accounts but very rarely seen recreated in a game.

Full interview with Jervis Johnson

Andy Chambers

I’m going to nominate myself for this one, actually. The blast marker mechanic that we introduced in Epic initially, I think. There’s just something about having little explosion markers next to a unit. It’s another stage of damage at its heart, but it’s not removing models; it’s just showing that they’re kind of being suppressed under fire, that sort of a thing. And it’s been used in quite a few different game systems since then. I’ve used it a few times myself, and it’s a good mechanic. It’s a useful tool to have when you’re designing a game, to have that other stage of damage which isn’t actually killing things or knocking off hit points per se, basically like a temporary damage source which suppresses them or whatever. So, conceptually, I think that’s a good one.

The other one I’d nominate is the system that I use in Blood Red Skies for doing three-dimensional combat because that’s a World War II fighter combat game which doesn’t use altitude or anything like that. It uses what I call the advantage system, meaning we don’t care about how high up you are. Basically, it’s like, are you at an advantage relative to the fight? Are you neutral relative to the fight? Or are you disadvantaged relative to the fight?

Being advantaged means that you have more options. Basically, being disadvantaged means you have less, and it’s only if you’re disadvantaged, you’re actually in danger of being shot down. Until that point, you’re just ducking and diving along with everybody else. But in a disadvantaged state, that’s where you’re most vulnerable as well. So again, it’s a way of almost combining damage with other factors at the same time, without it actually being damaged to the unit. So I think that’s another particularly kind of interesting example of almost the same again, if you go on a very meta-level conceptual design mechanic applied in a different way.

Full interview with Andy Chambers

Tuomas Pirinen

There are a ton of great game mechanics I admire, but I’m going to use my own – Mordheim‘s exploration roll. This gives you your income, the ability to modify through the metagame, and helps you to find unusual places. You only need to get a handful of dice, roll that, and all of that happens from there.

Full interview with Tuomas Pirinen

Rick Priestley

I thought the turn over mechanic in Blood Bowl was an interesting way to sequence a game, and I took the idea and adapted it to my Warmaster system. So, to activate a unit you rolled dice to give an order; if successful you continued to move and order units, but if you failed, it’s turn over. It’s interesting because you have to decide which things to move first and which to leave until last and risk not being able to move at all. I later adapted the same mechanic to Black Powder and Hail Caesar for Warlord Games, so it’s had a good run!

Another mechanic that I’ve always thought would be interesting to adapt is the combat mechanism in a game called Warlord. Warlord is a game of nuclear warfare published in the 70s and later re-boxed and marketed by Games Workshop as Apocalypse. Anyway, it works like this:

When making an attack you take a dice and secretly select a number by hiding it behind your palm, you can only choose a number up to the total number of pieces you are attacking with. Your opponent guesses what number you have chosen, and if correct, you lose that number of pieces, if incorrect, your opponent loses one of their own pieces.

The attacker can stop at any point if things are not going well. Assuming things do go well, once an attacker removes the opponent’s last piece, you get to move into the space and take it over, but the number of pieces you move in has to be the number you last selected. Thus, the initial attacks can be random, although choosing a high value risks losing a high number of pieces, which encourages you to choose a low value… but your opponent knows this… and you know that they know… and so on.

When it comes to your last attack, the fact that you take the space with the number of pieces nominated means you want to choose as high a value as possible… but your opponent knows this… and you know that they know… and so on. I just like the element of double guessing and the potential for a lucky guess to unravel an attack.

Full interview with Rick Priestley

Joe McCullough

There are so many, as far as I’m concerned, because, for me, every aspect of a game can have unique and elegant mechanics.

So, like, movement. In most games, movement is a very set kind of thing. You can move your guy six inches. If you are doing a unit, you can move it, and you can make one manoeuvre with it; that’s absolutely fine, but there’s nothing amazing or elegant about it. And then you see something like X-Wing, the miniatures game that has this incredible movement mechanic where you have the secret little spinner, where you decide what move your ship is going to make, and everyone does that for all their ships. And then you reveal it, and they all just go everywhere in a way that fantastically recaptures the look and feel of the movies. And that’s just movement.

My all-time favourite game mechanic is the combat mechanic in a game called Silent Death, which it’s about space fighters shooting it out. Every gun system in the game rolls three dice, and two of those dice are determined by what that gun system is, and one of those dice is determined by the gunner. Like the gunner’s skill, you might have a gun skill, but a gunner with a D8. So you roll two D6 and a D8. And what’s really beautiful about it is you roll those three dice and add them together to see if you hit. But then you look at the dice a different way to determine how much damage is done. So a gun might have a damage level of medium. So you’d roll the three dice, and you’d find the medium die, and that would be the damage done.

And that idea of one die roll serving multiple functions has been hugely influential to me. Obviously, you see it in basically all my games. So Frostgrave has that same idea of making one die roll determine who wins and how much damage is done. And Silver Bayonet has that as well.

So, yeah, that’s a biggie. But there are just so many. I love the way power works in Marvel Crisis Protocol. I love how, as things happen through the game and as a figure gets hit, it can actually gain power. And thus, by having something bad happen to it, it is also given the potential to do more things. And that’s just a beautifully elegant balancing mechanism within the game. But also, again, it really captures the flavour of what they were trying to mimic in that game of superheroes beating each other up. And in all honesty, I could just go on and on. These things are like little bits of art to me, so I do collect them.

Full interview with Joe McCullough

What’s your favourite miniature gaming mechanic? Leave a voicemail and let me know. It might make it onto a future episode of the podcast!