Back to Battlelore

Finally got Battlelore back on the table after an initial outburst of play over the holidays. I played my first "lore" scenarios and sampled the creature rules.

Lore and the spell cards integrated into the game more easily than I expected. It quickly became second nature to add a lore decision at the end of the turn, when drawing cards. The "Wizards & Lore" scenario didn't provide too many difficult decision points, though -- it was usually obvious whether you should draw two lore or mess around with the cards. The spells themselves added a bit to the game, from the dicey (fireball and creeping doom) to the useful (the cards adding battle dice for a single activation), to cards too weak (or too subtle?) to be played. I did find the counter-spell useful, and the teleport cards were game-turners, given that they can be used to break up a powerful, supported position just before your guys pile into the line.

What I most enjoyed about the lore cards was the possibilities for new combos. Combining a foot onslaught or a mounted charge with a teleport card that whisks away a critical supporting unit is very sweet. Giving an onslaught a little extra umph with a dice-boosting card is a good combo, too. I am anxious to play with the war council rules to experience a wider range of lore cards.

The creature rules were ... OK. Basically the elephant rules from Commands & Colors: Ancients, with a bit of chrome.

This was also the first time I played the game with my crazy magnetic basing scheme in place. At the risk of repetitive stress injury, I fitted the bases of all my Battlelore troops with self-adhesive business card magnets, then built movement stands for infantry and cavalry out of self-adhesive "paper steel" and matte board. I sprayed half of the bases white, and left the other half natural black. Now I can push my units around without having the figures get jumbled up (or fall over, because of those heavy flags), and enough of the white/black base shows through to help identify unit possession. It's a definite improvement over the stock components, but I wish the magnets were a little more powerful, and the bases possibly wider, as the bases are still a little fiddly to handle. The base colors do somewhat improve the "which guys are mine?" problem, which I found a pretty serious drawback in the game out-of-the-box.

I liked the game well enough, but for some reason I'm finding Battlelore a little less than the sum-of-its-parts. I played a couple scenarios of Commands & Colors: Ancients the same weekend, and found it a more satisfying game. I think it comes down to the flexibility of the light troops class in Ancients versus their counterparts in Battlelore ... it is still a pain in the ass to determine the difference between lights, auxillia, bows, and slings in CCA, but the subtle differences in battlefield roles for those units do add quite a bit to the game. I guess I like running spear men up to pepper the enemy line before the clash of shields more than I like parking bowmen in forests to plink away at the bad guys from a distance.

I also think the CCA scenarios have a bit more to offer than those in Battlelore. Notwithstanding the whole wonky Hundred Years War With Giant Spiders Thing, the Battlelore scenarios seems a little bloodless, a little "samey." Certainly they are leaning heavily on player input via the war council system to spice them up. Some of the CCA scenarios generate blowouts but it is the assymetrical situations that are most interesting -- cavalry versus foot armies, phalanxes versus lights, elephants versus anything. In Battlelore, the opposing armies just seem too similar (and the goblins and dwarves not dissimilar enough); there is a generic feeling to the troops and setups in Battlelore that feels a little uninspiring. I don't find myself especially eager to play the remaining scenarios for their own sake -- I'm interested in them for the new rules they will introduce, but not for the situations, whereas I do want to play those Greek scenarios from the CCA expansion, and remain intrigued by the promise of legion vs. barbarian scenarios in the second expansion.

The just-announced scenario generation supplement for Battlelore does have promise, though. Maybe this just needs to be a campaign game.