Sunday 25 January 2015

Playing BattleLore.

Having had an opportunity to play it again I feel I can give it a quick review. Unfortunately no photos due to being distracted with all the playing.

BattleLore Second Edition by Fantasy Flight has been out for a while now and I've played a few games now so it's review time.

Things you need to know:
- A 2 player game where each player takes control of a fantasy army either Daqan (good humans with Stone Golems etc) or Warband of Scorn (evil spiky Humans and monsters).
- You need to select your mission which will dictate your half of the boards terrain and victory conditions and then you can customise your army to best win the game.
- You fill up the rest of your 18 unit slots with decoys so that each player's deployment is secret.
- Each player has three Command cards, from which you will choose one per turn to play. You replenish your hand at the end of the turn.
- Each command card dictates the number of units you may activate and zones of the battlefield in which these units can be selected from. 
- There are also Lore cards (spells) which you can draw and play during the game, powering them using Lore tokens you generate during your turn.
- First player you get 16 VPs or wipe out the enemy army wins.
- The board is broken up into hexs for each unit to be placed in making measuring easy and swift.

Things I like:
- It gives me the Fantasy theme I want from a war-game but without the need to spend money/collect hundreds of miniatures.
- It has loads of options for missions and units whilst keeping the game quick and straight forward.
- Whilst at first Command acrd may seem restrictive it rely challenges you to make hard choices about how and when you commit units.
- The miniatures are good enough quality you could paint them if you really wanted to but also still great as board game pieces.
- The game is really customisable and easy for FFG to expand as they only need to release army packs to help mix the game up really quickly.
- For a game that gives me the chance to smash armies together it plays really quickly compared to things like 40k/Fantasy.

Things that made me go hmm:
- It really needs to add a few extra armies to make the game it give players a real choice in the theme behind their army. You can dictate the style of army through unit composition but each army is very specific in it's units play styles (Daqan is fast but light but Scorn is slow and very deadly) but it would be nice to have other options.

Score: 5/5 Daves. Given that it's a two player game I can overlook the lack of variety in armies so far, especially as there are army expansions for the existing armies right around the corner.

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