GW’s Latest Digital Product – Warhammer Battlefields

I hope you don’t mind the massive WALL OF TEXT, but I copy/pasted my thoughts across from DakkaDakka:

I impulse-bought the Border Wars version last night, and spent this
morning looking over it. Some basic details, followed by my thoughts.

In terms of value, the iBooks page says 55 pages, which sounds
about right. Of that, perhaps 10 are “how this works”, 16 are scenarios -
including all the ones from the BRB,
along with new ones – and the rest is the actual crunch of the campaign
system. There are several picture pages, but these are mostly
photographs of the studio armies, without much line art. It looks nice,
and has a very professional aspect. For this you pay £5, which
seems fairly reasonable to me. Doubtless in yesteryear this would have
been in White Dwarf, but this is an interactive book – so you get all
the popup links and whatnot – and includes a campaign tracker. Said
tracker isn’t anything that you couldn’t do in excel, but it looks nice
and has a picture of your race’s logo, which I like.

In contrast to Blood in the Badlands, there is absolutely no fluff, nor any bits of narrative about the GW Studio armies or anything like that. So unlike Blood in the Badlands, this is entirely focused on how you run your own campaign, not about
telling you how the Studio ran their campaign. This is much more to my
taste – I don’t really care about other people having fun, I just want
solid rules. This product is very focused upon its goal: to give a
simple and amusing campaign system for two people.

The new scenarios are not tournament style mirror-matches, and so
have some imbalance by design. In total, there are fifteen scenarios,
including the six BRB ones as I noted above, leaving eleven new scenarios.
There are a few ambushes, the age-old Last Stand one with the defender
having 33% of the attackers points, a couple skirmish ones, a river
crossing battle, and a couple based around taking and holding buildings.
No sieges.

The campaign system – the real meat of the product – is quite
interesting. You begin by spending points on three traits to represent
your general – Guile, Persuasion and Planning. An optional rule is to
get a +1 to one of these from your race – for example, Tomb Kings get
+1 Planning, Warriors get +1 Persuasion, Wood Elves get +1 Guile. Before
each of the 3 battles, each player selects from a list of five
strategies, related to the mission. These are compared, and may result
in dice rolls on your general’s stats.

For example:

The second mission has a clear attacker (the “Invader”) and
defender (“Custodian”). If the attacker selects “Pursue” and the
defender selects “Guerrilla War”, then the table says the following.

“The custodian must make a Guile test. If passed, fight Surprise Attack with the custodian as the ambusher and the invader as the defender. If failed, fight Heroic Last Stand,
but the Heroic Underdog has 50% of the points of the Overwhelming
Attacker (see Appendix 3 or Campaign Tracker). The invader is the
Overwhelming Attacker and the custodian is the Heroic Underdog.”

Thus you combine a bit of decision making, and some dice rolls, in
order to get your match-ups. Many of the results will specify that one
side or the other gets “stratagems”, which are mostly fun benefits, such
as increasing the WS or BS
of one unit by +1, or being able to specify that your opponent cannot
use a certain magic item. Overall, this system will give you, on
average, 3 games in the “storyline”; it is possible to only have 2 if
you pick certain results in the second mission, or to have many more
than 3 if you somehow keep getting draws in your games.

I’m quite pleased with my purchase, overall, and look forward to
giving this a whirl soon. It has the benefit of being simple enough that
you don’t need to get big maps or spreadsheets out to control it, but
still has a lot of story potential for those that want to roleplay it
up. I’m confident to say that it represents a better value than Blood in
the Badlands (being smaller and more focused), and am quite excited to
see what else GW
do in this range. I don’t have the Lustria book – I don’t know any
Lizardmen players – but that seems to be different by virtue of having
alternative missions and campaign choices, rather than being locked into
any two races. Conceivably we could see GW
offering stuff like “High Elves versus Dark Elves” or “Civil War”
versions of these campaigns, but this offering is distinctly vanilla and
lacking in race-specific trappings in order to keep it useful for
everyone. I’d recommend this to any players who fancy adding a bit of
variation and fun to their games versus regular opponents; however, I
don’t see it as so useful for people playing against randoms in a shop,
or for a tournament-focused gamer.