Warrior Knights: Two Different Games with the Same Title

Fantasy Flight Games, 2006

I've always really liked FFG's Warrior Knights.  I get the criticisms, and they're mostly valid, but the issues aren't big issues for me.  Highly recommend getting the expansion and just using it from the get-go though.  The game is rules-heavy enough that adding a few extra things doesn't make it significantly more complex, and the experience is just better.  Once you get comfortable with all the rules and moving parts the closest thing I can relate FFG WK to is A Game of Thrones the book/show in game form.  There's a lot of jockeying for position, religion, offices, tenuous alliances, and of course fighting.  The game doesn't feel like it's trying to be set in a particular place in history, but rather it attempts to be evocative of a period.  It's fun to play the roles of Head of the Church or Chairman of the Assembly or, if you're a poor title-less Baron, to scheme against them.  The game mechanics give you ways to do that, but it does take several plays to fully grasp all the different systems at work and how they mesh together.  The end result is that the first couple plays are sometimes confusing and it can feel like people sometimes luck into opportunity.  The truth is that with experience players can work the systems in their favor and get a real feeling of "I made this happen."  The biggest issue with FFG WK; however, is that there are a few areas where players can game the design.  Once in a while you'll find yourself thinking, "I guess the rules allow that, but it doesn't feel right."  I've played a bunch of FFG WK and it hasn't ever been a significant issue for me, but once in a while I've caught myself trying to come up with house rules to iron out a couple wrinkles.

Games Workshop, 1985

I had played FFG WK quite a lot before I ever played the GW original.  I was pretty comfortable with the sometimes overwrought design of the FFG incarnation and was really interested in how it might have mutated from the original game.  What I did not expect was for GW WK to be so... clean.  The rules aren't really written all that well, but once you've figured them out the game really hums along in a way that FFG WK never has.  Every single thing in GW WK is more straight-forward and intuitive.  Combat?  Die roll.  Voting?  Pen and paper.  Movement?  Let's talk about movement.  The FFG game requires cards to be played, you usually don't get to move all that much each round, and achieving your desired positioning for a battle or a siege usually takes a few turns.  The GW game just lets you move your Barons without any special requirements.  The result is that GW's game is much more vicious.  There are no safe corners of the board that will give you a couple turns to figure out whether the enemy is coming for you.  When the enemy comes, and it will come, it will be at your gates in short order.  GW WK, to quote Mr. White, "is like a swift, gauntleted punch in the mouth."  He's right.  Hell, the game begins with an Assembly phase where you suddenly have to start by putting players on unequal footing.  You'll make enemies quickly.  One thing that makes our games especially vicious is that, since we already have pens and paper for various game reasons, we allow passing notes above the table starting after the first Assembly.  Everyone knows you sent something to your neighbor, but only you and he know what it was.

Setting and theme is an interesting topic for these two games.  They're ostensibly the same setting, but there's something markedly different between the two.  FFG's version has missions, scholars, a religious system, and other machinations that, like I wrote above, make it feel more evocative of a period than truly set in one.  It seems to be a romanticized version of an era, and it really does remind me a lot of A Game of Thrones.  GW's original, while probably not designed to represent a specific historical situation, has a more honest medieval setting.  GW's Barons are Barons, not the scholarly political warring heroes of the FFG game.  The GW game is more true to a maybe-possible historical period than FFG's "Wouldn't it be cool if..." design.  The end result is weird, because in GW WK I care more about my towns, troops and nobles.  The idea that the GW game world could be a real time and place seems to make my actions more meaningful.  I shouldn't give a shit, honestly; we're talking about a little card that says I have Romanian Mercenaries that need to be paid, but I do.

Well...?

So the burning question: If you're going to play one, which one should you play?  If you like the FFG school of design then their version with the expansion really does have enough to it to be called a coffin box game in a normal sized box.  If you are indifferent or aren't particularly a fan of the FFG school of design then play the GW version.  I really enjoy both games and can't pick a favorite, but I lean slightly towards the GW game simply because you get to the meat of the game immediately, and the tension holds for the duration of the game.  But sometimes all those FFG systems in their Warrior Knights mesh together just right and you'll be gloating while the other players sit in disbelief.  The truth of it is FFG should have given their game a different name like, "SomethingSomething (inspired by Derek Carver's Warrior Knights)."  They didn't though, and because of that these games will always be compared even though they are different games that are both great for different reasons.

Doom of the Eldar: First Play Session

A good while back I picked up Doom of the Eldar and Horus Heresy (Games Workshop, although I also have the FFG HH).  Hadn't gotten around to playing them though until last night when we busted out Doom of the Eldar.

It's a fun game.  I'm surprised with all the Games Workshop reprints FFG has been doing that this hasn't been done in a Silverline-style format.  There's really not a lot to it component-wise.  The gameplay could probably handle a little updating, but it still stands up pretty well.  I don't know my 40k backstory very well, but the setting is an Eldar Craftworld (read: big ship) is attacked by the Tyranid Swarm.  It's almost like a Castle Panic in spaaaace where one player is the Eldar and one player is the Tyranid.

It's got 6 Phases to a turn:

1. Tyranid Reinforcements: Roll 2D6, and doubles could end the assault.  The chance of doubles ending the assault increases as the game goes on.  Then the Tyranid gets his 2D6 worth of reinforcements and rolls a D6 to place each of them in 1 of 6 deep space areas, just like Castle Panic.
2. Tyranid Move
3. Tyranid Combat
4. Eldar Special Action
5. Eldar Move
6. Eldar Combat

See?  It's that easy.

So the Tyranid units are face-down in space as the Hive Swarm.  The Tyranid player can inspect his own face-down space Tyranids.  They have a singular combat value.  The Eldar have some ships in space too around their Craftworld with a singular combat value.  Space combat is die rolls back and forth based on stacked unit strength, on a CRT, until somebody wins or the Eldar retreat.

Once the Tyranids get to the Craftworld they are flipped face-up.  There's no stacking limit in space but on the Craftworld it's 3 units per player.  Units on the Craftworld have an attack and defense value, and it gets real bloody real quick.  Eldar unit defenses are doubles until the Tyranids wipe them out of a Craftworld area, at which point the area loses its 2x defense fortification forever.  Craftworld Combat is a single die roll by the attacker based on the attack strength to defense strength ratio, again on a CRT.

The weird thing is that the game is scored with victory points, but it works pretty well.  The Eldar player only gets VP based on the length of the Tyranid Assault.  Eventually the assault will end, either due to Tyranid Reinforcement doubles or a fixed point on the reinforcement track.  That doesn't end the game; however, it goes until either the Craftworld has been devastated or all the Tyranids are dead.  Once the assault ends though there's no further way for the Eldar player to get victory points so he really needs to defend the Craftworld.  The Tyranids get VPs by devastating Craftworld areas and killing a couple Eldar special units.

The game feels like a game of its era.  The game flow was a little bit clunky the first round or two, but after that we were smashing each other up and it didn't matter.  The game flow gets a lot smoother as you play and figure out little ways to speed up things like placing reinforcements and such.

Session:
I was the Eldar, my wife the Tyranids.  I misread a stacking limit rule and thought the stacking limit applied in space as well so I spread out my ships all over the place at the start.  Her Hive Swarm mauled them, and did it with quick efficiency.  I had zero ships in space by her third reinforcement phase.  I could have launched a few more ships but it was a waste at that point, so the Eldar braced to defend the Craftworld.  The Tyranids landed and quickly devastated a rear area, but the Eldar held off the first wave on three other fronts.  That was just about the end of the good news for the Eldar though.

Consistently good reinforcement rolls kept the onslaught persistent and bloody.  A couple rounds later both rear sections, both flanks, and the Craftworld's forward section were devastated.  Some fancy fighting by the Eldar managed to wipe out a big chunk of the Tyranid heavy units on board the Craftworld though, which really just put them back into the reinforcement pool to come out again next turn.  But then, my wife the evil Tyranid finally rolled the right doubles to end the assault.  Boom.  No more reinforcements for the rest of the game and most of the Tyranid heavies are back in the box.  The Eldar have 5VP at this point, and so to the Tyranids for the 5 devastated Craftworld areas.

Just have to hold on.  The Eldar can't gain any more VP but they can force a draw if they don't lose any more areas or one of their special units.  With the Tyranid threat on board the Craftworld pushing three fronts (two flank, one rear) the Eldar repositioned their units for maximum effect.  Tyranid battle in the rear section: Eldar units hold fast.  Tyranids flanking the right section: Eldar annihilate the entire swarm.  Tyranids pushing hard on the left flank:  Bad news.  I had moved some of my better units into the left flank and put one of my special "If you kill this dude you get a VP" units into the left flank because I needed the strength bonuses he gave.  The odds were such that my Eldar would hold unless my evil Tyranid wife rolled a 6, which would annihilate my entire defensive force and devastate the area.  That's +2 Tyranid VP for anyone counting, but the risk was necessary to hold the area.  Die roll... 6.  Tyranids win, and my beautiful Craftworld is full of ugly bugs.  We could have played out the rest of the game to the bitter end to see what the final VP margin would have been, but we didn't because the Tyranids had won anyway.

I liked the game and my wife really liked it, which I didn't expect.  Game time was about 90 minutes, but now that we know how to play I'd expect future games to be closer to the hour mark.  If GW's Horus Heresy is this fun I'm going to need to track down Battle for Armageddon to complete The Trilogy.