I said reinforcement, here is it, directly from Ebay: Another 15 orcs, 10 chaos warriors, 10 crossbows, 5 beastmen, 3 knights on horse and some equipment. Only a few of them are glued to the trays. I think I need to make a list now to keep track of the pieces, to define how the armies are configured and see whats missing.
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| Battlemasters Box 1992, Milton Bradley (MB) & Games Workshop. Maybe the biggest ever Wargame-in-a-box |
Remember that I said I would go back to the early nineties if possible? Her I am, going back to "simpler times".
Not that I liked the Battlemasters game so much. I was never a friend of random troop activation and that game did unit activation with cards. I think what you do or plan in a game should not depend on randomness. To me it is stupid to make wargames a lottery. Complete randomness - the fights are of course also solved by dice and so all results are random - produces a complete unpredictable game and makes any planning and tactics obsolete. I am not a chess player, but I am sure that none of them would sit down to play a game over which they have no control. Always strange to me that wargamers tend to accept this. The question is: who plays with whom? Do you play the game or does the game play with you?
But what I liked was the simpleness. Moving troops from field to field without measurement, getting fighting results without looking at result tables. Fast gaming without too much effort and with a good pace. And of course the style, this 90s Citadel-Warhammer style.
While I was painting some of the minis that I bought 4 years ago it came to me that a rebuild/my own version of a hex-field-fantasy-boardgame, with new rules, expansion and a nice playmat with some terrain features could be made very easy. In fact I can produce this very quick and I get a very handy game that can be used occasionally and may also be used by non-wargamers who would never touch a complicated game.
I looked around and it seems I am not the only or the first one with this idea. I found a lot of pictures of nicely painted Battlemasters minis, some people made new playmats, even 3D prints of the minis are on sale (!) and there are fans who created complete hex-field gaming tables with terrain that do not look different from other fantasy wargaming tables.
So, why not? I made a list. I always make lists.
Miniatures
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| Fantasy Warriors Box cover from 1990. 102 Miniatures, Rulebook, Counters. Back then a good start into Fantasy Wargaming. |
To be honest, if I could go back in the fantasy hobby, I would continue at the point where I was around between 1992 and 1995. What I didn't know back then: we - my wargaming friends and I - already had everything. Or let's say almost. The little that was missing would have been easy to get, the bits that were annoying us would have been easily changed. A little bit of planning, a minimum of investment and a manageable amount of effort would have closed all the gaps and would have ended all the problems.
Back then, for example, we had a somewhat messed up set of rules - which no one knows anymore because it was only printed in the form of a series of articles in the in-house magazine of a local games store - which we could have adapted to our needs and findings. And that would have produced a set of rules that could have been used ever since. But we didn't. We went to Warhammer, another mess, but in color.
And if we had adapted the obscure combat rules in the role-playing game we used at that time to our needs, this would have opened (literally!) a whole world of fantasy gaming with hundreds of adventure modules, several big and legendary campaigns, novels and even some computer games. But it was not meant to be. However - to be correct - our 90s role-playing game actually came to an end on an evening when the game master at the time was so extremely inflexible and stubborn and behaved so strangely that nobody wanted to play the RPG anymore after that.
And that brings me to the points that have always bothered me in the hobby (and sometimes people in general) : obedience to given systems, inflexibility and a lack of focus. A lot of people cannot approach things in a relaxed manner, can't focus on one thing at a time or concentrate their effort so that things go ahead.
Roleplaying started again more than ten years later and I was part of several long running roleplaying groups, but I haven't had any real fantasy wargaming for a long time now. And my last roleplaying group broke up in 2019 because one of the guys moved away - right after the end of the best campaign I ever had. The pandemic that followed shortly afterwards and the long period of isolation then did its part to seal the situation.
That was 5 years ago now. Time flies. For me, it's now the time to finally bring my activities in the fantasy area into a stable and sustainable state. And the only way seems to finally admit that solo wargaming and - if I can manage this - solo adventure gaming is the only really reliable solution. Dependence on others always carries the risk that everything will fall apart and I really have had enough of that. I had this too often and not only in the hobby. It is actually unbearable that external factors, most of which don't have anything to do with my life, keep interrupting my hobby activities. In other areas nobody would accept that. And I am no longer willing too.
I had seen these Warhammer Wood Elf Warhawk Riders before but really believed they were from the early nineties because the riders are very small. My memory deceived me, they are old but not that old. I finally found them in a Games Workshop catalog from 1997 (but not in earlier catalogues). The horses below them are from Minifigs, Aureola Rococo Series, (ARH4 Knights Silver Rose Horse). Sadly no riders. And a cave troll from Lord of the Rings (GW).
These unicorns and riders are also from Minifigs, Aureola Rococo, Mortals & Male Warriors (ARXC1, the horse ARH5). All a little bit damaged but nothing that can't be fixed. I think they make good companions to Brandor the Avenger, they look very similar. Unicorns where a thing back then. Two ogre spearmen without weapons from Ral Partha (02-149) and some Chainmail Gnolls.
And a sci-fi bridge from Mutant Chronicles for my invisible and still "undefined" sci-fi project.
