WARMASTER (WM) is a Games Design Workshop product. GDW does nothing by halves… and they came out with a huge WM 10mm product line and a huge, expensive rules booklet. On second thought, the book is not that expensive… it’s printed on glossy paper, has lots of pages, has lots of text, has army lists, has pretty color photos, and it costs around $30… you can probably order it over the internet for $20. Why 10mm? Good question. Why not stick to the tried-and-tested 15mm range? Perhaps GDW saw a market potential here, and decided to jump in. To date, the firm has made very few poor business decisions. I picked up a slew of painted 10mm figures at HISTORICON, and ordered more. They appear to be easy to paint… somewhat in the same ball park as 6mm figures. I played a quicky game with Bob Hurst at HISTORICON, and when we returned home, I watched the two WM Champions, Bob and Tony Figlia, have at each other. Amazing what you can do with 6-sided dice. a. In combat, a unit tosses its share of dice (12 dice for a unit of knights, 9 for a unit of infantry, etc). The knights hit on 4, 5, or 6, while the infantry hits on 6’s only. b. Then we get to the savings throws… infantry need a 6 to remove a hit, while the knights shuck off a hit with a 4, 5, or 6. c. Then we get to the actual damage. A total of 3 hits removes one stand… all units are composed of three stands. If there are excess hits, these are translated into ‘fall backs’… for each excess hit, the unit falls back 1 centimeter, which is a fifth of an inch. Since this is a game of British origin, the use of centimeters is mandatory… Lawd forbid we translate distances into inches… this would be a heinous act, and the hand of GDW would strike out immediately. But I must say that it bothers me no end when I see a participant actually measuring out one lousy centimeter… a fifth of an inch… as his unit retreats. The WM sequence is that of a simple boardgame… first, the active side does its thing, then the opposing side. a. The first phase is a command phase. In the games I witnessed, there were two types of generals… an 8 general and a 9 general. Two 6-sided dice were thrown for the generals… the 9 general had to toss 9 or under to move a unit. The same for the 8 general. If a general flubbed his dice toss, he couldn’t move any more of his units. b. The second phase is movement for the active side. Movement is unrestricted in the sense that a unit can wheel 90 degrees and charge an enemy unit to its flank. After units are moved, the officers are moved, getting them ready for the next turn. c. Then its fire time for the active side. The only time the inactive side can fire is when the active side closed to contact with a missile unit. d. The last phase is resolution of melee. While Tony and Bob were battling it out, I looked at the WM text, admiring the color photos, and reading about army lists and painting. I found out how halberds are to be painted… first with Bestial Brown, and then touched up with Vomit Brown. Alas! I don’t have a single paint container of Vomit Brown on my desk! During the battle, Bob and Tony kept referring to certain types of infantry units as “flagellants”. These are the ‘crazy guys’, they said… they get additional dice in melee. But at first, I thought I was hearing references to “flatulence”, not “flagellants”. This sort of took the gloss off the goings-on. The WM rules have some interesting ploys. A total of 3 hits destroys one stand of a 3-stand unit. And I do like the procedure wherein excess hits are translated into fall backs… there’s no need, therefore, for record keeping or casualty caps to track the damage to a unit. Another interesting ploy is that a pursuing unit gets additional dice when it catches up to the unit it’s following… the number of additional dice is proportional to the distance that the enemy unit fell back. The two procedures I didn’t like were first, the fact that the sequence is a very simple boardgame “gotcha” sequence. The active side moves and fires and gangs up on the inactive side as he wishes. There’s no opportunity for a reaction or a response. The second item I don’t care for are the saving throws. I realize that with 6-sided dice, your options are fairly restricted, and the savings throws, in essence, simply expand the hit tables, but I still don’t like ‘em. Bob’s army is that of ‘humans’, i.e., real people… at the convention, he picked up a number of little Roman-type warriors. The WM book lists 15 types of units for a ‘human’ army. Tony’s army is a dwarf army… there are 11 types of dwarfy-type things in the book. My own intentions concerning the 10mm people that I purchased at the convention is not to play WM with them. To me, they’re just an attractive addition to my inventory. I’ll generate a couple of sets of rules for them, and try them out just as I do with all the figures I acquire. The 10mm size looks just right for what I term ‘area gaming’… large, table-size maps on which the troops move from area to area. To this effect, I ordered a bunch of officer figures, which should be mailed to me within a couple of weeks. And I noted that in my current collection of 15mm figures… Napoleonics and such… the older figures, especially the cavalry, which are much, much smaller than those being manufactured today, are very close to 10mm in size and fit right in with the 10mm scale. Back to PW Review June 2000 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2000 Wally Simon This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. 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