Catalan Mercenaries by
@
Scytale
(nominated by
@
Cleon
)
At 10 points per figure, the Catalan Mercenaries are one of the best Black Friday deals you’ll find. But can you trust them to have your back when faced with dozens of moms looking for the perfect gift for their precious youngsters?
Balance
A 4-figure squad at 4/1/3/4 for 40 points is, frankly, nuts. That’s a ton of power for 10 point figures, and you’re activating four of them each turn. This design makes no pretense at making these stats seem anything less than super duper strong, as the one power on the card is there for the exact purpose of reining them in by giving them a chance to completely leave the game. Unfortunately, this makes straight balance comparisons a little difficult. It’s already tough since none of the other 40 point 4-figure squads have the same function as the Mercenaries. Comparisons can be made with the Knights of Weston, a strong squad with the same stats. The Knights have bonding, extra move if they’re being used with Gilbert, and they’re 30 points more than the Mercenaries, so a straight comparison is still difficult, but non-bonding Knights for half the price but a potential to leave you in the dust midway through the game seems decent balance-wise. There will have to be a continued focus on balance in playability to really know where they land.
Theme
The Catalan are mercenaries you can hire for cheap that might run out once the going gets tough. Thematically, this works in a lot of interesting ways. There’s the obvious theme of mooks providing some extra muscle on the front lines, taking and dishing hits, that may desert you when they’re sick of being your pawns. There is also implied theme with army building; in a standard game, you can’t completely fill out your army with Mercenaries due to start zone restrictions, so you have to pair them with some powerful, high point figures. This works great from a thematic angle, giving an image of these stronger figures being around to keep the mercenaries in line (which also enforces their Unruly personality). The Catalan can also make good fillers at only 40 points per squad, which gives them a great feel as figures you get when you’ve got some extra resources to hire a bit more muscle. (Their theme/army building requirements also makes them prime for scenario/dungeon crawl gameplay, which is a huge positive in my book.)
On the whole, this squad works great thematically not only on your normal level of imagery and gameplay, but also on a meta level when you’re drafting and building your army. It goes to a whole different level and is one of my favorite executions of theme I’ve experienced.
Creativity
Powerful stat-ed figures with negative powers aren’t entirely new to Heroscape. The Ogre Pulverizer and Pel, as a couple of examples, are great at providing extra muscle with some drawbacks an opponent can work around. The Catalan Mercenaries are perhaps the most ambitious, however, as they have incredible potential value but an incredible drawback. Cut and Run creates a different type of unit that becomes a big gamble to draft. Unruly is a new personality that reinforces this angle, and it fits well.
Stat-wise, this design feels very much like a Heroscape design. A 4-move human melee squad is straight out of classic and a great tribute to Knights of Weston, Roman Legionnaires, and those other guys who wish they were Romans.
I also have to commend how much these units promote good army building. They can fit into a wide variety of armies, but you still need to know what you’re doing when drafting those armies, as well as when playing. It’s not always obvious how many mercenaries to draft, and it also depends on what you’re bringing with them. They’re some of the most interactive units on an army building level I’ve worked with, which I love.
Playability
The Catalan Mercenaries change the way a game is played. They have a ton of value and power, but the nature of Cut and Run dictates how you play with or against them. In order to maximize their effectiveness, you need to slow roll the group towards your opponent as stringing them out results in early kills that get you closer to rolling for Cut and Run. The game changes, though, once half of your mercenaries are gone. When that happens, the mercenaries turn into sharks, running out and killing everything they can before they Cut and Run. This creates two different stages of gameplay when running a mercenary army in order to get the most value out of it, and it’s fun as a player to be challenged to balance the slow roll with the impending need to rush out and get as much value as possible before your mercenaries disappear.
Playing against the mercenaries also dictates your pace of the game. Ranged figures can have a pretty easy time of picking off mercenaries and kiting until they lose out on a Cut and Run roll. Melee, on the other hand, has a harder time, and must find their own balance of defense and offense. Too defensive, and the mercenaries will win out on the value game, so you have to know when to rush out and make strikes that will whittle down the mercenary forces, since Cut and Run is your only hope of winning. The new kind of gameplay the mercenaries provide is a fun and interesting dynamic, for the most part.
Despite all of the good gameplay that the mercenaries promote, they are at their hearts a swingy unit. Sometimes after painstaking development they simply Cut and Run once half of them have been depleted, losing the game for their player. On the other hand, sometimes, despite playing against them incredibly well, Cut and Run doesn’t happen for just long enough. Keeping your Catalan Mercenaries in the fight for an extra two or especially three rounds can just win the game for a player, even with excellent gameplay on behalf of the opponent.
This feeds into the biggest detriment of the Catalan Mercenaries. Cut and Run, as it stands, is a power that can (and often does) single-handedly decide the game, and it’s a roll that only happens once per round. Succeeding on the roll gives you
three more turns with their numbers and power, and that is huge in an otherwise close game. On top of that, because the mercenaries are so cheap-but-powerful, they dictate the game as long as they’re present. If you’re playing against them, you can’t beat them in a full fight, so you have to play into Cut and Run, depleting their numbers by half and then hoping for a bad roll. If it doesn’t, you kite and run and turtle until it does (which is especially detrimental for melee armies in terms of position and momentum), because if you try to keep fighting them you’ll lose. But again, you can only hope for that roll once a round.
This is where the Mercenaries really fell out of favor for me. Despite the interesting and interactive gameplay they promote at the beginning of the game, Cut and Run is just too much of a win condition for both sides. I really did not like that one roll dictated how a whole round was going to be played. I also didn’t like that it was so easy to high roll with the mercenaries -- often two (and always three) successful Cut and Run rolls won the game for a mercenary player, no matter how hard the other player fought against them. And, unfortunately, I found that exact scenario to happen all too often. The all-or-nothing nature of Cut and Run put too much power into a d20 and not enough into the skill of a player.
There are things to be said about such swingy powers, since they do have a place in Heroscape. Airborne Elite, for example, can dictate a round (and even game) with a d20 roll, but they are intrinsically different by being Unique, not appearing until The Drop triggers, etc. Other figures like Deadeye, Ne-Gok-Sa, etc. can also swing a game with a good d20 roll. I’m happy to have that conversation if there is interest, but suffice it to say that I’ve found differences in the nature of Cut and Run, and this review is long enough already.
Summary
I have so much high praise for the Mercenaries. They’re new, unique, and reward good army building and gameplay. They’re interactive and dynamic both on thematic and meta levels, and the two-part gameplay is exciting to play with and against. I would love to see them gain entry into SoV canon. However, I’m not comfortable with their current level of power and nature of Cut and Run as the dominant win condition when playing with or against them. One d20 roll that happens once a round dictates the game way too much, and I don’t feel that it is a healthy mechanic for Heroscape gameplay as it currently stands.
I vote
Nay to induct Catalan Mercenaries into the Soldiers of Valhalla.