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Old July 14th, 2008, 01:47 PM
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Grishnakh Grishnakh is offline
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BattleMasters - customized game



BattleMasters. As many have pointed out before this game was a definite predecessor to Heroscape. Released in 1992 it was a joint product of GamesWorkshop and Milton Bradley, thus it's Warhammer characters.

While it looked pretty good out of the box I'm sure many people considered painting the figures (thanks to the GW influence). I took it a bit further and not only painted the figures but started customizing the battlefield as well. In a sense this was a precursor to my involvement with customizing Heroscape tiles.

I had not played BattleMasters in a very long time so this past weekend I dug it out of the basement, set it up and played a game with my family. What follows is a pictorial that shows my modifications to the look and play of the game.

Here's a bird's eye view of the set up at the start of the game.


I had gone to a fabric store and purchased a large, green piece of fabric. Using a dark green, prismacolor pencil and the cardboard hexes that came with the game, I traced of the battlefield hexes onto the fabric. It's difficult to see them in this picture but you'll be able to notice them in some of the close ups. The pencil line was left intentionally light so that they would not stand out as much.

My daughter and I were playing the Chaos side while my wife and our son played the Imperial side. Here's a shot of our dreaded Ogre. (I love this figure.)


I mounted all of the figures on green cardboard squares so they would simply look better. The movement trays that came with the game were, in my opinion, pretty horrible looking.

Since the figures were not put on the trays I had to make a game piece that reminded you of their attack/defense values. For those of you not familiar with the game this game mechanic is pretty much the same as Heroscape.


First round the mighty cannon misfires and takes a hit! It's already looking good for the Chaos players.


Here you can see the drawn on hexes. You can not move through the bushes and fences but you can fight across them normally.


The trees I now use for Heroscape were originally purchased for use in this game. I had mounted the trees on bases that fit the BattleMasters hexes so when Heroscape came along I had to rip them from those bases and glue them down to new ones. Now they work for both games!


Still positioning our forces here....


Our right flank.... (The rock pile is borrowed from my Heroscape customs.)


Our left flank....


Suddenly there is a blast from the Imperial Cannon! (O.K. I know. Really geeky here. But it's fun to place the cotton smoke clouds out! It makes it look more impressive!)


And it takes out a squad of our Wolf Riders! Ouch! (Here you can see the path the cannonball takes to get to the goblins. You'll notice that they are all flying cannonballs. My wife and son just seemed to have all of the luck during this game.)


The Imperial Knights charge up the middle! The hedges are lichen glued to green cardboard.


Our right flank engages in combat!


Each unit has three life points. When a mounted unit takes damage it's a simple matter to remove a figure for each hit. For a squad (which contains 5 figures) we remove one figure for the first hit, then two for the second and third hit. Its a great way to visualize what unit is hurt. In the picture the Chaos Knights have taken one hit.


A view of the middle from the Imperial side. The castle came with the game and I painted it with various shades of acrylic paint to give it that old stone look. (You can also see the current, drawn card that allows the Imperial Knights to move and attack. The card system is interesting but it might be fun to adapt the Heroscape order marker system to this game.)


The Imperial army, having tasted first blood, advances....


The broken down stone walls are made from styrofoam and are painted to look like stone. They match the shape of the hexes and act just like the fortified ditches in the original game.




Our Ogre, in the Chaos middle, is challenged.


The Imperial knights take their toll on our poor Ogre, giving him three hits. That reduces his cards down to three (from six).



The ogres card deck has three attack cards and three move cards. For each hit you draw one fewer card. With three hit points against him we could only draw three cards. All we needed was one good hit on the Imperial Knights and we would open up the middle of the field. This is what my daughter drew.... our Ogre basically did a little dance in the middle of the battlefield....


More scenes as our Ogre gets slowly surrounded.


Don't you just love going into battle with a bent pole axe?


My wife and son keep pressing our right flank and it slowly starts to crumble. Ever have problems rolling skulls when you need shields? Here my orcs die a horrible death at my wife's hands.


The fences were just hot glued together balsa wood strips stained brown with thinned down, acrylic paint. Many times I thought about ripping these apart to use in Heroscape. I'm glad I didn't!


The Ogre is hit hard by the Imperial Knights....


...and this time does not live to tell about it.


Our middle and our right flank crumbled pretty much at the same time. This only left what few forces we had remaining on our left flank. Even though this squad of Chaos Beastmen did a tremendous amount of damage the battle was lost.


With archers claiming the tower as the last insult the field of battle was cleared of the Chaos army.




Hope you enjoyed this little walk down memory lane!

_____________________________________________________________
Update!


After several starts and stops over the past two years I finally got my Advanced version of the Battle Masters rules ready enough for a play test. The game went very well and I was happy with about 95% of it. The few things that did come up were simple problems and I've been able to adjust the rules in question already. Anyway, thought I'd show a few pictures from our game. And in case you don't know Battle Masters was designed by the same person that did both HeroQuest and Heroscape, Stephen Baker.

One last thing, if any of you are going to be at TotalCon next year I'll be running this so watch the schedule for it.













Here's a couple of additional pictures:

The Wizard gets additional bonuses when he is in the standing stone hex. However it exposes him to attack!


The evil side's dragon blasts through the Empire Knights...


...and then attack a squad of Wood Elves on top of the watch tower!

Last edited by Grishnakh; January 6th, 2014 at 11:09 AM.
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  #2  
Old July 14th, 2008, 01:54 PM
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Uprising Uprising is offline
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Re: BattleMasters - customized game

+ Rep for the great post. I used to love playing this game when I was younger. Unfortunately it went the way of the Dodo when my parents moved. It didn't survive the move. I would play it now if I had it
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Old July 14th, 2008, 02:02 PM
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Grishnakh Grishnakh is offline
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Re: BattleMasters - customized game

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Originally Posted by Uprising View Post
+ Rep for the great post. I used to love playing this game when I was younger. Unfortunately it went the way of the Dodo when my parents moved. It didn't survive the move. I would play it now if I had it
I'm sorry to hear that you no longer have the game. With shades of things to come I originally bought 7 copies of it way back in '92. At one time they were really cheap at KB Toys. They couldn't give them away. I threw away the movement trays but still have the game maps, figures and cardboard components.

Thanks for the rep!
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Old July 14th, 2008, 02:03 PM
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Re: BattleMasters - customized game

Sorry, double post...
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Old July 14th, 2008, 02:04 PM
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Re: BattleMasters - customized game



I wish my BattleMasters was in better shape. It all got thrown in a box back when I first got married and has been kind of beaten up over the years.
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Old July 14th, 2008, 02:10 PM
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Re: BattleMasters - customized game

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Originally Posted by Cavalier View Post


I wish my BattleMasters was in better shape. It all got thrown in a box back when I first got married and has been kind of beaten up over the years.
I've got a few bent spear tips, especially on the wolf riders. I've tried to glue them back on over the years with pretty good results. Oh well, gives them character huh?
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Old July 14th, 2008, 02:25 PM
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Re: BattleMasters - customized game

WOw, that looks awesome! Good painting! I love that game. I got one for my birthday from a friend a long time ago, and just recently I got another almost complete set. I'm looking forward to having some massive battles soon!

+ rep coming your way for brightening my day!
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Old July 14th, 2008, 04:28 PM
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Re: BattleMasters - customized game

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Originally Posted by gamjuven View Post
WOw, that looks awesome! Good painting! I love that game. I got one for my birthday from a friend a long time ago, and just recently I got another almost complete set. I'm looking forward to having some massive battles soon!
Thanks! As far as the painting went I pretty much "slop" painted them to get them done quickly. I had planned on painting another set to make even larger battles but never found the time to do so. The set armies and the inability to build your own army sort of kept me from going any further with it. Maybe the different units could be treated like Heroscape squads with point costs. That way you could customize your forces. In fact you could port most of the Heroscape rules over to this game easily. I even discovered that the seven hex Heroscape terrain matches the size of the BattleMaster's hex so you could use them to make hills. Perhaps I'll play around with some of these concepts just for the fun of it. The old rule tinkering spirit, once caught, is hard to let go of.
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Old July 19th, 2008, 02:05 PM
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Re: BattleMasters - customized game

Very well done! My wife is always trying to get me to toss this game ("You never play it!") but I just really like the potential the game has. This is pretty much summed up in the most spectacular fashion through your pictorial post. Again, great job!

On the thought of customizing the game mechanics... I agree it would be easy to port the HS mechanics more fully into this game but I think I would just find myself wanting to play HS instead. To keep the flavor of this game alive while improving (subjective opinion of course) the overall game mechanics, I was thinking of messing around with the card drawing activation mechanic.

To me it is just too random, and it will keep it from ever getting played in my current group. One solution I had was to split those activation cards into to two separate decks- one for the Chaos side and one for the Imperial side. The game then becomes turn based while still keeping the random activations intact. To take it to the next step, each player could draw three cards and choose which to play on there turn, thereby limiting the luck even more. Some playtesting might be required to see if you need to remove dead unit cards from the deck or make players keep them in their hand as dead weight.

The random removal of the Ogre cards also bothered me for the exact reason you set up (after three hits you big badass just gets to run around the field). I think it should be chosen by the controlling player but I could see others still enjoying that randomness.

One last thought is to combine the Battlelore Lore system with the game. This would seriously complicate things and would need a lot of revising on the Lore cards but has potential.
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Old July 19th, 2008, 04:13 PM
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Re: BattleMasters - customized game

This is one game I really wish I still had. I cannibalized both sets back when I was playing WHFB. Oh, the folly of youth.

Beautiful stuff as always Grish.
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Old July 20th, 2008, 04:40 PM
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Re: BattleMasters - customized game

Ah Grish, you brought back sad memories of the 6 sets I snagged at KB toys a decade or so ago for only $10 each. Now, they are no where to be found. Thanks, though, for the happy memories of when we used to play that game. I loved the randomness of the cannon-ball cards and the ogre's goofy move and fight system. I may have to ebay a set for my son, just to give him a taste of those good times.

Good trades: Oogie Da Bruce, EyeOfSauron, Lilnewbie, rodriguez, Jaz1597(x2), GeneralRolando, SlikkRikk, BIGJIM, Lord Pyre

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Old July 21st, 2008, 10:06 AM
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Re: BattleMasters - customized game

Great! I still own two sets of it and couldn't ne happier. I had some huge battles with my nephews over spring break and they kept asking for more.

Quote:
The card system is interesting but it might be fun to adapt the Heroscape order marker system to this game.)
Yeah, I had this feeling too as the game feels very random as is. I came to the same idea as the previous poster on using a hand of cards for each player.

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