Dabbling with Barons' War

In recent weeks, Andrew and I have been dabbling with Barons' War. We both read the rules cover to cover, and have played two games with the same 500 point forces. This post has been a long time coming, because our short-form conclusion is that the rules are ok. And that is a little disappointing.

In both games - one a straight clash, and one a scenario from the back of the book - we used the same retinues themed around Anglo-Normans in Ireland, but using the standard retinue raising rules. I have to say the flexibility in building retinues in Barons' War is great. I really appreciate the freedom to create a band of veteran sergeants, militant monks, green levies, and everything in between.

However, not all things are created equal, and it feels that the points values are not necessarily well balanced. Indeed, although the game is only recently released, there have already been official errata circulated to start correcting some of the imbalances. Spear and bills seem very effective, while the positives of using a two-handed weapon in no-way make up for the negatives. Shooting is very effective.

It was clear in the first game that we did not have enough terrain on the table. We thought we had rectified that with game two, seemingly not. Literally every piece of 28mm terrain at hand still didn't seem to help. I would expect this much terrain on a true skirmish game (with up to a dozen figures per player), but at this large skirmish scale of gaming, this really should be enough.

The scenarios themselves, and the supporting material including the campaigns, are brilliant! This is where the rules really shine and the obvious effort put into them bears fruit. There are plenty of them, and they are clearly written. 

The general game mechanics are perhaps more crunchy than we would normally go for. It's not that they are hard to understand at all, but rather that elements that could be very straightforward are more involved that they need to be and have multiple steps. The flow chart for declaring and making an attack (below in low res) is a good example of where a theoretically simple process is made more complicated than necessary. There is also a lot more record keeping than seems appropriate in a large skirmish game with multiple different tokens needed (I think there are eight? different statuses to track).

Horses for Courses
In conclusion, the game - for us - is a real mixed bag. These are just the thoughts after a couple of read throughs and a couple of games. The rules are beautiful to look at, force building is flexible, and the scenarios are a great resource. However, some of the points seem unbalanced and several of the mechanics are overly crunchy. I know some people like added crunch but, as always, it's horses for courses. Will we play again? The jury is out.