Form up, deploy the troops, enemy is in sight, what ever happens… Hold your ground!!
Orcs, Elves, Humans, Dwarfs or Demons… it can be great fun commanding your very own army of miniatures on the tabletop. Miniatures you have taken time to assemble and paint (if that is your kind of thing). That feeling of chucking handfuls of dice, scoring objectives and watching your opponent squirm as you remove their favourite units or heroes. So much fun to be had, but one thing miniature war games can suffer from is complex rules and the need to book out a whole day just to get through a single game with your gaming partners.
Enter Kings of War Champions!
This game is rank and flank wargaming, but rather than a whole army, you command a company of around 4-5 units. Its being sold as a quick way to try out rank and flank miniature tabletop gaming, with rules and miniatures designed to get the game to the table quickly.
So does it manage it?
Opening the box/Components
It is worth noting, if you have played kings of war before, you might want to opt for the separate rule book (which comes with tokens) and buy one or more of the companies you like the look of or works with your current collection.
If you are new to Kings of War, or just like the look of the starter set, you get everything you need in the box, for you and someone to join you in battle. You get two complete companies, each of which has one hero model, made of resin, and a handful of units, all in plastic. You also get the full rulebook, tokens and measuring tools, a playmat (double sided so you can choose between a grassy scene or snowy scene), and some card scenery, stat cards for all your units and heroes and of course, dice!
It is worth noting you do not get any glue or tools to make your models, so you will need to buy that separate. You will need plastic glue, superglue and some cutting tools and filing tools, so if you are new to this type of game, you may need to be prepared to invest a little more in to purchasing the extras you need.
All the contents do feel really good quality. All the card tokens feel well made and durable, the playmat, is a kind of thick paper that feels substantial enough to get you started and will probably last okay if you don’t want to invest in anything more to play your games on. The plastic models look great built and feel well made, as do the new resin hero models, they are particularly nice. In fact, Mantic have done a great job with their choice of miniatures here, as the heroes are great centre piece models, but you also get a range of really cool and exciting models on both sides of the battle. The only let down were the building instructions. Although some were perfectly fine, there were some that were not clear or detailed enough… particularly the crossbowmen. It was hard not to think certain arms and crossbows needed to go together, but it wasn’t clear which ones.
That said, all the miniatures were built in a single afternoon and ready to set foot upon the battlefield.
Gameplay
The thing about miniatures games, and particularly wargames like your very popular skirmish combat games or fantasy rank and flank, is that they can be often very complex to learn and play. This means you probably spend a fair chunk of time reading rules and getting your head round them, and then the game (which could average around 2+ hours anyway), extends by another hour or so, just with you flicking through the rule book, checking things that you are not sure about.
Kings of War champions promotes itself as quick and easy to get to the table… Well Mantic are not kidding. The rules are only over a handful of pages, complete with diagrams, and pretty much everything that needs covering, is covered (we say pretty much, because some of the rules are simply attached to the stat cards for ease). They are clear to understand and even offer up solutions to potential issues that could arise because the nature of game modifiers.
Set up is done together, by deciding an attacker and defender and then following the steps laid out by the standard set up rules and for your chosen scenario.
Round structure is simple. You open each round with the champion phase. Here both players get to assign special commands to their units, these offer a range of gameplay effects that can help during the heat of battle. You then move into the next three phases, movement, shooting and combat. This is done starting with the attacker first doing all three, then the defender doing all three.
In movement, you give movement commands to all of your units. This includes things halt (basically do nothing, but does add a bonus to shooting), turn around, move forward, to the side or backward. Movement is achieved with great ease, with Mantics choice of using multi-basing (adding 2 or more miniatures to a single base) in the game, it means you can move anything up to ten miniatures with a single move. As you move, you can also make some pivots to allow you to move around objects.
For shooting, as long as you are in range and line of sight, you get to role a handful of dice based on an attack value of your unit. Your aim is to role a number equal to or higher than your units shooting value. For every successful one of those dice, you then role against the enemies defence, where every successful role, leads to damage against that unit. In Kings of War champions, you do not remove models. Instead, damage is cumulative and is used when rolling a nerve test (more on that shortly)
For combat, the dice roll process is basically the same but using your melee stat for the unit instead. However, if you are lucky enough to charge into the side of the enemy, you get double the dice to roll, and if even better from behind, you also then get a dice modifier. This can be quite brutal!
Once each combat is completed you then roll the nerve test (much like after the shooting phase). So, what is this nerve test? This is an interesting and quite unique feature compared to other tabletop miniatures games we have played. As mentioned, damage does not remove models. Instead, when you roll a nerve test, you roll two dice and add the amount of damage the unit has taken. If the value is lower than their nerve (or you roll double one!!) the enemy unit carries on the good fight with no penalty. Get higher than their nerve and they turn and flee. The unit is then fully removed from battle. If you ever end up having more damage than their nerve, you still roll. Double one always succeeds; the unit holds fast. However, when damage exceeds the nerve value, the unit suffers a penalty to their attacks going forward. This system can mean after a single fight, if things go well you might wipe a unit out quickly, and yes… that has happened a couple of times in our games, but it does mean you are not having to constantly manage model numbers and how that affects your units attacks.
Once all combat is done, the final phase is all around objective scoring. The rules for scoring are outlined in the scenarios in the rule book, but ultimately, your aim by the end of the game is to score as many points as possible.
Games last around six rounds on average or until someone is wiped out. Our first game, only lasted just over an hour! This is great for this type of game and makes it a very viable option when you have more limited time to play, or if you want to get more than one game in.
Final thoughts
We play a lot of miniatures games, so have a lot of room for comparison. We mentioned that Mantic promotes this as a way to get into rank and flank, being simple to pick up and quick to play. Well, they nailed it! As stated, our first game was only just over an hour, and for this kind of game that is pretty impressive. Even though you only have a handful of units, you still feel like you are having a popper little battle, with lots of exciting moments. The game felt balanced and at no point felt like one company was always destined to win, strategy, scenario scoring and good old fashioned luck when rolling dice all play a part, but every unit and hero can be equally devasting or battered and bruised. Fun was definitely had!
The building instructions should be better. It is a shame that a company that writes great rules for their game, don’t manage the same for building their minis. This could be off putting for some. But that said, in one afternoon all the minis were built and ready to play.
This is definitely a game that will find its way to the tabletop regularly for us and could be dangerous to the bank balance as new companies are released.
Well done Mantic! This is a game you can be proud of and once again shows how simple but affective rules make for fun games that you just want to keep going back to.
About the author:
We are Peaches and Meeples, busy professionals who love to chill out to fun table top games. We love board games, card games, miniatures games, competitive or co-operative. Put some dice in our hands and we are in our happy place.
We are also proud guinea pig parents to two lovely fluffballs of joy.
