A brief post about Warlords of Erewhon

A brief comment on Warlords of Erewhon

I'm a fan of Rick Priestly games and had a wonderful opportunity to chat with him at a GW Games Day in Baltimore.  In fact, he signed my WH40K softcover ("It's been a while since I've seen one of those!") and gave me a one-one-one demo of the system that would become Warmaster.

So when Warlord Games announced Rick's Warlords of Erewhon, I took the unusual step of pre-ordering it.  And I'm glad I did.  Why?  Because when I set up a simple 2 unit scenario to demo the games to my wife, it turned out to have a really interesting set of decisions.  Let's set the stage:

Amazons versus Romans

I put together a unit of 5 Roman Legionnaires using the Dwarf warrior stats.  My wife took her Amazons which actually do have stats from the Olympians army list.  I randomly put the units out and they turned out to be about 16" away from each other.  

I drew the first order and realized that I couldn't charge her unit.  So I just moved it 5" closer -- this put me at a disadvantage as the only way that I could get my charge in first next turn would be to draw my order dice first.  My wife had a much more interesting choice.  She could either hope that she would draw the first order next turn or go on Ambush this turn and wait for my attack.  I would have gone for the Ambush but she chose to trust in luck.  Unfortunately my luck held out.  

Turn 2, I drew the first order and charged in.   For this combat, we treated the Amazons as having spears and my Romans took a casualty on their charge in despite their high armor.  Then thanks to some abysmal rolling I ended up losing the combat and retreating.  In the following turn the Amazons were able to charge and auto-routed my Romans by getting more pin results.

And that was it - a very simple demo that left me wanting to play more.  I like the activation, the system is modern and clean with simple die rolls and simple modifiers.  My one complaint is that there is no insight into the points system.  I want to add the Shieldwall rule to my Romans but there's no advice on how to cost it.  It's a minor complaint, though.  [UPDATE: Points system has been published by Mr. Priestly)

All in all, a very solid set of rules and I'm looking forward to getting my skeletons finished and getting my goblins and orks to battle once more.  It's been a long time for those guys.