"God of Battles: a Tabletop Fantasy Battle Game" Topic

Hi everyone,

I am looking for a good set of mass combat rules for dwarfs, orcs, and goblins. I came across the above rules in an ad. Has anyone played these rules authored by Jake Thornton that are being marketed by War Games Foundry? They are 285 pages with full color plates.

Thanks.

Sorry, never heard of them.

285 pages seems awfully long for a set of rules …

Bought them and played them once or twice but found the rulebook rather difficult to get the correct explanations from and it almost seemed to be missing parts of vital explanation. But alot of Foundry rules seem to suffer from this.

I got it in a Foundry sale for £20.00 GBP so not a big loss, and it is pretty, but its not been looked at again since the two initial game attempts. May try it again, but having gone back to my old stalwart – 1984 edition of Warhammer – I dont see much point in changing again…

Some possible games for you:
Kings Of War, Mighty Armies, Legions Of Battle(Crusader publishing), Warband, Mayhem, Armies Of Arcana, Fantasy Rules(Chipco), and the upcoming Dragon Rampant(maybe a bit smaller scale than you're looking for).
Kings Of War looks to be inheriting the throne abdicated by GW…

The Crusader set , Legions of Battle is an excellent generic set, I particularly like the fact you can have single characters, units and single element units.
I've got God of Battle -it's worth a punt.
Dragon Rampant will be an absolute winner i suspect judging from the popularity of Lion Rampant.
Isn't there a fantasy version of Hail Caesar on the cards -in the meantime this is a good shout
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"punt" means take a chance or gamble on something.

285 pages seems awfully long for a set of rules …

A lot of the book is taken up with ary lists and painting guides. There is a painting guide for every army, with lots of repetition – for example under each painting guide it tells you how to clean up the figures and undercoat them.
There is also a lot of repetition within the army lists, as whenever a troop type has a special ability, the full text of the ability is given (rather than just giving the name of the ability and detailed descriptions of all of the special abilities given in a separate section). You get the impression they were trying to fill as many pages as possible.

The rules and army lists are very much tied in to the Foundry fantasy figure ranges, so don't expect to be able to play a generic army without making up some special rules or doing a lot of "counts as..".
I bought them pretty cheap to have a look at for inspiration and ideas, and then sold them on – unfortunately without getting much in the way of ideas. Actually there was one interesting idea – terrain types that are keyed into particular armies, some of which contain neutral monsters, e.g a bear cave.
Otherwise it seemed to be (purely from reading) a reasonably solid game, without much in the way of innovation.
It's not really a set of mass combat rules though – one figure represents one man (or creature, humanoid, etc) and figures don't form up in ranked units. I would consider it to be a large skirmish game.

I still play 2nd Ed. BattleSystem, by TSR, published back in 1990? They are still available, used, on e-Bay, Amazon.com, etc. They are mass battle rules, covering nearly every conceivable type of troop, race, etc. There are rules for battle platforms (both simple machines, and chariots), simple gunpowder (I don't use gunpowder, but others might), with sample army lists, as well as conversion rules for 1st/2nd Ed. AD&D type creatures and monsters. These rules cover city fighting, open terrain fighting, siege warfare, magic, aerial combat, etc.

The rulebook is perfect-bound, and less than 200 pages, including a painting guide. They are bucket-o-dice rules, rolling one die for each figure attacking, but they play well, and they are adaptable to any creature type you can come up with stat's for. Cheers!

I always have to cast my vote for Mayhem by Brent Spivey, available on Wargames Vault.

Lord and Lands from Caliver books is a fast paced system, 14 races to choose from, uses command pips and unit activation, designed to be simple but challenging game play. Historical and fantasy and completely interchangeable so historic armies can vs fantasy if you wish

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