Dragon Hordes

Dragon Hordes is a heck of a lot of fun.

The game is set on a fantasy world in which several nations are warring over a magical substance called "eortheblood." To play out these battles, the book comes with six pretty big armies in the book as cutout color markers. This sounds cheesy but it is great to be able to jump into the game without having to paint up a ton of dragons, pegasi, whatever. There are also explosion/turn templates (they serve double duty, to help cut down on the number of fiddly pieces) and, oddly, paper rulers.

Each army comes with land, sea, and air forces. The air units are the most flexible but are pretty delicate compared to the heavy land units, which in turn can't deal with the water.

The game runs really smooth and feels fair (reality checking in this case is fairly moot). The forces are very well balanced, and definitely different from one another. Setup is extremely fast, like five minutes or less if you're not anal-retentive about your force.

This is a brief breakdown of the forces:

Theofas Principalities

This is the "classic fantasy" side, with dragons, dragon hatchlings, pegasi, and dragon-riding spell casters.

Alef Catechumen

This is the "giant bug-riding elves" side, with dragonflies, spider cavalry, swarming hornets, tree folk, and cheapo spell casters.

The Forgotten

This is the Jurassic Park side, with T-Rex-riding warriors, pteranadons, triceratops ballistae platforms, and NO spell casters.

Dhurghoth Strongholds

This is the "high-tech fantasy dwarf" side, with floating crystal platforms, a stone giant, and some spellcasters. This force is as odd as it sounds.

Selicum Barony

This is the "Evil Pirates" side. Interestingly, this army can select forces from the dragons, bugs, and dwarves' armies, as well as their own balloons and tall ships. The drawback is that non-pirate forces suffer a morale penalty, and you can only build up to half your force with non-pirates.

Swaerthan

This is the "evil Chaos army" side, which selects forces from all the other races, plus their own icky slime monsters and shambling whatsits. Non-Swaerthan forces cost 50 percent more.

The army list works like this: Each army has a set of cards describing "hordes" and "individuals." The card lists the per-unit cost, and min/max number of units per horde. So, say, you want a horde of dragons: Each one costs 76 points and you can have 2 to 4 of them in a horde.

Each army has six or seven horde/individual unit choices. We've found them to be exquisitely balanced and an adequate selection for now.

The game is not designed with the same level of detail as Battlestorm. Personally, I prefer some structure to the way the various nations are "supposed" to build their forces. Get down too narrow and you end up with a one-trick pony or a non-representative force.

Some fans of the game are getting anxious for the promised lead figures, and have wondered if there are other epic-scale pieces they can use in the interim. Until Games Workshop releases its Epic Fantasy game, the only epic-scale dragons on the market are from Grenadier's out-of-print DragonLords, which, incidentally, was designed by the same guy. Rumor has it you can still find DragonLords figures from several online game stores.

In any case, the dragons and other critters are extremely generic -- you have "dragons," "hatchlings," "beastmaster" (dragon with rider), and "dragon with sage" (dragon w/ spellcaster). Dragon Hordes doesn't get into ice dragons, fire dragons, chromatic dragons, plasmatic dragons, whatever. Ditto for the dinosaurs -- you got a T-Rex, a triceratops with a ballista on its back (probably not too hard to kitbash), some li'l raptors, etc.

The game's scale does not bother with individual soldiers, so there's no conversion to be done with, say, epic-scale Inferno infantry. I've been fooling around with some toy dinosaurs for the Forgotten force in the interim.

My only quibble with the system is that terrain isn't particularly well thought-out. Since most of the action is in the air, it isn't so bad. However, if you introduce artillery or cavalry, expect to work out stuff like hills on your own.

A specific, and exceedingly common, example: Can catapults, triceratops ballistae, or the other "throwers" use indirect fire over hills? Do they require a spotter? We worked out our own solution, but the playtesters should have caught this. The party line on these questions is, "The game is supposed to be simple, so don't worry about terrain so much." My opinion: If you wanted to ignore terrain, you shouldn't have included terrain rules of any kind, fuzzy or otherwise.

Magic is extremely open-ended and probably the "hardest," if that's the right word, part of the game. There's a big list of spells that any spellcaster can use, plus the spell-using races each get a spell of their own. That's a lot of spells to keep track of, and they're all stuck on a two-page spread in the middle of the book. Expect to pass the book around a lot, or make extra copies of the spell pages.

The designer, Bryan Winter, has done a lot of CCG work (Doomtrooper, Kult, James Bond, Crow), and his affinity for wacky combo effects is apparent in the magic section. I haven't played a large enough army to have multiple spellcasters, so I haven't seen this in action.

There's no real "initiative." Each squad (horde or single piece) of figs gets a chit, with a corresponding chit in a cup. You draw chits and activate. There's a spell that lets you recycle chits before turn's end, but otherwise initiative is arbitrary. I like that, as dice-based initiative generally hoses one side in even the best-balanced TTGs.

I would have liked a "leadership" structure that would let you, say, set multiple numbers next to your horde and activate on whichever number you want. However, that wouldn't be in the style of the game, which tends toward extreme simplicity.

Last I heard, the plan was to release a complete set of figures replicating the pieces that come with the book. The concept was going to be pewter on stands a la Silent Death for the flying critters, standard based figs for ground forces. I understand there's supposed to be a setting expansion with two additional armies -- a da Vinci/retrotech force, and a warrior-women force. The designer swears the women won't be Xenalikes, but you know how marketing goes.

Bottom line: Dragon Hordes is a good deal for US$30, and you'll get a lot of game play out of it.