There are ‘The Art of the Master’ rules which expand upon the use of Combat Masters and Battle Masters. These rules form the basis for having characters in your games with many varied skills. I’ll cover this in my next post.
War Unleashed also contains rules for conducting simple campaigns – ‘The Art of War’. Although I’ve called them ‘simple’ campaigns, these rules are the core rules for running a campaign and will be built upon with each future release. War Unleashed concentrates on a series of battles for a region of Edath being the campaign but in the future it won’t just be battles that contribute towards your success in winning a campaign. But more on that in a couple of posts time.
What I want to concentrate on in this post is how War Unleashed provides you with new battle gaming experience.
The original Art of the Warrior in ‘War for Edath’ contained rules for Unit vs. Unit, Skirmish and Battle games. The leap up from the Unit vs. Unit game to either the Skirmish or Battle games was pretty big as you had to not only learn a set of rules for the deployment phase of these games but also rules for moving Units from Terrain Card to Terrain Card and then how to conduct the fighting aspect of these games.
In War Unleashed we have simplified this step up and made it more gradual – you get Basic rules that enable you to get playing the Skirmish or Battle really quickly and there are the Standard rules which give you the full strategic gaming experience. These rules also include all errata that came from the original Art of the Warrior and are laid out and explained much better.
War Unleashed also gives you rules for Battlefield games. These give you the full tabletop battlegame experience as your battles can now be fought over multiple rows of Terrain Cards. You can play both the Skirmish style and Battle game style as Battlefield games and with the modularity built into the rules, learning to play the Battlefield game is a cinch with only a couple of pages of new rules!
The use of cards to represent terrain enables a battlefield to be multi-dimensional. You can have a stack of Terrain Cards that represent all the levels that combat can occur over – you can have a tunnel card to show what’s beneath the ground then the earth terrain – such as woods or hills – with maybe a canopy terrain for combat in the trees and then an air terrain for aerial combat. All for the same terrain position.
With expansions you’ll get more varied terrain. Rivers can cut through a battlefield but with water troops you can use rivers to your advantage to get behind your enemy. The same is true if a large wood covers the battlefield – canopy troops can move through the trees’ canopies and over the heads of the enemy to come at them from behind. A tunnel mouth will give access to the Underearth of Edath and if only your army knows of the tunnel entrances on the battlefield you can certainly surprise your opponent’s troops.
War Unleashed opens up this potential with the Battlefield rules. Manoeuvring of troops and the terrain layout of the field of battle becomes critical in the Battlefield games.
And all of these rules expansions work with just the cards from the base set – War for Edath – but with expansions the gaming experience is greatly enhanced.
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