Warmaster 1000 Point Empire v Dwarf Game

Game setup. Dwarves on left, Empire on right.

Yesterday early morning, I found myself sitting at home all alone, while the wife and son went over to the east coast of the state to do some shopping. We had planned to spent the day at Disney World with a friend, but that fell through. So there I was. Alone and bored. I was going to try to paint some miniatures a bit, something I haven't done in two years now (gasp!). However, I've been thinking about what types of games I want to play (mass combat, skirmish, fantasy, sci-fi, historical, 10mm, 15mm, 28mm, yadadadada) and if I even still want to play miniature games, now that I'm mainly a solo miniature gamer. (My son and I occasionally still play board and card games, though his interest is more in model railroading and girlfriends now.)

Instead of painting, I decided to play a solo game of Warmaster! Though I've been re-making a lot counter sets lately, I hadn't played the game in over a decade. It's one of the few miniature rules I've actually liked over the years, and works well solo due to the command rolls. The downside is that I had to literally re-learn the rules, but that would have been the case for anything I pulled off my shelf. (I'm not one to keep rules in my head for long!)

I would also put my counter sets to use, which is how I used to play Warmaster and ACWarmaster back in the day. (This also was less work than setting up my 15mm miniatures and buildings for a game of WWII, which was my other plan for the day.) I only have two WM counter sets ready for play, so I used them to create 1,000 point armies. For the Dwarfs, I used my latest set mounted on comic book board. This set has full art with no stats, and old school dwarf miniatures. For the Empire, I already had my old set mounted on MDF bases. These have a couple figures per stand (mainly from old Warmaster images that I've long since lost and cannot find online) along with stats on each counter. Playing with the old Empire set was easier because I had the stats on the counters, but the dwarfs looked better on the table. I just had to refer often to my dwarf my list, like any miniatures game.

All in all, I was happy how the new counters worked out. With only four figure images per stand, they look more like 15mm than 10mm, but I have been debating between these two scales for some time. I've literally been paralyzed by this. Neither 10mm nor 15mm is ideal for Warmaster at the moment. I should write my thoughts as a future post.

A Quick Summary of the Game
Since I don't have miniatures, I'm not going to bore readers with a play-by-play of the game with lots of mediocre shots from my ancient digital camera. I will say that the Dwarf tactics article I posted on the Dwarf counter set's page is great advice for WM dwarf players. (I fixed the link yesterday and cleaned up the post in general. Sorry about the dead link for so long!) Their good armor saves, crazy trollslayers, high command general, and artillery make up for their slowness, low-unit counts, and high unit costs. The Dwarfs pretty much manhandled the Empire the entire game. Trollslayers are just amazing when charging a brigade of enemy infantry. In one turn, one unit of Trollslayers just about destroyed a 3-unit Empire brigade. Gotta love charging and advancing!

Warmaster Fantasy Thoughts
The Empire kept blowing command rolls and rolling badly overall. This can be one of the frustrating aspects of Warmaster. Then again, it could have gone completely opposite. If the Empire had decent or normal dice rolls and been able to use some of their magic (darn those Dwarf Runecasters!), the game might have gone differently. Plus, Warmaster Fantasy doesn't operate so well at 1,000 points. If memory serves me, 2,000 points is where the game really works better. I also played on my 3x5 table, which puts units into combat quickly as if playing a 28mm game. If I had played on a 5x6 set of folding tables, it might have been different for the Empire since they could have used maneuvering to their advantage. (I was too lazy to pull out and set up the folding tables!)

Will I continue to play Warmaster and build some actual miniature armies? As I write this, I'm not sure. I'll continue to make counter sets because it can be fun late in the evening. And they cost me nothing other than time, though I wish I still had the images from GW's website of 15 years ago! (Archive.org is no help there.) I'll probably throw down some more games this summer as well, even doing some Ancients with the counters. Sadly, this is a "dead" game so overall interest in the real world is quite low it seems. (BTW I did get a copy of En Garde and Black Ops the other week!)

Do I want to buy and paint Warmaster miniatures? That is another issue and something for me to ponder in future posts. Sigh. If could go back in a time machine 15 years, this would be a no-brainer. But I would need a large truck to bring back all the GW miniatures I would love to have been able to buy back then when we literally were poor. All the old turn-of-the-century Epic, Warmaster, BFG, Mordheim, Necromunda, 40K, LotR and more I would love to buy! Yeah, wouldn't we all like to go back in time and buy some cool GW stuff!

Happy Easter everyone!

Dwarves army deployment.

Empire army and deployment.

End of Turn 1

Beginning of last turn.

End of game. Empire has reached Breakpoint.