Saturday 31 May 2014

Song of Blades and Heroes - Game on

Sean came over a few weeks ago for my first 'proper' game of Warmachine but later in the day Keith arrived so we moved on to SoBaH. I'd been itching to give this a go and had had various lists and fully painted warbands sitting on the sidelines for days.

I'd planned a classic Dwarf v. Goblins game. The dwarfs are more powerful, costing more, so were massively outnumbered. Most AAR's I've seen for SoBaH have been between two similar warbands with similar capabilities and they looked like fun games but I can sum up my feelings on how well the rules stood up to a more asymmetric scrap in one word... Disappointing.

Hordes of poor quality troops in SoBaH seem to have no chance against smaller warbands made up of high quality troops. The points system fails to allow for the massive disparity in the abilities of the troops. It was bad enough in the first game we played but once we added Leaders it was ridiculous. The dwarf player just kept shouting, "3 actions!", rarely causing a turn over. The Short movement dwarfs ran rings around the goblins, setting up advantageous fights and slaughtering them. Gruesome Kills happened all the time causing 50%+ of the goblins to flee every time the dwarfs ploughed in. I played a 3rd solo game after the others had left, same results.






I took loads of photos, planning on doing a detailed AAR/batrep but it all seems pointless now as there wasn't really a battle. My enthusiasm for these rules which was riding high has really drained. I'll give them another go with two warbands of similar size/quality but first impressions are that the game engine won't allow me to do what I want to do.

2 comments:

  1. I feel your pain. At least designed my opponent's commander with short move... anyway, with overall quality 2+ (unless separated from their leader) they have a simple tactics of keeping together and then either giving you a bolt to the face (aimed crossbow, short to medium distance - yummy) or powerblowing you to the death. The best I came up with is having at least a leader and few men at Q3+, and keeping the poor bloody infantry in a tight group that swarms the enemy and -of course- leding from behind, because of those damned crossbows. And this was when playing the humans.
    I seriously hope you'll conquer them one day, because I have a box of night goblins I intend to put to good use...

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  2. Would you mind posting the lists you used? I have only had a few games of SoBH, but have not seen this much of an imbalance.

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