VOID, Warzone, VOR the Maelstrom... Who's played them?

[Major_Gilbear]

As per the thread title, has anybody played one or more of these games? If so, what were they like? In no particular order:

• Ease of play.

• Variety of units/variety of play within each army.

• Do you need big squads, or are small 5-6 model squads playable.

• Variety of gameplay/replayability.

• Game duration.

• Differences between the games.

• Any notable pros/cons.

I ask as I've recently found the rules for them, but don't know too much about them - for me, I was playing 40k at the time, and didn't have money or time for other sci-fi platoon-size games. These were therefore, for me, "the ones that got away".

However, now that times have changed and these have come back onto my radar, I'm curious to know what people thought if them, and whether it might be worth my time giving them a go at long last.

[robh]

The original VOID (up to 1.1) was very good. I ran it for a while at an after school gaming club, iKore/UM were very helpful with getting started. I never played later versions so cannot comment on those.



Easy rules to pick up with 4 "human" factions that were identifiable to new players but with enough of a difference to make them look and feel individual, there is also a single obviously "Alien" race to add more variety.

It is very much a small squad game (I never bothered with the big walkers and vehicles). Units are not hugely varied within each force but do have unique abilities or special rules to make them subtly different.
Games can be 20 or so figures up to about 100, but that is pushing it. Playable in 60 to 90 minutes.

The figures for 1.1 are lovely, very clean uncluttered true 28mm sculpts (Kev White).  As a sci-fi platoon game I would much rather play that than any iteration of 40K.

[frank xerox]

Have only played a couple of games of void a fair while ago - can’t remember too much about the gameplay but as robh says the figures are lovely. Think Seb games has them now.

[Major_Gilbear]

Thanks robh for your comprehensive answer - exactly to sort of thing I was looking for!    Yes that purple book is the one I have too. I also have the Urban War Metropolis version of VOID that Mammoth did later, but that looks like a skirmish game with 8-15 models a side, which is really a bit too small for me (especially as I'm already flush with very good sci-fi games at that scale). I'm really looking at the three named games in the thread title as being some 25-45 models a side, plus maybe a light vehicle/walker or a 3-4 model mounted/monstrous infantry unit as a centrepiece for a force?

Do you remember what inter-faction balance was like (I imagine fairly decent if 4/5 armies all had similar core troops), and were there any specific features of the game that you particularly liked?

Miniatures-wise, the Kev sculpts are all still available, as are the later Urban Mammoth ones (which I also quite like on the whole, but they don't quite template over to the older game units exactly). One thing I couldn't quite work out is whether the faction books superceded the force lists in the purple book, or if they were in addition to the lists in the book. 

Have only played a couple of games of void a fair while ago - can’t remember too much about the gameplay but as robh says the figures are lovely. Think Seb games has them now.

Yes, Seb Games has the original models (seen in the purple book), and Scotia Gendel has the later UM minis (plus a few of the original Kev sculpts too). Neither are terribly priced, and I'm delighted to see they're both still available.

[Torben]

Do you remember what inter-faction balance was like (I imagine fairly decent if 4/5 armies all had similar core troops), and were there any specific features of the game that you particularly liked?

Now, I'm not Robh but I was also heavily into VOID back in the day and hosted tournaments for it and what nots - and from my experience the balance was way off when it came to the Syntha forces especially.

Whilst expensive, point wise, their weaponry were leagues ahead of all other armies and could be utterly devastating if your opponent knew what he was doing. As a quick example, the basic Androsynth unit (the cool robot soldiers) had a support weapon that fired a large template, with a high strength of 8 out of 10, and multi-damage. This meant that whenever it fired it would usually hit all models in most squads and sometimes even multiple squads, and would roll two dice to wound, usually needing a 2+ to score a wound on a d10.

Now, yes, my usual opponents did like to play Syntha and did indeed wipe the floor whenever we played, so there's some slight bias of course! But in general, I'd say that the balance between the other factions are fairly good - with some unit combinations that can be quite hard to face if you're not prepared for it, as the army building rules were a bit loose.

[NotifyGrout]

I played a bit of Warzone 1st.

Ease of play
It's a pretty straightforward system. Units have a number of action points to spend on movement, shooting, melee, aiming/bracing a weapon, and so on. Combat is d20 based which allows for a lot of variance between forces. Roll under your Missile Weapons or Close Combat score to hit. Success means your opponent looks at their Armor stat, subtracts the Damage of the weapon, and has to roll under the resulting total to avoid a wound. There are the usual cover modifiers and all that, but the core of any action that has a chance to fail is "roll under score after modifiers".

Variety of units/variety of play within each army
The forces vary quite a bit. The five Megacorps and the Brotherhood make up the human forces, plus there is the option of a Cartel force that allows mix-and-match and to field Doomtroopers, expensive but powerful heroes. The Dark Legion has five subfactions, and a force can be mixed and matched from any of those five powers. Each faction (Legion or human) has aspects where they are great and those where they are not so great.

Do you need big squads, or are small 5-6 model squads playable?
5-6 man squads are actually the average. The largest squad sizes are for Legionnaires, the Dark Legion's lowly grunts, and those are 7-10 plus a squad leader. This game knows it's platoon/warband scale and doesn't try to push that.

Variety of gameplay/replayability
Victory Points (1 VP per 50 points or part thereof slain or broken) can be used to calculate a winner. There are a few sample scenarios given, and they are good enough to get players going. It wasn't until Second Edition that more scenarios and more than a basic set of campaign rules came into play.

Game duration
Generally a 500 point game will last about an hour to 90 minutes, while a 1000 point game will probably go around two to two and a half hours.

Any notable pros/cons.

I'll start with cons:

• Miniatures availability- if you like the old school metals, they are extremely rare as the molds were destroyed ages ago. It is possible to play with Warzone Resurrection models or even reasonable proxies as there are very few unusual weapons in the game.
• Miniatures quality- It's all over the place. The original minis have that old school charm, but some of them look ridiculous- Capitol's basic troops have either baseball caps or football helmets on! A fair amount of the fully-helmeted models (especially the Brotherhood line) suffer from Big Head Mode, and some of the models have extremely large shoulder pads, almost as if to be a Take That to Games Workshop. The Second Edition line was improved, with some really cool but sadly hard to find plastic Trenchers and Ducal Militia. Shoulder pads were less silly and the Big Head problem was gone.
  
  Resurrection's models are mostly good to great sculpt-wise but assembly is not always easy (it wasn't for the Dark Legion starter, anyway- the hero models from other factions had fewer issues). They are also out of print but the core troops and heroes are not as hard to track down. They are resin, and I know that's off-putting for some.

Now the pros:

• Fast playing- no invulnerable saves where four dice rolls are needed to see if a model is removed. There are regeneration "saves" for a small number of models but it's not enough to slow things down too much.
• AP system- The action point system gives units more flexibility as to how they operate. Most units have relatively short movement (3 inches is typical) but this makes choosing when to use two actions to move an interesting tactical choice rather than a default.
• The setting- it's dark, but there's an interesting tug of war on both the human and Legion sides; if the human factions could truly unite they could likely eradicate the Legion, and if the Legion powers could work together as one humanity would be doomed. It's a little bit closer to hard sci-fi than 40k's "so-grimdark-it-used-to-be-satire-but-no-one-can-tell-anymore".
• Game size- A huge game is going to be around 30ish models total (average of five models per squad times five squads, plus five heroes/vehicles). It doesn't cost a fortune to build a force unless you insist on nothing but OOP official models or maxing out big vehicles (depending on how many expansion books you bring into things).
• Lastly, and most importantly, a new version is in the works, with a new company at the helm.

This game was doing alternate unit activations (as opposed to IGOUGO) long before it became cool in sci-fi and fantasy wargaming. It's neither too complicated nor too simple. I...I kinda want to try playing it again, even if I have to proxy a bunch.

[Major_Gilbear]

@ Torben:

Looking through the force book, that weapon would be the Plasma Cannon I think? It looks pretty similar to the it's 40k equivalent of the same name (well, Heavy Plasma Gun in RT/2E), but I can see what you mean about it being considerably more powerful than the squad support upgrades available to units elsewhere in the game. It also looks like Syntha can customise their troops via purchasable upgrades too? I remember seeing this sort of customisation in 40k 2E/3E (Eldar Exarchs in 2E and Tyranids in 3E), and it always seemed that either the upgrades had a winning combo, or were too expensive to bother with at all. Usually the former ended up creating some frightening game-distorting units though! Do these have similar issued in VOID, or are they in fact more reasonable?


@NotifyGrout:

Thank you for the detailed breakdown of Warzone First Edition.

It's interesting that you mentioned the unit sizes being around 5-6 models, and that armies were 5-6 squads, as the boxed set they put out (in, I'm guessing, Second Edition) with the scores of plastic figures in it seemed to suggest that it was being aimed at units that were around 10 models strong, with perhaps 6-7 units a side. Do you recall what balance was like between factions at all please?

Speaking of miniatures, I thought Prince August was still making and selling these? Or are they only running down old stocks? Or are these a different era of sculpts? If I wanted to play this game, am I basically looking at proxying to get consistent-looking forces? Anvil Industries looks like they might be a decent place to start with for Imperial/Capitol/Bauhaus factions, although I suppose VOID and/or VOR models might also be a decent fit (especially Syntha troops as Cybertronic). What would you use as proxies?

[jetengine]

Whilst I cant add much to the convo (beyond Vors minis are still in production with....Ral Partha iirc?) It's nice to see more interest in these games.

[Westfalia Chris]

(...)
It's interesting that you mentioned the unit sizes being around 5-6 models, and that armies were 5-6 squads, as the boxed set they put out (in, I'm guessing, Second Edition) with the scores of plastic figures in it seemed to suggest that it was being aimed at units that were around 10 models strong, with perhaps 6-7 units a side. Do you recall what balance was like between factions at all please?(...)

I played Warzone 1E and 2E quite extensively. 1E was more of a smallish skirmisher, whereas 2E aimed to go towards larger forces akin to WH40k levels. In 2E, in my experience, the basic plastic troops were the only ones effectively fielded in ten-squads, especially since their specialists except for the HMG were only rarely seen. Squad composition IIRC was based on 1 specialist for x regular troopers, and the better troops released in metal tended to work best in squads of 7 to 8, considering the tight command radii (i.e. you couldn't really do skirmish lines to avoid area weapons to to coherency being measured from the leader).

Balancing IMHO was better in first edition, although Brotherhood had some really rotten power combos, especially if cybernetics were used indiscriminately. Second edition's basic set lists were okay if a bit boring after a while, and there was the problem that they only released two army books before they folded, with Capitol and Bauhays bring quite OP in comparison to the other lists except Dark Legion.

That said, I liked both 1E and 2E Warzone very much, and preferred them to early 3rd edition 40k. But with Target Games' demise, there simply wasn't that much interest, supplies dried up and the matchups got old in a while.

[Westfalia Chris]

On Void 1.0, I played that a bit in 1999. Much better than it's predecessor Kryomek, good if a bit samey sculpts, and the mechanisms weren't that much different from 40k 3rd with some key improvements in activation. It suffered in my then groups from a lack of availability (Germany in the 1990s and early 2000s being a gaming wasteland beyond GW).

All in all, I'd probably go for Void for ease of play and adaptability these days. Warzone had a great fluff going for it.

[jetengine]

On Void 1.0, I played that a bit in 1999. Much better than it's predecessor Kryomek, good if a bit samey sculpts, and the mechanisms weren't that much different from 40k 3rd with some key improvements in activation. It suffered in my then groups from a lack of availability (Germany in the 1990s and early 2000s being a faming wasteland beyond GW).

All in all, I'd probably go for Void for ease of play and adaptability these days. Warzone had a great fluff going for it.

Plus Seb Games are being pretty cool with the re-release. All the rules are free downloads, theres a new starter box (Syntha vs Vasa) and a new Skirmish version of the game (Viridian vs Junkers) on the way, plus the Tiger APC is out again.

[Major_Gilbear]

Westfalia Chris,

Thanks for the contrast on Warzone 1 and 2, and for your thoughts on VOID. The rules for Warzone read a little bit like the ones for Infinity (though much more limited, of course), and VOID seems to be more like a d10-based hybrid of 40k 2E and 3E. Strictly from a game rules point of view, anyway.

With Warzone and VOID, I got the distinct impression that they did okay against 40k in Scandinavia, Germany and Poland, even though 40k "won" in the end. In UK, rest of Europe and north America, is was basically 40k all the way. That's just based on my impressions though, so I don't know how well that actually holds out (and several responders here are British). VOR seemed to do better in Canada/north America, and I've seen very little about it both when it was still a current game, and in general afterwards.

As for Kryomek, I've heard of it quite a few times over the years, but otherwise know very little about it. Is/was it similar to Warzone/VOID/VOR?

It's nice to see more interest in these games.

They were all very much games of their time, but their lack of continued success never meant that they weren't good games. Funnily enough, I think that if they'd had the advantages of communication that exists today, they might have fared much better and would likely have survived. I'm curious about them as I know they are "dead" games (which I find appealing in itself since I don't need to "keep up" with releases), but I also know that they all tried in their own way to address the bigger complaints many players had about 40k (most of which were valid). I guess I want to know if they succeeded in being better than 40k, and whether they are worth enough effort to collect a couple of forces for to play them. Hence why I'm now asking the people who played them!

Plus Seb Games are being pretty cool with the re-release. All the rules are free downloads, theres a new starter box (Syntha vs Vasa) and a new Skirmish version of the game (Viridian vs Junkers) on the way, plus the Tiger APC is out again.

I didn't know about the new starter sets, but I have been on Seb Games website recently. It is cool the rules and forcebooks are free, although I think over the years they have been free before for at least a period of time. In any case, I like that the old models are still available, and I hope that they remain so even after the new game(s) is/are launched.

[jetengine]

They were all very much games of their time, but their lack of continued success never meant that they weren't good games. Funnily enough, I think that if they'd had the advantages of communication that exists today, they might have fared much better and would likely have survived. I'm curious about them as I know they are "dead" games (which I find appealing in itself since I don't need to "keep up" with releases), but I also know that they all tried in their own way to address the bigger complaints many players had about 40k (most of which were valid). I guess I want to know if they succeeded in being better than 40k, and whether they are worth enough effort to collect a couple of forces for to play them. Hence why I'm now asking the people who played them!
I didn't know about the new starter sets, but I have been on Seb Games website recently. It is cool the rules and forcebooks are free, although I think over the years they have been free before for at least a period of time. In any case, I like that the old models are still available, and I hope that they remain so even after the new game(s) is/are launched.

I think the biggest things holding potential players back is the "Dead game" notion and the old-school miniatures.  Now as long as players can appreciate the sculpting style and its limitations then you've got them halfway, as you say the internet is reviving half these systems in some form or the other. Vor and Void may make me break my "No more 28mm games" for 2022 resolution.

[Major_Gilbear]

I think the biggest things holding potential players back is the "Dead game" notion and the old-school miniatures.

Yeah, it's weird; I have many projects, and find the release schedules are often too much to keep up with. Whereas dead games are patient, and I don't have to rush - everything that ever existed for the game is already out, and is now just waiting for me! Don't get me wrong, it's nice to get releases for everything, but after that... Games need to keep growing to justify new releases, and then periodic new editions that just reset everything rather than fix actual gameplay/balance issues. I find it all surprisingly stressful, which is odd as it's just playing a game with friends in the end. (Power of marketing I guess? )

Now as long as players can appreciate the sculpting style and its limitations then you've got them halfway, as you say the internet is reviving half these systems in some form or the other.

For me, as long as a force is consistent in style and is faithful to the imagery of the faction in the game, the actual miniatures used bothers me much less. If somebody wants to use suitable proxies, that's fine as long as I can easily tell what they're supposed to be and I can distinguish all the units types/weapons okay without needing to ask again every five minutes.

Vor and Void may make me break my "No more 28mm games" for 2022 resolution.

Go for it! Judging by the comments I've received so far on game size and game balance/duration, what's actually holding you back? 

[jetengine]

Go for it! Judging by the comments I've received so far on game size and game balance/duration, what's actually holding you back? 

Honestly? Space and a crazy huge backlog It's sometimes hard for me to internally justify "more sci humans" you know ?