Rules for 6mm Fantasy with 40mm width troop blocks

[RSDean]

I have a fair number of 6mm fantasy troops based for Hordes of the Things. I’m thinking about spreading them all out for some bigger battles. While I could just use HotT with three or so connand groups per side, I was wondering if there were any other recommendations.

I should note that I do already have Fantastic Battles, which I haven’t tried with rectangular bases, but which should work.

[Hobgoblin]

Kings of War would be a reasonable shout if you wanted a detailed game (heroes, magic, big monsters, etc.). You would need to lose the Warhammer-legacy differences in frontage, but that's not a big deal. It uses various sizes of unit, so you could set a 'troop' as one 40mm base, a 'regiment' as two (so a square), a 'horde' as two regiments side by side and a 'legion' as a horde fattened up with a couple of troops in the back rank.

The advantage of Kings of War is that it's fast-playing and very clear-cut. You do need to track 'nerve' (hits/morale) for each unit; we generally do this with small dice behind each unit (a blue die for the first 6 hits, a red for the second 6 and a white for the third 6).

It also scales up to very big battles (e.g. lots of hordes and legions), and you get a lot of differentiation between troop types in skill, strength, toughness and morale, along with special abilities. And the army lists are all very nicely balanced.

Two historical games that I have but haven't yet played are ADLG and Basic Impetus; I'm hoping to get a game of the latter in very soon. Both essentially use multiples of DBA/HOTT bases (two bases side by side would form a typical Impetus unit). Basic Impetus would use roughly 24 HOTT units per side (so two to three times as many as HOTT), and there's a free, rudimentary fantasy supplement on Wargames Vault.

A great game that I haven't played for a while is Mayhem (Brent Spivey/Bombshell Games). It's got a great 'push your luck' command-point system. It uses squares for units (so doubled-up HOTT infantry units), but it's no big deal if you have cavalry on (say) 40 x 30. The fatal flaw - at least for getting the game quickly to the table - is that you have to design your own units. There is, though, a list for the Battlescribe app that has statted out army lists for Warhammer-style armies. Once you have your armies built, Mayhem's a really original and interesting game with lots of decision-making throughout.

Finally, one of the most original mass-battle fantasy games of recent years is Ganesha's Of Armies and Hordes. You need to divide the table up into 20 to 30 zones, but they don't have to be regular and can be discretely marked on the table with terrain pieces or chalk markers. At that scale, you could probably build a dedicated board very quickly out of a cork noticeboard or something. There's a spreadsheet that comes with the game with colossal and exhaustive army lists, and the whole thing is just a bit different from most other massed-battle games. From memory, the biggest unit is 16 figures, but you don't need to remove casualties individually; you could count one base as four figures and use a die or five-bar gates on paper to mark attrition. It's almost more of a card-and-counter game played with miniatures, but it's got lots of fantasy-specific stuff - options for heroes to explore dungeons mid-game and that sort of thing.

All that said, HOTT is hard to beat. One tip would be to set your commands at 32 AP rather than 24. That way, you can get a game with 96, 128 or 160 AP a side in an easily managed fashion - and 32 AP a command works just fine with the normal PIPs (it just favours slightly bigger groups). And there's the D3H2 mash-up of HOTT and DBA, which is great and which you can get from Tom Thomas on this forum. It integrates all the DBA troop types with those from HOTT, so allows skirmishers and different types of blades, warband, etc.

[fred]

Lots of good suggestions from Hobgoblin

I’d certainly give Of Armies and Hordes a look - it is a very interesting game - was a bit too different for what we wanted (an evolution of Warmaster) - but well worth a look.

Mayhem is good - but probably not big battle.

Warmaster is worth a mention

[Phil Portway]

Sword & Spear do a Fantasy version, quite easy to learn. The unit frontage is 80mm for 15mm, so your basing will fit perfect!

[Hobgoblin]

Mayhem is good - but probably not big battle.

Yes, that's a fair point - my thought was that Mayhem, with its square basing, would double the number of stands used per unit, thus using lots of them!

[RSDean]

Thanks for the extensive reply—that’s a lot to think about. 

I’m a fan of Ganesha’s Song of Blades and Heroes, but “Of Armies and Hordes” rarely gets a mention. 

I think I might even have Kings of War somewhere on the shelf…I know I have the historical variant book.

I gave Basic Impetus a try about ten years ago and hadn’t thought about it lately.  But it’s still somewhere in my pdf collection, and a free fantasy supplement would make it a possibility.

I do have a copy of D3H2 around as well.  (Do you see a pattern here … more rules than I remember owning…). My younger son had a burst of enthusiasm for DBA3.0 a few years ago, hoping to do some medieval Spanish and opponent armies, but that’s still pending.  My elder son took up the DBA3.0 banner, so we’ve been playing a lot of it lately, to the exclusion of HotT (1.0…), which was the default family game for a long time.   (A digression … sons’ first armies were 6mm HotT, so in addition to my ~9 HotT/DBA armies, they have another 5 or so out there … if we tried to put everything on the table, the full count is somewhere just over 200 elements.)

I haven’t run across Mayhem at all, and haven’t ever owned Warmaster. (In general, I started miniatures gaming before GW existed, so somehow never became much of a fan, apart from some Warhammer Ancient Battles mostly in the ‘90s and ‘00s.). There’s probably a copy around the club somewhere, though, so I’ll enquire.

I recently bought a bunch of miscellaneous reinforcements from Irregular for my troops, so I have the bits to make individual monsters, mages, and heroes if called for.  I just don’t have any based up right now.

Counting hits is no big deal.  I’ve got a set of counter markers briefly sold by Litko as an experiment.  It’s unfortunate that they didn’t choose to produce them; I find them easier to use than dials. (See attached picture for their use in a 25mm Dux Bellorum game; we read the number that is flat against the base in case alternative geometries occur…)

[fred]

For Warmaster there is a fan based project Warmaster Revolution which is updating and streamlining the rules - all the rules and army lists are available online.

If you have KoW Historical then it’s a cut down version of the Fantasy rules (i.e. no magic!) So it will certainly give you a feel for the core mechanisms. And magic is fairly low key in KoW - so while certainly useful, doesn’t transform the game (other than undead with Surge)

[RSDean]

Well, a scrounge through my shelves demonstrated that I do have two versions of KoW :

[Bodvoc]

I have played many fantasy rules over the years, one of my current favourites is 'Fantastic battles' which use 4cm square bases. A wonderful 'all you need in just one book' set of rules.

[Pattus Magnus]

I’ll echo the endorsement of Fantastic Battles - it is a great sandbox set and is compatible with element based figures. As long as the frontages of the bases are all the same any square or rectangular bases will work. Good smooth game mechanics and easy unit building, too.

[Valander]

Yup, another vote for Fantastic Battles. We've been really enjoying this ruleset, using 10mm models on 40mm square bases. No reason it wouldn't work with 6mm models on 40mm bases at all.

[RSDean]

The one thing that would slow me down on trying Fantastic Battles is that it is expecting you to have some smaller bases of characters.  I’m setting up to paint a few for my 6mm armies this morning.  At present, they don’t have any, but to have themed characters for some of the armies will require assembling another order with Irregular.  (Which isn’t a terrible thing … )

I’m getting enthusiastic about this. 

[Hobgoblin]

If you have any larger-scale miniatures (10mm or even 15mm) on appropriate bases, you could always adopt a "hierarchical scale" for your commanders, etc., until you get appropriate 6mm figures ready.

I haven't tried Fantastic Battles - I must pick it up. From a glance at the rules on Amazon, I'd give it huge credit for acknowledging that the figures on the table represent a far larger body of troops - something that Kings of War, Oathmark and Warhammer all seem strangely reluctant to do!

[RSDean]

My next larger scale is 25mm, which would work I suppose.  It would give sort of an Egyptian “Ramses Crushing the Sea Peoples” effect. 

[Hobgoblin]

My next larger scale is 25mm, which would work I suppose.  It would give sort of an Egyptian “Ramses Crushing the Sea Peoples” effect. 

Exactly!