Fantastic Battles a rambling review part 1

 

So, I recently joined the Facebook page for the game Fantastic Battles. You may have noticed that I had posted a brief synopsis of the game, really just my first impressions of it back in February 2021. I liked what I read, but I confess at the time I had some reservations. Well I have recently decided that I would like to start gaming again and that some of that gaming will involve fantasy armies fighting it out. So I pulled out a number of different fantasy games and this one made it to the top of the pile.

Now it may be the lack of gaming in my life, I may not be completely myself, or it may just be that they are not that bad a set of rules but I am interested in them! Your troops are assigned traits, traits that define what they can and cannot do. What traits you select are entirely up to you. There are no preset lists of troops, not preset army lists build what you want to do emulate the type of troops you want to field. There are 50 different traits to use, some are mutually exclusive (for good reason after all you cannot be both fast and slow) but most can just be blended together as you see fit. You can select up to four traits for any given troop, one being used as a racial trait (mindless for undead for example) while the other three slots further define your troops. The racial trait is a nice touch to add some thematic cohesion to your forces. If selected at least 50% of your forces must have that trait/be of that race..

This of course can be both bad and good. Sometimes when confronted with too many choices you can wind up in analysis paralysis. With only being able to choose three there is a certain amount of trade off required you need to select the best traits to represent your vision. But the fact that you are not constrained by someone else's interpretation of how best to define something is a good thing.

To help  you out the author has included sample historical and fantasy army lists as suggestions. Nothing is codified so they really are just suggestions, his idea of how one might build certain units. Technically there is no right or wrong way. So that being said I submit these sketches of what dwarf warriors might look like, some taken from the authors list. I whipped these cards up very quickly more of proof of concept. As such the points may be off but I do think they look nice.