Last Thursday Dave and Gary played a game of the new Midgard fantasy rules, whilst others of us spectated. Dave Brown has written this excellent survey/review of the rules. I took a few pictures of the game, which was between Dwarves and Undead. "So what’s with this new Midgard thing?
The ‘Midgard, Heroic Battles’ rules come from the Two Fat Lardies' stable / Reisswitz press, authored by James Morris being a rank-and-flank set covering – as per the sub-title - ‘Historical, Legendary and Fantasy Battles in the age of heroic deeds’.
Legendary’ as described by the author has overlap with what I call ‘semi-historical’, where an army has via myth accreted a few fictional elements while otherwise being true to historical sources. An example being the Alexander romances where his army contains what you would expect in a 4th-3rd Century Makedonian force but adds Amazon riders, Roman archers and an eagle-powered vehicle.
It’s not clear to me what should or should not be called a review of a set of rules, but the following may fit your definition. For such a new set, released less than a week ago, I clearly have limited experience to draw upon.
Firstly the author and supporters have produced a series of you-tube clips walking through a game and a website spells out various basic data such as base sizes and so on.
Form and Content
As to form, the rules are 131 pages available in hard copy or a PDF. The author has flagged on-line support for things like army-builder spreadsheets, extra scenarios and army lists. A Facebook page and the Lardies forum can be scouted for more support and discussion.
The rules are superbly produced with original artwork, well-executed page design, crisp and clear diagrams to explain rules and photos of units. At the back of the rules are a two-page QRS.
To quibble, I reckon 10-20 pages could have been knocked out and the presentation quality maintained (and therefore print and post cost reduced) and some captions describing the photographed units would have been a nice edition. The units and figs are actually for the game – it’s surprising how many rules include pics that are not.
Any set of rules has three audiences; people thinking about purchase, players learning the rules and experienced players.
For the first group, the book has enough ‘shelf presence’ to attract buyers, not that I know if it will be available in bricks and mortar shops or how on-line sample pages will manifest.
A significant positive is the commitment to being model-agnostic and pragmatic on basing. I, like a number of my playing group, change rules not basing.
The suggested basing for 25-32mm figs is units all on a 12cm frontage (so 2 x DBx). A wise choice to go large here, if nothing else for the simple reason that you can use existing armies based narrower and put troops on movement trays, spacer bases and so on – but going in the other direction may be an impossible deal-breaker.
It seems the rules have already been something of a bridge to players of the various fantasy / historic skirmish games, that use singly-based figs, to try a rank-and-flank game by putting such figs on unit bases – temporarily or otherwise.
The number of figs per base is not relevant, to further remove a barrier to entry.
For learning players, the clarity of writing, superb presentation and examples mean that it’s easy to comprehend and play. I found that one read-through and a watch of the You-tube clips was enough to play out a game with no major confusions or errors. It has an index and table of contents.
Will experienced players find the game has enough depth, balance, challenge and ‘re-playability’ – ask me in a year or so or charge up your crystal ball. However, the published and proposed scenarios are a good start to cultivating long-term interest, albeit they are not my priority cup of tea.
Content
Rules are best judged against their design philosophy and Midgard makes a clear statement about emphasising the roles of ‘Heroes’ being the troop leaders / generals / magicians.
Early chatter on-line suggests a significant proportion of players intend to play historical armies, where the detail on generals’ / heroes’ traits would presumably be dialled down.
The game is presented as a roughly 10-15 unit army + 3-4 heroes and options to expand force size. Units are bunched in a "Contingent', commanded by a particular hero.
The rules suggest an ‘evening’s’ game-time at 300-400 points (reflecting roughly the unit number noted above) A good rule of thumb is to add 30-60 minutes to rules authors’ projected game length – so compute that any way you like.
Troops are classified into five broad troop types and some sub-types;
Warriors, - Heavy Infantry – Heavy Infantry with missiles – Formed Archers - Horde
Skirmishers, - Shooters - Light Infantry
Heavy riders, - Knights - Medium Cavalry
Light riders, - Scouts – Nobles & Light Chariots
Monstrosities, - Giant - Elephant & Mammoth – Dragon – Flying Beast - Artillery
The rules have a dozen or so sample army lists and an open-points system (with type limitations on traits), and notes on mutually exclusive traits, for you to build your own forces.
Heroes / commanders are markers that can join units and have limited individual combat capacity – but they can challenge others to single combat.
Units and Heroes can have a variety of traits, either by virtue of their type (all light riders Evade etc) or added for flavour. Indeed the traits drive unit and army flavour. Troop quality is pushed into traits rather than a simple numerical value for elite to raw, or whatever.
Only Pikes appear as a non-missile weapon-trait and armour sits as a separate quality on a 2-5 rating, high being good, 3 sorta average.
Limited access to magical weapons and missiles are catered for but not heroes’ magical armour for some reason.
Units have typically 2-4 Stamina ie hit points and heroes 1-4. Unlike say the ADLG ancients rules, with similar hit strengths, hits can not be generally recovered. Troops at half lost strength take significant negatives.
Shooting is less likely to cause stamina loss while combat can see units lose several in a single round – or all of them if outmatched.
The game sequence is a reasonably simple u-go / i-go. Command is via unit tests, often not required early in the game, some functions such as 2nd moves, tests to stay in place having been shot at and so on require a 3-6 command test dice throw.
The game is largely bucket-of-dice, all being D6, for combat and shooting. Measuring is in ‘Spear-throws’, being base widths. You can pre-measure.
A key part of the game is ‘Mighty deeds’ effectively action / commands of hero /generals which broadly speaking can be spent to buy re-rolls of command / morale throws.
Thus a unit failing to make a 2nd move can be prompted by spending a mighty deed and dicing again.
Generals / heroes have 1-4 mighty deeds, which are replenished each turn, they can also be used to trigger some traits, add dice to a combat where the hero is leading a unit and a variety of other things such as casting magic or avoiding hits.
Armies / ‘forces’ fight within a global morale system known as Reputation. A force’s reputation total is a function of the reputation value of its component units and leaders – when these die the army reputation is reduced by their value.
A force with no reputation left has lost the battle. Unlike many similar systems for global morale you can gain reputation / morale by your heroes doing bold things such as leading charges.
The units ‘grouped’ under a hero do not have a separate morale / reputation limit or test. I wonder if the rules developers were tempted to telescope Reputation and Mighty deeds into one thing.
How Does It Play?
The first observation is it feels and plays as a unit game not an element game. While units are best advised to support and co-operate they don’t do so in such a direct way as per an element game. And with a relatively small unit count you lose some of the higher-order features of a multi-element game.
There are enough here-and-there exceptions to broad rules that you may well be tripped up from time to time. And it’s not immediately clear why some of the exemptions are needed, why can’t troops evade more than once in a turn, why does turning to face preclude a further move.
The author has stated the rules are not intended for competition games – which is usually a red flag for a set being underdone in some areas – however the rules do look solid and well drafted enough that competition / pickup games will not be a problem within some parameters.
(There are a few sections that look like they need clarification but I’ll put those in a separate post once I double check. Some typos are rearing their inevitable heads.)
The relatively limited command system, no hidden troops and a max of only a second move per unit per turn (with no options for ‘brigade’ moves to keep troops together for important early turns) suggest sweeping manoeuvre and wrong-footing the other side will be limited. All the games I’ve seen depicted look a shade predictable - you can see where the troops will likely go and where they will form a battle line.
The multi-step turn sequence, combat sequences and command tests by individual units means the projected 6-turn game nominated in scenarios is on the money and frontal slogs look common.
That’s not so say the game is over-predictable, it’s just that the decision points will be risk / reward of timing of matchups and exposing heroes, and Mighty deed management.
I suspect the value in the game is that it will generate a player-base and that it is really intuitive to pick up and play.
The optimum appears to be playing at the higher points cost to allow greater troop diversity and army differentiation via specialist troops - and to maximise where the player decision points are – in the scrum of attack risk / reward, supporting unit deployment, hero and mighty deed management.
Do I recommend them, yes. Will I play more games and cook up army compositions, also yes.
Are they ‘better’ than competing rules – that might depend on your use for historical or legend / fantasy and frankly it’s too early for my view on that.
I had no involvement in the rules development or previous contact with the author. The publisher / distributor sent me and many other non-UK early purchasers our copy with a partial postage subsidy – many thanks again for that."
