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BattleLore: Agincourt Session Report |  |
I went out and spent some of my Christmas gift certificate money on BattleLore the other day, and I got to play it with my wife for the first time today. The game is just too massive for me to do a review of it yet, especially since the Agincourt scenario doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of what’s available (no goblins or dwarves, no creatures, no loremasters). At any rate, I’ll probably post session reports from time to time, giving a sort of mini-review on a scenario-by-scenario basis until I can review the whole game. My session report on the Agincourt scenario follows:
My wife and I played the scenario, both of us beginners. She was the French, with their heavy cavalry and well-trained foot soldiers, and I was the English, my side brimming with archers. I opened with a volley from my bowmen, and for quite a few turns it looked like things were going my way. I kept on peppering her soldiers with arrows, picking off figures one at a time, while my side remained relatively unmolested. I even managed to eliminate one of her heavy cavalry before it was able to do any damage, scoring the first victory flag of the battle in the process.
We danced around each other for a while, me lining up my foot soldiers and hitting her with volley after volley, she packing her footmen into tight formations and bringing her cavalry around to outflank me. I attacked with a Foot Onslaught, but her units were well supported and devastated mine with their counter-attacks. The real damage came when she was able to bring her cavalry to bear on my foot soldiers: one blue regular cavalry and her remaining red heavy cavalry. Between the two of them, they must have wiped out three of my units by themselves.
The game seemed fairly close toward the end; we each had three of the four victory flags that we needed. However, her side was made up mostly of blue footmen and her aforementioned cavalry, while I was the proud owner of a number of heavily damaged infantry units and four sets of archers, who were really only picking figures off one at a time, not doing any serious damage.
In the end, her heavy cavalry (now down to a single figure) hammered one of my blue infantry units and sent it running, then hammered it again with a follow-up attack, rolling three (!) bonus strikes, one for each figure left in the unit. And that was game.
But I hear you asking, “Was it fun?” Yes. Yes it was. Despite the fact that there seems to be a lot that I haven’t gotten to use yet, I really enjoyed my first game of BattleLore. Even more impressive, though, was the fact that my wife enjoyed it and expressed her interest in playing again (in the same day, even), and she’s not usually a big board game player. The game seems simple enough that you can pick it up quickly (and the huge number of reference cards that come with the game certainly help), but deep enough that there’s a lot of room for nuance and strategy. I, for one, can’t wait to start playing with goblins, dwarves, giant spiders, and all the various loremasters and their associated powers. Thus far, I can find quite a bit to recommend this game.
