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Chainmail
Author: Jonathan Tweet
Price: $29.95 (or free here)
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast (www.wizards.com)
This review is a bit unusual. First of all, this is the first review I've done of something I was sent a free review copy of. All my previous reviews have been for items that I bought with my own money. Second, since this is supposed to be a "pick of the week", where I highlight something good, which left me in something of a dilemma with regard to Chainmail, the new skirmish-level miniatures game (with an old, nostalgic name) from Wizards of the Coast. You see, parts of the game are very, very good, and parts are very, very bad. So this review will concentrate on the good, which is the rules set. If you're interested in the bad, click here.
I've always been interested in miniatures wargaming, but never really got into it. The reason for this is because the main thing that attracted me to miniatures was the freedom of movement and the wide range of tactics. The idea of assembling and painting a large number of miniatures didn't appeal to me at all. So the idea of a skirmish-level game, which uses less miniatures but still has all the qualities I'm interested in, greatly appealed to me. I figured that I could tolerate painting a handful of miniatures a lot more than painting a whole army.
Using a streamlined version of the D&D combat system, the Chainmail rules deliver on this promise, retaining tactical flexibility and adding complexity only in the area of troop control.
This is how it works in the basic game: Each side rolls a d20 each round. The person who rolled the highest can choose to go first or second. The person who goes first "activates" one model in his warband, that is, the model gets to do something, like move and attack, or move and cast a spell, or move twice. Then the other player activates a model. The players take turns doing this until they're both out of models, and the round starts over again.
Simple, yes? Combat should be familiar to anyone who's played D&D, though, as I said, streamlined. To hit a model, the attacking model must be touching another model's base (for melee) or have a ranged attack that's in range. Roll a d20, add the model's melee or ranged attack bonus as appropriate, add or subtract modifiers (there aren't many), and if the total is equal to or greater than the Armor rating of the defending figure, that's a hit. Every figure has a fixed amount of damage in "Wounds" that they do, and each figure has a rating in Wounds, indicating how much damage they can take. (For those of you familiar with D&D, I believe one Wound is about 5 hit points.) If you roll a natural 20, that's a critical hit, and the victim takes double Wound damage.
The damage system is pretty clever, and makes combat more unsure than one would expect. If a figure is brought down to a negative amount of Wounds, it is dead. However, it is more common for a figure to be brought down to 0 Wounds (most figures only do 1 Wound point of damage in a hit), at which point the figure is "knocked down". Models that are knocked down have a chance every round to get up again, based on the figure's Save score. (Yes, there are saving throws, like in D&D. However, all the saving throw types have been collapsed into a single Save score. Roll a d20, add the figure's Save, and if you make the Difficulty Class for the save or higher, the figure saved.) The "knocked down" feature makes things interesting, as figures can go up and down and up, with rapid changes to the tactical situation, unless your opponent spares an extra round to make sure a figure is dead. (One of the people I playtested the game with said this meant combat was not deadly enough. Another found it too deadly. To me, that says it's just about right.)
Terrain is very simple, usually causing a movement penalty and providing some sort of bonus to Armor for being behind it. Some types of cover block line-of-sight and some don't. The game comes with simple cards with terrain printed on them that you put down when setting up a scenario; these terrain cards list everything you need to know about the terrain on the back. (And you can download them for free if you don't want to buy the official miniatures to get the terrain cards.)
Exceptions to the rules that flow from particular figure types (like the undead) are handled by Special Abilities, which are clearly defined in the rules. Models may have Special Abilities as varied as Point Blank Shot, Scary (causes fear), and Acid Spit. They're all laid out in one place, so model statistics don't have to go into the exceptions, just list the model's Special Abilities. These Abilities can also represent disadvantages of the different types of troops, and are quite clever. For example, the Wild Troop type simulates a creature of animal intelligence, and does a good job of using the rules to make it hard to fully control the troop in question: Pretty much you have a choice between "come here" and "sic 'em" when it comes to Wild Troops, and when I was using the Hyena in combat, I really felt like I was trying to command, essentially, a vicious dog.
It's in the command and morale system that the game really begins to shine. Certain units have the "Commander" Special Ability, allowing them to command. In the Basic game, what a unit can do depends on whether the unit is in or out of command, that is, within line of sight of a commander or very close to the commander. Out of command units can't do much more than charge the enemy or flee. Being in command allows you to issue more sophisticated orders, and what a figure can and can't do when in or out of command is clearly outlined in the rules.
Morale is simple: When a figure is down to half its Wound points, it has to make a Morale Save against a DC determined by how much of the warband is still alive. If it fails the save, the figure flees, and needs to be in command to try the save again to pull itself together. Simple, yet effective. I was glad to see that they didn't forget the morale rules, since as a fan of The Art of War I would have been upset if morale wasn't taken into account. But the rules are simple enough that they don't get in the way of the game.
The only difference between the Basic and Advanced (i.e. complete) game is in the command rules. In the Advanced game, a commander has a number of "command points" which are spent every round to put units "in command", as in the Basic game. However, they can also be used for other things: Giving troops a combat bonus, giving a boost to morale, giving a troop a better chance of getting up, or allowing a figure to engage in more sophisticated targeting than is allowed in the Basic game. (My favorite is the ability to spend a Command Point to re-roll initiative.) This makes the Advanced game much more tactically rich, with a resource-management issue with regard to the Command Points. Do I give my troop a bonus, or save it so I can keep some of the other troops in command? In one of the review playtest games I played, I deliberately picked a couple of troops with Command scores so I could test this out. The different tricks I could pull, compared to my opponent (who had very few Command Points), combined with a stretch of bad luck on my opponent's side of things, was more than enough to tip the balance in my favor.
All of this combined to make playing Chainmail very fun. Unlike D&D combats (which, even in 3E, tend to bore me to tears), that is, despite the similarities to D&D, combats were fast, exciting, and tactically rich.
Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the background and the factions, which are well-written, coherent, and interesting. The Sundered Empire is a land cursed by Stratis, God of War. Since his demise at the hands of a group of heroes, the world has been plunged into a state of constant warfare. The only relief for this war-ravaged world will come when a new God of War arises from the destruction. So into this land you are then thrust trying to lift the Curse of Stratis by becoming the new God of War by leading your Faction’s warbands to victory. We're talking everything from paladins to elves to demonic gnolls to the undead, here, kids.
If there was anything to complain about, it would be the system for creating your own figures, or the lack thereof. You see, every warband is built on a certain number of points, and each figure costs a certain amount of points. And while there are rules for converting D&D monsters and characters to Chainmail, there are no rules for determining how much a homebrew figure is worth, points-wise. They claim there's no easy way to estimate this, and don't even give the minimal amount of advice Challenge Ratings recieve in D&D. This means that unless your opponent trusts you a lot, you're stuck using the official figure statistics. This would be especially unacceptable considering other factors, particularly the fact that said statistics aren't in the rulebook, but on cards that come with the miniatures, except that you can find the statistics for most of the official figures online, so that if you want to field a warband made mostly of Zombie Troglodytes, you don't have to buy the official miniatures in order to do so. (Which is particularly nice as it'd be nice if all those Zombie Trogs looked a little different.) This, in my opinion, is the biggest flaw in the rules themselves, putting aside other factors.
So, that's it in a nutshell: Chainmail is an excellent, playable, and fun set of skirmish-level miniatures rules. Too bad the rulebook is packed in the same box with other things.
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