Wrath of Kings Demo Day

I was fortunate enough to get a demo of the Wrath of Kings game that was created some time ago via Kickstarter by the people at 'Cool Mini or Not' today at my friendly local game store Titan Games. The demo was (as far as I remember...I'm not good with names) courtesy of Phil Templey from EBS Hobbbies.

The models are very nice with each faction having a very distinct look and I took the opportunity to take pictures of some of the demo models. They're not quite up to my usual photographic standards but in my defence they were done somewhat 'on the fly'. They're also not divided properly up by faction (or 'Houses' as they are in the background) below but the styles are fairly distinctive so I'm sure you can work out whose on which side...

The game system itself is fairly simple at it's most fundamental level with the expected differences in movement and attack potential across the different models though it does have some interesting differences. Each model has a letter that decides which band it deploys in and once activated certain models can activate other models as well though generally the models activate in an alternating fashion.

I was given some House Nasier models to use while my opponent was using a force from House Shael Han. As expected the first turn had a lot of stoppages while we asked pertinent questions such as "What the hell does this mean?".

Pre-measuring is allowed at any time so we quickly realised that we were out of range of both our shooting and melee attacks so some advancing towards the enemy was in order...

Each model has a 'bar' on it with a variety of symbols which indicate what happens to your model when it's hit ranging from 'nothing' to 'dead as dead can be...' and certain models have abilities which remove decent results and replace them with less beneficial ones. It's also worth noting at this pint that all the D10's we used hated us or were pacifists who didn't want anything to die...at first...

Terrain imposes a penalty on your movement stat based on it's severity but in this case was only reducing our movement by 1". The larger issue was that you move in straight lines and that most models need to be in bases to base to hit each other...a factor we hadn't considered when we deployed...

Each force has a morale score and as models die this score is reduced with the objective being (in this demo at least) to reduce it to zero. As this score also is a factor in initiative it's seemingly important to balance mass casualties with eliminating key enemy models.

After a particularly bloody exchange in the middle of the table the forces of House Nasier were victorious though this was mainly due to me getting lucky when deploying models that I had no idea of the capabilities of...

By necessity the demo was obviously done skimming over many of the more complicated rules and as some-one who demos other game systems I can appreciate how difficult it is to embody a game in a brief exchange between two people who don't really know what they're doing, lol. Despite that the demonstration was very enjoyable and the game itself flowed well and was a lot of fun so it looks like I'll be finally getting around to assembling all those models I acquired during the Kickstarter...

For those of you looking for more information then the (now long ago completed) Kickstarter page can be found here.

Thoughts and comments are (as usual) most welcome.