Battalion: War Of The Ancients Review

Review copy kindly provided by Osprey Games. Thoughts & opinions are my own.

Any time I get my hands on a new Paolo Mori game I get excited, so I was thrilled when Osprey Games offered me a copy of Battalion: War of the Ancients to take a look at. It’s a game which masquerades as a wargame, has all the theme and trappings of a war game, but plays more like an asymmetric duelling card game. It sets out to do something very particular, and it does it brilliantly. Battalion is great fun, if not without a rough edge or two.

They say stay in your lane, boy

The first thing you’ll notice is there’s no board. A board game review site reviewing a game without a board?! The very idea… The lack of board is one of its biggest strengths, as the game is modular and only takes up as much space as you want it to. As long as you’ve got enough space to have three sectors (five in a four-player game), you’re good.

All you’ve got to worry about is a small player board, a few cards, some dice, and a whole lot of tiles. The tiles are a funny shape, they remind me of those tickets you used to get from the deli counter in a supermarket, but wider. Younger readers, ask your parents. Each tile represents something in your chosen empire’s army. A tile is known as a rank, and when you jigsaw them together – which, by the way, is way more satisfying a thing to do than it should be – they become a unit. Units fight against the opponent’s units, lining up in the aforementioned sectors.

If you’re at all familiar with MOBA games like DOTA or LoL, the concept of lanes won’t be alien to you. Using a two-player game of Battalion as an example, you have central, left and right lanes to deploy your units, and choosing which to deploy where is a huge part of the game. Not just because of the tactical nuance of the match-ups you want to make, but also because if you start a round uncontested in the central sector, you instantly win.

Instant win conditions – there’s something you don’t see in your games every day. Let me tell you, it really adds to the already spicy levels of nonsense going on in this game. Nonsense in the very best sense of the word too. How many other games in your collection let you utter phrases like “Okay, I’m sending in my elephants over here on the right”? See, wonderful nonsense in a world of beige farming and plastic zombies.

Bumping heads

Combat is pleasingly clean and easy in Battalion. No consulting of tables or calculating odds as per a more hardcore war game. Instead, you roll three D8 dice. 8s are guaranteed hits, then you assign any other dice to units to at least match the value printed on their tile for long- or close-range damage. You can grab extra dice to swing the odds in your favour by certain attributes of some ranks, discarding tactics cards, or managing to overlap (i.e. flank) an opposing enemy.

I love the combat system. A game like Battalion is aimed at drawing in more casual players, and if Paolo & Francesco had used something more convoluted it just wouldn’t have worked as well as it does. Being able to point at a tile and tell a new player “You need to roll at least that number to hit me” is a real boon. The trick comes in choosing which units you use, and when. You see, issuing orders – such as assaulting the enemy – comes at a cost. You have a stock of command tokens which you need to add to units to do stuff. If you don’t have enough, you can’t do the thing. When you’re in that situation you can Rally which brings them back to your board and flips Disorder command tokens back to their Order side.

Why would you have tokens on their Disorder side? Well, when you take hits you can offset some of the damage by flipping an available command token to the Disorder side and placing it on the damaged unit. This is where some of the most interesting decision-making comes in the game. Tokens are in short supply. If they’re marking Disorder on a unit, you can’t spend them to give orders. So what’s best – lose ranks in battle and save the tokens to make your own attacks, or save the rank from death at the expense of being able to do less? Battalion has you making these kinds of decisions constantly, which is great in a game which might only last half an hour.

The tactics cards I mentioned before are another great addition. You start each game with a slim deck of them and they offer all kinds of bonuses when you play them in battle. When you Rally though, you’re forced to draw another tactics card into your hand. This would be no big deal in most games, but in Battalion it’s the opposite. If you’re forced to draw a card and you don’t have any left, it’s another instant game-over situation. When you consider shorter setups only give you six cards to start with, you start to get a grasp of how vital they are.

Collateral damage

As much as I really enjoy Battalion, there are a couple of things which niggle me. First of all, are the Traits. Rank tiles have traits printed on them. Keywords which have different effects at different stages of the game. When I first played the game I was a little disheartened when I saw all the different verbs & adjectives printed on the right-hand side of the tiles. I remember learning Too Many Bones (review here) for the first time and just drowning in keywords. Having to refer back to the rulebook or a player aid every single time you want to plan a turn is horrible.

In fairness to Battalion, the traits aren’t as bad as the mental overhead of the keywords in Chip Theory’s games. There are only 14 different traits listed in the rulebook, but what annoys me about them is that very few of them are obvious just by reading the word. The number of times I found myself re-reading the descriptions for Discipline or Steadfast is ridiculous. I’m sure if you played it frequently it might not be quite as big an issue, but it still bothered me.

That all pales beside the issue I have with the command tokens though. They look cool, and they’re screen-printed on both sides. But for some reason though, and I really can’t fathom it, both sides look similar. Really similar. Look at the example below. Bear in mind that this is much more zoomed-in than your view over a table. The top token is on the Disorder side, while the one below is on the Order side. Picture this but with loads of tokens on loads of neighbouring ranks.

It makes it difficult – for me at least – to tell which command tokens I’ll get back when I Rally. Remember, when rallying you get tokens on the Order side back to spend, while those on the Disorder side get flipped instead. I just don’t understand why one side didn’t have a big cross on it, or even just left blank. It might sound like me being picky for the sake of it, but Battalion is almost entirely driven by the command tokens at your disposal, so an at-a-glance read of the game state is really important, and is unfortunately made more cumbersome because of the way they’re printed.

Final thoughts

Despite my pet peeve with the command token printing, I really like Battalion. I lead a busy life and have to squeeze a lot of different games into my free time, so I haven’t played this as much as someone who loves lighter war games might. I really like it though. The four ancient empires in the box (Roman Republic, Carthage, Han, Greco-Batrian) have some similarities in the units they let you command, but where they’re asymmetric the differences are stark and varied.

Playing casually to learn means you’ll probably turn to the preset scenarios in the rulebook which define the units, numbers of cards and tokens, and guide you gently into the system. Don’t get fooled into thinking this is the ‘lite’ way to play just because it’s using presets. Playing with them is fantastic. If you feel the need to mix things up, however, you can play mustered battles. This is more akin to drafting with pre-built decks in a card duelling game, and is great because you can agree between you the size and length of the game before you start.

I’m still not sure how the design for the command tokens ever got through playtesting, and while it’s not enough to make me not recommend the game, I can easily see people using Sharpies to mark one side to make it more obvious. Is Battalion for everyone? No, I don’t think so. Some people will bounce hard off the theme. While a lot of people are happy to play pretty much anything, ancient warring empires doesn’t do it for everyone, and this isn’t the game to change that. The same is true of hardcore wargames. Battalion won’t satisfy the hex-and-counter or 4X yearnings of those people. But for anyone looking for a quick, very clever, satisfying lane battler with tons of space for strategy and tactics, Battalion: War of the Ancients is superb.

You can buy Battalion: War of the Ancients right now from my retail partner Kienda. Click here. Remember to sign up at kienda.co.uk/punchboard for 5% off your first order of £60 or more.

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