There's a lot to be excited about when you first see Battalion - War of the Ancients from Osprey Games. The sublime cover art from Roland Macdonald, the rather decent sized unit tokens and the various small amounts of chunk in the tokens and dice which come from the box. The big excitement comes from the fact that this is a Paolo Mori joint, and so I'm instantly expecting accessibility and depth and also not expecting to be spending hours at the table. There's a lot of expectation here and so does it deliver?
I'm reminded of Command & Colours even though it's not quite that. I'm also reminded of a lane battling card game like Star Wars Unlimited (Yeah I know, don't at me homeslice), even though it isn't exactly like that. Battalion tries to be a hybrid of unit control and unit specialities and pushing your opponent to making decisions that ultimately will leave them in the lurch. Not because of health points, but because of order, disorder and tactic cards. Battalion is about how confident your units are feeling in the face of the enemy and how much disorder you can allow in your forces before they end up being disbanded against your will.
Like other Mori games, the main actions are simple to understand. You'll have several units that are assigned to a number of battle lanes, depending on the number of units you want to play as. Units can be made up of multiple army ranks, with their own attack stats and whether they are melee or ranged combat of both. Each rank also has a cohesion value that decides how much disorder it can absorb before it must be disbanded. Each rank may also be furnished with a trait which will effect how that rank and unit will play out in battle and be warned, there's a reasonable number to understand and learn and not everything is obvious.
On your turn you can move your units between the different sectors of the battlefield before you either engage with the enemy or raise the rallying cry to effectively reset the available active order tokens that you have. While rallying provides a necessary reset, it also requires you to draw a tactic card from your deck. Pushing you closer to potential defeat if you run out of tactic cards.
Battle is resolved on dice, which some of you are going to groan at, and I understand. In this case rolling eights are automatic hits, while other hits dependable on whether you have met or exceeded the ranks individual attack criteria. Most of the attack values hover around the 5 mark, so more often than not you'll be able to successfully attack some of the ranks. Ranks then are given the choice to take on disorder or be removed from the game to counteract received hits, but if the total disorder exceeds available cohesion, then the entire unit has to be disbanded. You've also got the balance the disorder on the field since the order and disorder tokens are just one double sided token. I like the idea that an army in disorder doesn't have the command confident to order other units in the field if things become desperate. Also you can't just attack with the same unit again and again as the number of order tokens required to activate the same unit increases if you command it again. All of a sudden it feels a lot more complicated than the likes of Blitzkrieg.
I like that causing your opponent to burn through their tactic deck will grant you the win. I'm less sure of the centre lane dominance win, as it can concentrate the battle to the centre of the game and force you just to be constantly reinforcing and playing with that part of the board. Luckily the limited order tokens means that even if you had all units in play in the centre, you'll never really have enough tokens to launch an all out assault.
It's clear Battalion was designed to bring the game to a conclusion quickly, and while it won't necessarily be another war in 20 minutes kind of affair, it shouldn't take all night. Yes there is the chance of unlucky dice rolls as with any game focused on dice based combat, and I admit that a couple of rounds became full of sighs of frustration as the dice decided to hit one and twos and leaving the units locked together in some kind dangerous tango. Number of plays will ultimately decide if this is something that will dampen excitement in the long run and will also decide what factions are likely to be fielded more than others.
A couple of design decisions confused me. While asymmetrical powers are welcome in most games to add a differential, I find the number of traits in Battalion to be veering towards too many, and some of them need checked and double checked as you play the game. They're not always as obvious as they sound and I'm tempted to advise that you should ignore traits as a starter player if you want to learn the basics of the game. It makes it trickier to the view the entire game state at a glance and is something you need to make an effort to learn and understand to get the most out of the game as a whole. This is a type of game where asking questions of the board state will give away what your potential next moves will be. The second confusion surrounds the order / disorder tokens themselves. The icons are too small and too similar to each state and I'm baffled why there wasn't something as simple as a colour change on the disorder side of the tokens. Red would have made things so much easier.
So Battalion. It's not a light and breezy war game where you can just pick it up and run with it like my lovely Blitzkrieg. It's also not sitting in the heavy house of measuring tapes and tables and four hour long afternoons. It is good at what it does, which is to offer lane battling and basic tactics and a different way to battle. I like the tactic card win condition, but not as sold on the centre lane victory. I really like the order and disorder mechanism for unit actions, but I wish the tokens were different. I really like the different traits, but wish there were not so many of them. I appreciate Battalion for what it is and what it does and I would like to see the future plans for expansions and potential second printing improvements. There's a good game here, it just takes that little bit longer than twenty minutes to find it.
Designer - Paolo Mori, Francesco Sirocchi
Illustrated - Roland Macdonald
You can find out more about the game https://www.ospreypublishing.com/uk/battalion-war-of-the-ancients-9781472861894/
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This review is based on the retail version of the game provided to us by the designer and publisher. We were not paid monetary compensation for this review. We give a general overview of the gameplay and so not all of the mechanical aspects of the game may be mentioned.
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