One of the games I was most excited to see at Gencon – one of the few I actually knew I’d be looking for in advance – was none other than Your Move Games’ Battleground Fantasy Warfare, a game that co-creator Chad Ellis had talked about during his Daily stint a few weeks prior. Chad’s series had dealt mostly with the story behind the game’s creation, and I was anxious to see the end product. What I ultimately found was an abrupt lesson in the differences between Magic and minis, which left me thinking about how some of those differences could be bridged, and what they meant to me as a gamer.
The basic premise of Battleground is that of a miniatures war game, but with cards replacing the unit figurines, and that premise is executed very well. Although I don’t play any miniatures games, I demoed a few during the weekend and can attest that the gameplay is very much the same for Battleground and for those games with actual figurines. You spend points on units for your army, move units into range of each other, roll some attack dice, and people get hurt. Simple tenets (and over-simplified even further here), but classics nonetheless.
I’m not going to go into great depth exploring all the mechanics of the game – if anyone should be doing that, it’s Chad. What I will focus on is the single thing about Battlegrounds that most caught my eye: the Command deck. Each army comes with its own deck and you can spend actions to draw from, then spending the cards to improve your units in combat. That I like this idea might not be surprising – it’s the closest thing the game has to spells, which you may recall I enjoy flinging on occasion.
Beyond that, it adds an element of uncertainty to the game, which it seems that many minis games don’t have. If you know what units your opponent has and exactly what they’re capable of, you can always know what to expect – a far closer resemblance to picking your chess pieces than Magic ever was. The Command cards add randomness, yes, but they more importantly give you the chance to throw curveballs at your opponent, suddenly mobilizing in a tactic he or she didn’t see coming.
However, I don’t like the Command deck nearly so much as I like what the Command deck could be. See, each army’s Command deck is labeled – on the bottom of each card, you can see the words "Orc Army 14" or "Undead Army 25" or the like, which serves as a checklist to ensure you have the right cards in the deck. A sales associate told me that there might be more Command cards in the offing, alternate Orc 10s for instance, that could let players customize their Command decks as well as their armies.
I think that idea is great. See, the more I think about a customizable Command deck, the more I think I can see Battleground becoming this mystical confluence of minis and CCGs. Experienced miniatures players might be better at spending the allotted point total on units, but card gamers could have the advantage in constructing a synergistic, streamlined Command deck to exploit their army’s strengths. It doesn’t even need to go against the non-collectability of Battleground; with just two choices for each of thirty slots (the result of one parallel deck being released), there would be in excess of five hundred million possible permutations, enough room for everyone to stretch their creative muscles. You could have the two groups going back and forth, leaning on different sides of the game and learning from each other, all of them being roped into things by the business ideals Chad espoused in his Daily series – inexpensive, easy to transport, and still fun.
Even with so many possibilities, though, I don’t care for is how restrictive it seems – each card only being allowed in one particular slot for one particular army just feels unnatural to my CCG-born senses. However, a lot of cards do have duplicate copies in multiple slots, so the door is open for more accessible cards, perhaps an "Any Army 2" or some such, and I’ll live even without. I may just be selling the mechanic a little short from not having tried it yet, and I remain optimistic.
(I wanted to talk to Chad about this whole thing in more depth, but he could barely spare a moment from prospective buyers and press. Perhaps you could weigh in on the forums, Mr. Ellis?)
Even beyond just learning to play this one game, Battleground (and my fixation on the Command deck while writing about it) showed me part of what I really value in Magic. Part of it is the customization – although building an army from an allotted number of points lets you design your forces from the ground up, I looked mainly to the part of the game that couldn’t be changed yet. I wanted to know how it could be tweaked by the player, how each person could make their army even further their own, and I’m hoping that that becomes a major part of the game. Forget what I can already do – unless it’s Limited, I want to have total control over what I’m bringing to the table. Even if, as in Magic, it doesn’t always come out the way I planned, the planning remains as much a part of the experience as the actual games.
I think this is a good thing to know about yourself. As many games as I’ve tried (and there are many), Magic is the one I keep coming back to, and today I can answer the question of why that is. I probably couldn’t have done so last week, or at least not with this kind of accuracy. If I got nothing else out of my trip to Gencon but this, it would still have been worth it.
Signing off,
Andy Clautice
andy dot clautice at gmail dot com