Warhammer Great War

Cover to Warhammer Historical

Played my first game of Warhammer Historical’s Great War rules last night and enjoyed it. We played a skirmish between a mixed French and British force vs a German force made up of regulars and Stormtroops. The game uses 40k rules as a base the way that Warhammer Ancients uses Warhammer Fantasy Battle as a base, which means that the rules feel familiar, but that can often trip you up as the specific rules can be different than the rules the game is based on. We spent a bit of time in the rules digging about as we played, but it didn’t really slow us down and we played to a conclusion in a reasonable time.

The game objective was a hill in the center of the table and Jeff and Ed threw Todd and I a bit at first by throwing pretty strong forces up the flanks, which didn’t really help them in the end, but they realized what was happening in time for a mass assault on the hill for the last two turns of the game and they managed to pull off a win anyways.

All of the troops had good flavors to them. The French troops were very good, but in small units which meant their morale was fragile. The Brits were pretty good all round, I had some assault troops that did well, but they are also in smaller units than the germans and while my attacks did delay the Germans, the German Stormtroops are absolute murder. The Germans had solid troops and big units which means less morale check, so they are tough all around.

For special weapons I had some heavy machine guns, which take awhile to set up, but they can really pound targets when they get going. They felt right in game terms in how they affected the table. Todd had some French light machine guns and some mortars, which also worked about right. Jeff and Ed had Heavy Machine guns, some submachine guns, mortars and flame throwers. The flame throwers were thankfully never an issue, I dealt with the units that had them so they never deployed, probably the best I could have hoped for really. The Heavy Machine guns worked like ours did, as did their mortars. The submachine guns felt a bit over powered to me, they had a pretty long range for effective fire compared to rifle fire in my mind, but not so much that it made a difference.

Overall it was a good game. As usual with Warhammer Historicals stuff if you hate Games Workshop style rules (or are just a rabid GW hater) you won’t like these rules. They are dicey and play the way classic games play, but we turned out a pretty good little World War One game from a cold strat last night with little problem and everyone had an impact on the table and had a good time, for me that is a sign of a pretty good rule set.