Review:
Warmachine MkII

Play like you've got a pair!

Released near the beginning of the year, the new edition of Warmachine was quick to earn praise from fans and critics. This was about when I was introduced to the game, and ended up quite taken by the spirit of it – unbridled aggression and insanely cool antics were the norm, with five factions bludgeoning the heck out of each other without falling into the insane grimdark mood of 40k.

Now, I'm a Warhammer 40,000 player as well, but I've found Warmachine to be more of an entertaining game than 40k. Whilst 40k is well suited for tournaments, Warmachine tends to offer up much more hilarious and cool situations, and is a far faster game, focused on almost skirmish combat (in a typical game you'll only be controlling about two heavy warjacks – more on those later – and perhaps three small units and a character) as opposed to the more serious and straight-faced 40k.

The Rules (Or, “How to run up the field and apply axe to face”)

Warmachine is based on d6 (six sided dice), and generally employs rolling two of them, before adding a certain value (such as the melee rating of a model) and trying to equal or beat another value (in this example, an opponent's defense rating). It's not quite as fast as 40k's dice rolling, but it does allow for certain things to actually be totally invulnerable to small arms fire – so your heavy infantry won't be taken down by a lucky shot from the lowliest zealot.

Movement works in inches, and models can either move their full move (usually 6”) and cast magic, or shoot. They can also run, doubling their movement but do nothing else that turn. Charging is a mixture of the two, as it gives a boost to the models speed, but not as much as running, but in return it gives bonuses to melee attacks. Shooting and melee work in the same manner, with 2d6 being rolled and added to the shoot or melee rating respectively, and hoping the total matches or exceeds the targets defense. This system works well enough, but tends to bog the game down at larger games, as each model has to roll two dice to see whether it his and damaged the target.