Following our recent initial trial run of the Chaos Wars rule set available through Ral Partha in Chaos Wars - Trial Run a month or so ago, myself and Andy W had got together to give the rules another outing.
With a bit more confidence in tour knowledge of the game, ie we gave the rules a read through and Andy had picked up on a few bits we had previously carried out completely wrongly, we put together a larger (medium sized) game and included most of the bells and whistles and also went for the 'high fantasy' option of more points to spend on weird stuff.
Still using the generic army lists that are available for download, we put together a Humans versus Elf conflict with the Elves being quite shooty/magicy and the humans not. (I had forgotten to bring most of my artillery pieces, so struggled to make up my fantasy points but we just went along to see how things played out).
The game itself was fine and with a fresh perception of the mechanics things went pretty quickly with only minor checks of the rule book (mainly to deal with the magic system, which is simple enough but just unfamiliar) and managed to get the game to a conclusion by the end of the evening.
At the end of the game, we drew conclusions on the rules as we had seen them after two outings.
All in all, the rules produce a quick play style fantasy game which is relatively easy to pick up and quite enjoyable. The rules mechanics all seem to work together and there were no jarring results once we had understood the concepts.
We did have a few issues with the amount of 'fantasy points' or the proportion to standard troop points for a given size of game, with our average sized game you had 300 standard troop points and 90 fantasy points. Given the strength and powerfulness of some fantasy type units (Andy's Dryads were super-powerful probably taking half my 'normal' army to take out one unit, he had two units btw)), the proportion of these fantasy points seemed disproportionate to the army size. As a guide we pretty much agreed that the half the proposed fantasy points wouldn't be far off the mark to get a more balanced game. I might be prudent to limit the number of similar fantasy/fantastical units available or making some units unique given their strength on the field.
After the clear up we had decided that the rules were fun to use and its malleability to produce almost any army/type you could think of and to suit your existing collection, the rules were certainly worth playing again and into the future. A few constraints may be necessary with the army lists to avoid going all 'Armies of Arcana' with the lists.
More of these rules in the future.
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