I’ll put this at the front: I will not be reviewing Baron’s War because to review a game I need to play it enough to feel I have a good grasp on it. I want to marinate in the systems and really understand them such that I can put forth and honest, fair critique.

I will not be playing Baron’s War again. Let this stand as my “Review:” it’s a confused ruleset that doesn’t understand why its systems exist and to what end. It’s overcomplicated for no reasonable gain. It’s a list building ruleset where building the list is more fun than playing the game. It’s a minefield of small rules to forget. It’s over 150 unit abilities to forget. It’s not worth your time or your money.

I know. This is a very negative opening.

Baron’s War serves as a classic wargame. It operates off the basic Warhammer D6 melee systems modded over to D10s. It aims to be a fast playing but deep medieval combat game at the warband scale of 30-40 models.

My experience was that after I did my best to read the ruleset, produce cards to help us track our units, and have both the QRS and existing players on hand, we still had to look up rules, puzzle at reasoning, and slow the game down to answer various small questions that really didn’t matter to our decisions in the game. It was an awful slog. I grant part of this is learning curve but most of it is that the game has more rules than it knows what to do with.

Take the “Strength of Charge” rule. If you charge a unit beyond your normal move distance, you roll 1D6 and add it to your move. If on that 1D6 you roll a 1, you lose an attack dice in the subsequent melee. Roll a 6 and gain an attack dice. Why? Why does this rule exist? Clearly to mimic the strength of charging a great distance–so why can it fail so badly? Further, does it change your decision calculus? No, it doesn’t. It’s just another rule to forget.

Now look at the shield rolls in the game. When attacking you roll to defend yourself against incoming hits by rolling your armor save. If you have a shield, you get to roll again with a worse save (8+ on 1D10, normally). The thing is we’re using D10s instead of D6s: there’s enough room on these dice to just add the shield as an additional modifier and save time. There isn’t a good reason to have shield saves beyond some of the 150 abilities playing off shields specifically. The rules could have readily been written to move faster but they weren’t.

This permeates the rules and that’s without even touching on the Weary status which we had to constantly look up across multiple chapters to understand its full string of effects. It’s not even a small component of the game: units are constantly being made weary.

I could go on and on. I called the game after the second turn because it was such a disaster of a play through. Part of me believes I should play again but I just can’t stomach the idea. I went through the trouble of building cards, printing and redesigning the game’s tokens to be better, and even went as far as to make these tools available below for anyone who wants them. The problem is at this point: why would you?

Find something else. I don’t even know what that is–I wanted to like this game but simply can’t. Let’s at least learn from it:

When designing a ruleset you need to interrogate everything. You need to think about what you’re asking your players to do and what decisions you want them to make. Your rules should influence those decisions and if they don’t they shouldn’t exist. The “Strength of Charge” rule above is an example of a rule that shouldn’t exist. That’s the key sin here: a ton of rules overhead in exchange for no real depth. Complicated but not complex.

I’m sorry to be so harsh but this game desperately needs streamlining. I’d maybe pick it up for a heavily reworked second edition but that’s assuming I don’t find another medieval warband scale ruleset worth playing. I’d say “SAGA” but I came to realize yesterday that the sheer cost of getting into SAGA has gotten too damn high ($80+ for a new player to buy the rules and dice). Surely, something must exist? Something medium weight and somewhat crunchy that delivers a game with actual decisions to be made.

I hope it does–because I’m painting my Arabic force right now and I’d like to use it for more than just Lion Rampant, as much as I enjoy that system.

But good lord, don’t buy Baron’s War.

(But if you do or already have, here’s the tokens and cards I made. Download them and open with PowerPoint for best results:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1xZk94UmYkJLpx5jzHE8TRJixO7K6xxr6 )