Kings of War: Campaign Progress

Britton is back and excited to share with you how his Kings of War campaign is going. If you have not read his Starting a Campaign article check it out for the rationale behind its creation. The campaign uses a card system, playing cards to be exact, and some starting cards of my own creation. Each card represents an ancient relic or a region of the Provence. The cards have an effect and a point value. These are used to balance the cards.

Starting cards

Each player receives a Standard Relic and an Invasion Region card at sign up. A Standard that leads them into battle and their first Territorial advance in the Provence. These cards represent the formation of their army or warband.Their point values are a bit different than the rest of the cards in the campaign. An Invasion Region is worth 0 points but duplicates raise this point value. If a player has two in their hand they are each worth 1 point, three worth 2 points each, four worth 3 each and so on. The math is (n-1) n being the number of Invasion Regions. The Standard Relics work in the same way but are worth 1 point for one cards, 2 points for 2, and so on. The math here is just (n) n being the number of Standard Relics. The effects of each of these cards depends on the player's alignment. Evil players and Good players gain opposite abilities and neutral players get to choose from the 2 abilities. Simple and straightforward. The region cards give army wide abilities and the Relic Standard is a bubble effect from the modelwho carries it. The Relic Standard and Invasion Region also have the opposite effects for Good and Evil. I felt this gave players balanced options with some different mechanics to keep it interesting.

The Campaign Deck

Each player starts with 2 cards but there are 54 other unique cards in the campaign. Each card in a deck of cards plus 2 jokers. Giving players locations in the Provence and one of a kind relics to battle over. Provence cards are the locations captured by the player, they are typically worth more points towards winning the campaign and abilities to certain units in a player’s army or have a general game effect. Some examples are: plus 1 to go first or all individuals gain the Strider special rule. Relic cards represent items of importance. They are worth less pointstowards winning the campaign but give stronger rules to the player. These usually target a single unit or give a bubble effect to a unit. Examples are Combat Drugs which gives a unit the Elite special rule.At the start of all games in the campaign players choose a card to gain the benefit from. They choose a card they want to steal from their opponent. All cards chosen by both players are anted and can be captured by the winner at the end of the game. hen one more card is added from the campaign deck at random. This way players are competing over five cards total.

At the end of the game the winner gets first choice, loser second, winner third...etc until all the cards have been picked up. The winner ends up with better cards and one more than they started with and the loser finishes with the same number of cards they went into the game with.

Check out the full rules for the campaign here.

Half Way There!

I am happy to report a growing player base. 4 weeks in we now have more than doubled our players from week 1. And we have been giving demo games almost every week. It has been a lot of fun. We started off with 500 point games as the minimum point level and just raised that to 1000 points in week 4. But we have seen all sorts of point levels played, even going up to 2000. We started playing more than just Tuesday nights and almost every weekend a game or two has been played.

One player is attempting to collect all of the standard relics and is up to 6 now, yikes that is 6 points per card, but with a few weeks left who knows what will happen. Some amazing combos have come from the campaign cards, a Brotherhood player has a Vanguarding unit of flying Knights, 20 inch move before the start of the game, yuk. I have been focused on collecting high point cards but they seem to always get captured when I fail to hold the line with the Ratkin. The Varangur are still undefeated at this point.

We lifted the original restriction of playing the same army the whole 8 weeks as some people want to try out different armies. A Kingdoms of Men player switching to Brotherhood and myself switching from Varangur to Ratkin. This has also given our new players that borrow an army a chance to try out different armies and pick what they want to collect.

Weekly fluff updates have been fun to write for our group and they are posted along with some pictures each week. I will include some excerpts in the campaign wrap up I plan to write next, so keep an eye out for the next installment.

A few weeks left to go. I look forward to sharing the results of our event!