Who’s the Boss of Warmachine?

This week-end I attended a very different tournament for Privateer Press’ War Machine and Hordes game system. In each of these games, your army leader (called a Warcaster or Warlock depending on the system) is the key to your army. His or her abilities tend to affect what units and models will work best for you in the game. Should you lose this leader, the game ends and you have lost. It seems harsh, but in practice it provides a nice pressure valve where even if you are on the ropes you can still claw victory from the jaws of defeat. Conversely, you can’t relax even when winning, just in case your opponent steals the win.

Who’s the Boss turns the idea of choosing your caster and army carefully by asking players to choose and army, the leader is then selected randomly at the start of each game. To make things more chaotic, your leader cannot come from your own army.

The guys organising this Who’s the Boss tournament put together a great ‘Wheel of Fortune’ to determine each player’s warcaster or warlock in each round:

 

The call went out a few weeks early for participating players to bring as many painted warcasters and warlocks as they could, to help broaden the choice available. The organisers also brought many from their own collections. The tables next to the wheel looked like this:

 

This made the logistics quite easy, where you rolled your caster, then went over to a table to find them from the group. Models were organised into their factions, so they didn’t take long to find. I took the only War Machine army I own – Menoth to the field, ready to play my second, third, and fourth games of the system. In the event I won 1 and lost 2, which was more than I expected!

The winning game was probably the one where I had a leader that was relatively easy to understand straight away (Baldur from the Circle Ouroboros Hordes faction), and one of his spells protected most of my army from what my opponent was trying to do until I could take out his leader (a Trollblood shaman leading a Convergence of Cyriss army!).

The games were a lot of fun for me, and looking around the other players were all getting into the spirit of things by bringing some fun and varied armies to the table, and of course watching each other player spin the wheel at the start of each round was like a game in itself!

The event was well-sponsored with local group Angry Artists and the Combat Company providing prize support.

 

Not content with making the wheel of fortune, the organisers also put together a couple of hand-made trophies for the winners:

All in all this was a very enjoyable day for me, and I’d recommend it to anyone who plays or is thinking of playing War Machine or Hordes. It’s a fun introduction to the game ssytems. There should be another tournament of this type run in August this year.