Earlier this year I attended Salute which claims to be Europe’s largest independent wargaming event of the year with stalls of dozens, if not hundreds, of model makers and game developers showcasing their miniatures and rules sets. As a London local it’s become a tradition to grab a ticket and head up into town with some friends to see what’s around. It’s the smaller companies and games with their own unique minis that catch my attention best, and that’s exactly what we’re talking about today. This isn’t sponsored or anything, I just really like it and wanted to write about it! 

The very high level pitch is that Arcworlde is a skirmish game only requiring a handful of minis per side (or just one monster) set in its own universe with recognisable fantasy factions in a unique, almost cartoony, style of miniature. It plays quick and it’s open to creating narratives mid-game that simply sound fun at the time but could spell disaster if things don’t go well! If you hate narrative and whimsy then go read something else.

Arcworlde is made by Warp Miniatures, a small family-run business out of Nottingham. Alex, the founder, created the setting and sculpts the miniatures while his dad Rob handles all resin casting, his mom Dawn packs and ships, and his wife Wingshan works on creative strategy and events; Wingshan also has her own game coming out in the nearish future which we’ll be covering.

Whimsy in Miniature

Easily the largest draw to this game is the miniatures. At Salute I picked up the Wizard starter warband and Sentinels, something about the large eyes, facial expressions, and clothes made me think of Discworld’s Unseen University staff. The rest of the range is in a similar vein, reminding of mostly of the more whimsical fantasy settings that I’m familiar with though I’m sure there are others! Discworld is the obvious one but these also feel to me, in a very positive way, like Burrows and Badgers if they were not anthro animals. You can get most miniatures in either metal or resin and are some of the cleanest casts that I’ve ever had, the quality is just fantastic.

These have been some of the most fun I’ve had painting miniatures in a very long time. The amount of character in each sculpt is simply fantastic and makes each individual both unique and just a joy to “work” on!

I could easily write a whole article just on how much I love these miniatures but you can go and look at them all yourself; and look at the ones I’ve done as you keep reading this article. Time to talk about the game part.

Playing Arcworlde

First off the great news is that all of the rules and the list builder are entirely free. One really nice part of the list builder is that when you equip various weapons it actually changes the stats on the printable cards. Really great touch.

While the rules are free I’m going to be assuming that you’re expecting me to explain how it works anyways, and that’s fine, so you’re fine to just stay here and trust me for the time being. I’ll go into some more detail but my favourite parts of the game are:

• Simple to pick up and start playing
• Big things like trolls and monsters scale incredibly well
• You cast magic by playing blackjack
• Model stats are very simple
• Lots of depth and decision making
• Fun campaign mechanics

It should be no surprise at all that a skirmish game like this can be set up for campaign play. Those rules are still in Beta format but my friend Joe and I played some games back-to-back to try them out and they were great fun!

Simple Rules and Stats

This is a D6 game in its entirety. All you need is an area of somewhere between 3’x3′ to 4’x4′ with reasonably dense terrain, a handful of D6 dice, and a deck of playing cards. That’s a 54 card deck because you keep the Jokers in, which is way more fun. I actually had to buy a deck of playing cards because I can’t tell you the last time I needed one.

As many skirmish games are, this is an alternating-activation game. You activate one of your characters to move, perform actions with, and then your opponent does the same. You take it in turns back-and-forth until each character has activated marking the end of the turn. Then you roll-off to determine who goes first in the next turn.

Everything works off of a “success” which simply means a 4+ on a D6. That’s it. Whenever you’re making attacks all you need is to roll 4+’s on those dice and you’re golden but you really want 6’s because those are crits so they do two hits instead of just one and can unlock some pretty powerful effects, too. When it’s time for defence rolls you’re also looking for 4+ to cancel a hit, and 6’s to cancel out two hits as a crit, but the big difference between this and most other games is that you roll defence rolls one at a time. Not in a group, but one by one and as soon as you fail a defence roll you don’t get to make any more defence rolls against that attack. Say for example you’re hit by an attack that deals 4 hits in total; if you roll a 4 on your first roll then you’ve cancelled one hit but if your next roll is a 1, 2, or a 3 then you take the remaining 3 hits and subtract them from your health. That makes things like Shields that let you re-roll a defence roll per turn extremely useful!

Sometimes you’ll have Advantage or Disadvantage on rolls. In either case you roll an addition D6; Advantage has you discard the least desirable while Disadvantage makes you discard the most desirable result. Either of these effects on your defence rolls makes a massive difference to how likely your character is to be removed from the table.

Each of your models has a simple line of stats giving it:

• Name – what it is, you can give them cooler names though if you want
• Cost – in gold pieces
• Class – Commander, Mage, Unit, Monster, Beast, etc.
• Action Points – how many things your model gets to do each turn
• Movement – how far it moves in inches
• Bravery – how likely it is to run away from scary things
• Health Points – how many hits it can take before being knocked out

Action Points

Every model has a set number of Action Points and pretty much scales with how much it costs and how big it is. For example lets look at the humble Halfling Militia:

This little Unit of a model gets 2 Action Points to use each turn between attacks and Feats (more on those later), a 4″ move, Bravery 7, and 6 Hit Points to have to get through before he’s knocked out. That’s a pretty basic stat block and something you can roughly assume to be the case for most of the “normal” guys in each faction, sort of. You get this for the cost of just 40 gold pieces before adding any equipment like armour, a shield, some sort of ranged weapon, or a two-handed weapon to make all of their attacks that much more powerful at the cost of some defence.

By stark comparison let’s check out a monstrous Troll:

This big guy is going to cost you 220 gold pieces, a fair bit more expensive than our Halfling above, but with four times the action points to use, a bit faster movement (and on a bigger base that goes further, too) as well as higher bravery and more than three times the number of hit points. Definitely going to be a bit harder to take down! We’ll get to what a Medium Feat is below for a ranged attack. You might have noticed that those melee attacks are the same exact power as the Halfling, which makes sense since the Troll can use them many more times in a turn, but will also notice that the Critical effeects will knock characters on smaller bases prone or even hurl them away!

Monsters, like the Troll, come with a slew of special rules that I won’t go into too much detail here about but are very thematic and suiting. The biggest one to talk about is Split Activation which lets you activate the Monster multiple times across your turn instead of needing to do everything at once. You’ll need to track their Action Points across the turn and they only get one “free” move, after that they’ll have to Leg It to get anywhere which runs some risks on its own! I really love that this means you can field a very elite monstrous warband and not be outdone by a warband that can swarm and out-activate you to a detriment. If you want to use all of the Action Points at once however you absolutely can! Once you’re in the middle of the board it might even be better to do so and go on a murder spree in one fell swoop!

Movement

When you activate a model you can do whatever you like in nearly any order. If they’re already in combat then you can attack first and move later, especially if you have killed whatever you were in combat with! You may shoot first and move later, or move and then shoot; standing still offers no advantage to shooting. One thing that is limited is the “Leg It” move which can only be used after the character has used its free move but before they’ve done anything else; basically it’s picking up some speed and trying to sprint a bit further or charge headlong into combat!

Legging It will cost you one Action Point but you can do it as many times as you like…until the character falls over, that is. All you do is roll a D6 and move that many more inches; if that happens to bring you into contact with an enemy model then you have charged into combat and get your Action Point refunded to use on attacks. However, if you roll a 6 on a character’s first Leg It roll then instead of moving they fall prone and will need to use more action points to try and stand up; in either case they won’t be able to Leg It any further during their activation. If the character hasn’t fallen over you can attempt a second Leg It roll but this time they’ll fall prone on a 5+ instead of just a 6, and then a 4+ on a third attempt, and so on. So, you may be able to get some much needed extra speed but at a risk!

Prone Models

As you can guess, laying flat on your face in the middle of a skirmish is bad. All defence rolls made by a prone model are done with disadvantage making them prime targets! You can attempt an easy feat to stand up or just wait until your next turn when the model will stand up automatically when activated before carrying on with their actions as normal.

Melee Attacks

Then the profile has a set of attacks listed which are all made in base-to-base contact in melee unless they have a range, in which case they work a bit differently. Each attack costs your model a certain number of AP to be able to use it and has a Power level attached which simply tells you how many D6’s to roll. There’s no limit on how many times you can use the same attack either, as long as the character has Action Points to spend you are free to keep smacking! There’s various reasons you might want to choose one attack over another, such as the defending models’ armour or if you want to try and get any Critical effects from a certain attack. Maybe you’re just greedy and think that you can take that last wound off with a lower power attack to reserve more Action Points for further attacks later. In my experience, greed in wargaming is never rewarded by what “should” happen and your dice will absolutely betray you.

Feats and Shooting

Something that you’ll soon see referred to across various parts of the rulebook and warband rules are Feats, often with a difficulty rating attached telling you what kind of Feat you need to achieve. Feats will let you interact with objectives, making ranged attacks, and even pass off equipment and items to friendly models or loot them from prone enemies! The feat difficulty describes how many Successes you need to achieve it:

• Easy – 1 success
• Medium – 2 successes
• Hard – 3 successes
• Legendary – 4 successes
• Narrative – to be discussed!

Remember that a success is a single 4+ roll. Before attempting any feats you have to decide, and declare, how many Action Points you’re going to spend attempting it then roll that number of dice. For example if you’re attempting an easy feat, the most common kind, then you may choose to spend two action points to increase your odds of succeeding! Narrative feats aren’t anything that’s defined and exists solely for the fun of the narrative during your games; if you want to attempt something a bit sillier (or heroic?) then you just chat with who you’re playing about what you’d like to happen and agree on a difficulty for the feat. You might even want to think about some amusing ill effect if it’s failed as well to add to the suspense!

Shooting is done with the feat system, most often needing an easy feat to succeed and once you have succeeded then you get to roll the weapon’s power for attacks. Every faction has their own version of a ranged weapon that models can purchase and will differ slightly as is appropriate for the faction. Let’s look at the Halfling Ranged Weapon:

One thing that I really like is that it’s open to interpretation what the weapon is with no important differentiation between slings, bows, or crossbows. Or anything else you could imagine, maybe your halfling loves throwing pies or sandwiches or something else! It’s all the same. Since no feat type is stated it just needs an easy feat to use. If our Halfling Militia model above was firing it then you could choose to use one Action Point at a time to attempt to fire it twice, and if you get lucky do some serious damage at range! Some weapons don’t allow you to use them more than once per turn, in which case you’ll want to use more Action Points to help guarantee that attack hits home.

Now, the burning question: can you shoot into combat? The answer is yes! But if the shot misses then it’ll hit a friendly model, at random, that’s in contact with the enemy you were shooting at…that would be a great time to use more Action Points to make sure it hits the enemy, not your own model!

Magic

The section that I’m sure some of you have been waiting for! For all games you should have an Arc Deck which, as above, is just a standard 54 card deck of playing cards with the Jokers kept in. This is predominantly used to cast spells but can also be used to determine your scenario and even secondary missions.

When a character would like to cast a spell first you spend two action points for the privelege and declare which spell you’re attempting to cast. The spell’s level determines the total needed, at minimum, for the spell to succeed. Then you draw two cards off of the deck of cards and add them up! Using blackjack rules royalty are valued at ten and aces can be one or eleven, the casting player’s choice, while jokers are worth any value from one to eleven. If you want, you can then spend one additional Action Point to draw a third card, and then another to draw a fourth, and so on until you’re out of Action Points or until the spell has cast. However, as soon as you go over a total of 21 then you’ve gone bust! The spell casts but the caster loses D6 HP automatically with no chance to save them with defence rolls. What I like about this mechanic is that you and your opponent can share one single deck of cards and once you’ve drawn cards the remainder are then discarded…so if you get lucky early in the game and draw most of the higher value cards you’ll want to try and keep that in mind as you attempt to cast spells later on!

This is just a really fun way of making magic very different from the rest of the game and adds a nice bit of suspense to casting spells, especially the higher level ones! The most powerful spells require a 21 to cast, making it very risky while meaning a wizard will likely burn through a number of Action Points.

Bravery

It’s a stat for a reason, it’s important! There’s a few things out there that might force a model to take a bravery test and the most common one is when friendly models start dying around each other. If a friednly model is knocked out then all other friendly models within 3″ of it have to test their bravery by rolling two dice, adding them together, and trying to score equal to or lower than their bravery stat. If they fail then they’re scared and have to run towards cover in their next activation before testing again; they continue to act this way until they’re no longer afraid!

Terrain

Cover and terrain is very simple in Arcworlde. If your character is at least 50% obscured from the attacking model then it has advantage on its saves. That is so good and makes models behind terrain very difficult to shift. Since saves are one at a time being able to roll two dice to try and get one 4+ on either one to pass is great odds at staying alive. Other terrain will simply block line of sight entirely and even movement in some cases. Just chat with whoever you’re playing with

Creating Your Warband

Now that we know roughly how to play the game, what are you playing with? Currently there are eleven different factions to choose from:

• Halflings
• Imperials
• Vampires
• Ancient Dead
• Undead Raiders
• Wild Elves
• Wizards
• Dark Lords
• Ourks
• Beastfolk
• Bestiary

The bestiary is a little odd as it’s a list of monsters and beasts that any faction can take or that can be fielded as a faction all their own! They’re the only ones that won’t have a Leader but that’s hardly important for these creatures. You can, if you want, simply field a single model like a Troll in a smaller game or a Dragon in a larger one, to see how the enemy warband does in taking it down!

For every other faction you must take a Leader and for many there’s no choice here, there is a single Leader to take and you must have it. You cannot take multiples of the Leader, either, just one. Then you fill out the rest of your roster with models of your choosing and equipment if you want to buy them any! All models are assumed to come with some sort of hand weapon and that’s baked into their cost, it’s only if you want to give them ranged weaapons, heavier two-handed weapons, armour, or something else from each faction’s unique list of gear that you need to spend more gold on.

I’ve found that 400 to 500 gold piece games are great fun and great to learn with, the starter warbands are about 400 gold pieces each which makes that nice and easy or if you want to spend a lot on the models can easily bring most up to around 500 gold. Personally I’ve really enjoyed 700-750 gold games since it lets you take something big…or a lot more characters! That said, it’s really nice that a nice little starter set is plenty to start playing with and also keep playing with, trying different set ups of wargear and playing various scenarios can give a lot of replayability using the same models.

Equipment

There’s a standard set of wargear that every faction has available to them and are easily the most common that you’ll see. As I mentioned earlier each faction has their own version of a ranged weapon that with vary slightly, so there’s none here to be seen as I’ll just be covering some weapons and armour.

First off are the weapon options starting with a two-handed weapon. This heavy weapon adds +2 to the power of all of the model’s melee attacks but the model holding it counts all critcal saves as failures instead; that turns two successful saves from one roll into a failure and means that you’ll only pass on a D6 roll of 4 or 5, drastically reducing survivability. On a big character that can take a few hits it might be worth it to simply kill whatever they charge into before they can be attacked back! Next is the spear which lets a character make melee attacks from 2″ away and even through friendly models keeping your model at a safe distance while being a nuisance; the extra range also helps simply get into range without needing to chance it on a Leg It roll which might leave you prone on the floor. Lastly are dual weapons allowing you to re-roll all attacks of 1. Simple and effective.

On the opposite side of that is armour! Some models come with it, while others have special rules that work like it, but in any case the armour level (+1, +2, +3) determines how many successful hits are cancelled before making defence rolls. Light armour gives +1 so automatically cancels out a single successful hit every time the model is attacked. Heavy armour gives +2 so cancels out two instead but makes all Leg It rolls more likely to end up with your model prone giving every single one +1 difficulty on the roll. So while a model wearing heavy armour will be very hard to take down there’s also a good chance they’ll be spending a decent amount of time on the ground if they’re not careful! Some factions like the Beastfolk have unique upgrades to add additional armour as well to represent a thick tortoise shell.

This all costs you gold of course so it’s up to you whether you’d rather have fewer characters more heavily armed and armoured or to just flood the board with more models to try and overwhelm!

That’s All, Folks!

It’s really not all of it, but that should be plenty to give you an idea if this is something you’d like to look into further for yourself!

I’ve said it a few times already but this game and these minis really are some of the most fun I have had in the hobby for quite a while. I love a good skirmish game and this has the right balance of random chance and tactical choice to feel like what you’re doing and deciding matters while also hoping that something slips up in your opponent’s turn to gain an advantage. The way saves work can end either really badly really quickly or end up being incredibly suspenseful! I’ve had my wizard leader toe-to-toe with a mighty beastfolk leader that, by all accounts, should have knocked him out immediately but through a series of lucky rolls my wizard didn’t die! Other times you’ll get shot twice in a row and just fluff your rolls real bad to be knocked out, which is why terrain and cover is so important.

There are so many fun rules and quirks all around that I just like like the Imperial Ogre toting around a massive four barreled shotgun while ammo monkeys scurry around, Ourk brutes that carry little pet dragons as living flamethrowers, Halfling chefs that ride on walking cauldrons casting spells via their ingredients, and just a whole lot more.

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