Thanks to a surprising amount of demand, the starter set The Baron’s War has been hard to get ahold of — Wargames Atlantic actually stopping sales to catch up on inventory. Now that supplies of the set are starting to become available again, we’re reviewing the full kit, taking advantage of the time we’ve had with it to inform this review with a fair bit of gameplay with my local group.

First, we have to thank Wargames Atlantic (affiliate link) for providing Goonhammer with a review copy of the new Baron’s War starter set.

What Comes In The Box

The Baron’s War is generously supported by Wargames Atlantic’s increasingly robust set of “The Age of Chivalry” kits, which we have reviews of here, here, here and here. Overall, it’s a very solid range of plastic figures that will cover all the bases needed for The Baron’s War, and the kits are pleasantly interchangeable in a way that lets you add a lot of variety and flexibility to your force.

The starter box builds off this platform, giving you a mixture of sprues that will culminate in fifty four miniatures and the accompanying bases, alongside four sprues of what can be most accurately called “assorted medieval detritus” that make up their new “Market and Barricades” set – especially important for the terrain heavy vibe of The Barons War.

Alongside this you get a soft cover rulebook and a smaller getting started booklet, a sheet with enough tokens to support two players (The Baron’s War is a very token heavy game), a slew of ten sided dice in two colors (important as sometimes separate dice pools come up in the game), some characterful but marginally hard to read morale dice, and a single D6 for when the situation calls for it.

Coming in at $130 USD, and from my experience playing it more than enough for a lot of good games without needing much in the way of more miniatures (though you will need more terrain), I think it’s an unquestionably good value.

The Miniatures

The Baron’s War starter set is expressly designed for two-players with 500 point retinues to get you going, which is a refreshing change from some recent sets from other manufacturers that are sort of “two player I supposed if you look at them sideways”. That being said, if you want to go in on a larger force by yourself, it’s also a perfectly reasonable way to build a 1000 point retinue, though you’ll be notably lacking in mounted troops.

This is by far the strongest part of the set – fifty four models that make a strong starter for honestly any medieval game you might be interested in, that just happens to come with a rulebook and some terrain.

The Suggested Forces

Thankfully, the suggested 500 point retinues are not actually identical. There are two retinues, “Red” and “Blue”, with slightly different approaches.

The “Red” retinue comes with a Baron with a sword and shield, and a command group of five Knights, including a bannerman. All of them have swords, mail, and large shields. Given the death of your Baron triggers a sudden death condition, this largely defensive build isn’t a bad idea. Backing this up are six veteran Serjeants with falchions, padded armor and medium shields, which is a unit I have described as “Here for a good time, not a long time.” They’re dangerous, but relatively apt to die unless confined to bullying lesser units. The retinue also includes six regular Bowmen with mail armor, which is another curious choice, but one that will likely see them have the upper hand in an archery duel. Rounding out the force are eight green levy armed with whatever they can get their hands on.

The “Blue” retinue follows the same lines, but with some small differences. The Baron is once again accompanied by five knights including a bannerman, however he has opted for a somewhat more aggressive two-handed sword and they are only carrying medium shields. The unit of Serjeants is smaller, at only five men, but they’ve got large shields and mail armor – having tested it out, they definitely get the better of their Red counterparts in most one-on-one fights. The unit of bowmen is larger, at seven archers, but they’re completely unarmored, which improves their mobility but dramatically reduces their staying power, and the nine green levy in this contingent are armed with spears, which makes them situationally a little better at leveraging their very large numbers.

On the whole, both are reasonable retinues, and actually do encourage kitbashing – taking bow arms from the levy sprues and putting them on serjeant bodies, for example, to make the Red’s armored archers. The ability to kitbash is, in my opinion, one of the best parts of the Wargames Atlantic line. They make different choices, but not insane choices, and do an admirable job balancing “This is what’s on the sprue” with making a good retinue. They will also help you come to understand subtle differences, like medium vs. large shields, the temptation to use all of the extra actions a baron has on making that two-handed sword swing more vs. handing out orders, etc.

There’s nothing here that’s exotic, or overly clever, and to my mind for a starter set, that’s a good thing – and both forces have room to grow in a number of different directions. Like adding more archers. Archers are great.

Barricades

Alongside the slew of actual miniatures are four frames that make up the new Barricades and Markets kit. Linear objectives are hugely important in The Baron’s War, so these are a welcome addition, and an important piece of terrain that a lot of collections might not yet have.

Having assembled my set, this kit is aggressively fine. What each of the two sets you get involves is a whole slew of barrels, bags, jugs, tables and chairs, along with a set of four textured bases you glue those into to form the barracide itself. Leave them off, and they’re marketplace scatter, and perfect for a tax collector scenario, or for pulling double duty in The Guards of Traitor’s Toll. Glue them onto the base, and you have a nice linear obstacle to defend, with the positioning and angle of where you glue the pieces in giving a pleasingly haphazard look.

There were some frustrations however. The first is that instructions did not come with the starter set – though they were swiftly made available via the The Baron’s War Facebook group, and are actually one of the included images on the kit’s listing on the Wargame’s Atlantic site. But it doesn’t end there. I don’t think it’s actually possible, following the instructions, to build all four barricades. Perhaps the contents of the sprue changed before production, but there’s a topper piece to make a barrel look like its full of some sort of grain that’s just missing, and there are two pieces, a chest and a large box that, as far as I can tell, both use the same base – meaning you can’t use it in both barricades. This problem was solved, for me, by chucking an extra broken plank of wood and a pile of sandbags that don’t appear in the instructions in the gap.

Also, as a minor quibble – the kit doesn’t come with nearly enough sharpened sticks. I’d like my barriers to bristle.

All of that being said, I’ve preordered two more of the kits, because the construction oddities aside, it is an immensely useful set. And one that I suspect might be even more useful in the future, as supplements that focus on Robin Hood and more peasant-centric aspects of the First Baron’s War are released. They’re quick to paint up as well, with organic materials and strongly sculpted texture taking to contrast paints very well.

Starter Scenario

The starter set includes an introductory scenario, “The Ambush”, which pits the two suggested retinues against one another – one having set up a crude ambush, using a barricade to block a road (see, the set is already coming in handy…) and the other trying to push through to the other side. It includes a board layout – a road running through to a distant cluster of buildings, with a number of different paths lined with walls, covered by forest, etc.

The Baron’s War is a very terrain dense game, and for a starting scenario, I think this one communicates that well.

The objective of the game is for the defender to manage to escape the ambush and get off the map on the side opposite their deployment zone, while the attacker, having done the ambushing, is aiming to kill the opposing retinue.

In many ways, I think this is a decent scenario to introduce The Baron’s War conceptually, as it includes several elements that are, while not unique to that game, important for it. The first is that retinues are often in a hurry – rare is the scenario where you can just hang around and pelt everyone with arrows for a few turns before jumping on the objective. That’s true here too – the defender needs to hustle to make it across the board, and the attacker needs to intelligently block those moves, while also causing casualties to the defender. The second, of course, is that in The Baron’s War, and in many historical games generally, scenarios are likely to be asymmetrical. This is definitely that – and indeed the advice at the end is to switch sides, play it again, and see who comes out better.

Where I struggle with the scenario, especially for new players, is that the defender has a very hard road ahead of them. Much of their time is spent just moving – especially the mail-clad knights, who largely need to just run to even have a chance to make it off the board edge, and it’s entirely possible that none of their units will make it off the board. You can see this in a lovely battle report Martin over at 7th Son posted, and it’s reflected in the game of it my group played – only one unit made it off the board, and that was thanks to a cheeky bit of positioning where a group of knights lost a combat and got pushed back sufficiently to be in range to slip away. There’s a feeling of helplessness that seems to set in at about turn four as you realize you’re nowhere close, and the enemy still has an army between you and the edge of the table. I’m not sure that’s the best vibe for a starter scenario.

Second Impressions

If one wishes to read my first impressions of the new edition of The Barons War, they’ve mostly held up, and are probably a good place to start. But there’s some other things I’ve noticed, now having played the game a bit longer.

The first is the overall lethality of the game is definitely reduced. The loss of the ‘0’ auto-hits that deny armor is huge, and I feel like, though I can’t put my finger on why, it’s easier to figure out how to eek out a defensive bonus or two in this edition than the last, but that might just be me getting better. Regardless, I fully expect a clash between two groups of Knights, for example, to potentially result in zero casualties for either side, and I definitely haven’t experienced the “Holy shit, that group’s just…dead…” outcomes that occasionally swung first edition games in my favor.

Overall, I think that’s a good thing – especially for campaign play, I think killing a knight should be hard. But it does definitely change how I approach some things – often my goal has become pushing units off objectives, or into obstacles (where they take additional casualties), as much or more as just killing them.

There’s also a few things that need some tweaking – Mounted Serjeants, for example, are oft, and should historically be equipped with spears, but the spear rules are just weird when applied to a mounted unit. And we’ve definitely run into some places that required a very careful reading and discussion of the rules – while a second edition did a lot to clear up confusion for The Baron’s War, it is still a very granular game.

Final Thoughts

Bair recently wrote a piece on historicals needing starter sets and this is a very strong offering. For a relatively reasonable price, it provides two genuinely functional starter forces that you could play with, happily, for a long time before needing to pick up anything else, alongside all the accessories you need and a useful amount of terrain.

The Baron’s War itself is a great game – granular enough to feel like these are “your guys” and particular individuals, without being completely overwhelming. 500 points is a great starting size for a retinue – giving you a taste for a lot of different options and providing a full game experience without being overwhelming as you learn the rules. And the included retinues are also great jumping off points – either for expanding your retinue to 1000 points, or for building a foundation for playing other games. Rare is the medieval-period game that will suffer from having some foot knights, a few grim, professional sergeants, some scared shitless peasant levy, and some archers.

A good game and quality plastic miniatures – what’s not to like? If you’re remotely interested in The Baron’s War, this is a great place to start.

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