This article was one of our first ever – originally published on September 28, 2018. We’ve gone back and updated it to reflect seven years of experience gained writing battle reports and also better photos.
Battle reports are great. They’re a great way to talk about the game we love, show off cool models, and discuss the kinds of cool moments that drive us to play. At their best, battle reports tell a great story and help us learn how to be better players. They get us excited about the possibilities for new games, and get us thinking about new ways to play. So why are so many of them so boring?
In this article I’m going to talk about how to write better battle reports. I’m going to go over why we write battle reports, what makes a good battle report, and how you can make sure the ones you write will be interesting. For many of us, the gold standard of battle reports are the ones in White Dwarf – large, multi-page affairs with detailed photos of the game showing every round and highlighting key sections. I think these are pretty great, and from a presentation standpoint these are as good as it gets. But from a “what can you actually learn about the game” standpoint, I think they leave a bit to be desired. They’re great at telling stories, though – and that tends to be one of the most important elements.
And if you’re a competitive player and not a writer, wondering what the value of this article is for you – writing battle reports is a great way to remember your games and get more value out of your practice. By focusing on what happened, what you did correctly, what you did wrong, and where you got bailed out (or were screwed) by dice, you’ll be able to better understand your games and how you can improve as a player. Improving at a skill isn’t just about repetition, it’s about getting in meaningful reps and learning from them.
Writing a good battle report starts with asking four questions:
- Who is my audience?
- What is the purpose of this battle report?
- What was interesting about the game?
- What were the key lessons learned?
Let’s go through these first, then we’ll get to actually writing the thing.
1. Who is my audience?
Let’s start with the intended audience: Who’s going to be reading your battle report? Is this something you’re going to post on Reddit or Facebook for strangers on the internet to read? Is it something you’re going to share with close friends on a Discord or in your campaign group? Is it for your team or just for yourself, to help you understand what happened?
Different details will matter more or less depending on who is reading the final report but generally speaking, if your report isn’t interesting to strangers, it probably won’t be interesting to your friends, either. Focusing on key details that might be compelling to someone who doesn’t know you or your friend group. You can sometimes get away with adding these details, but most of the time you’ll find focusing on the game and the decisions made to be more useful. They’ll be more useful to you, as well.
If you’re writing for yourself, you’ll want to focus in great detail on the decisions you made, and in particular the process you used to make those decisions. Remember that good play isn’t necessarily about outcomes but about process – if you make the wrong decision and the dice bail you out, you don’t want to take the wrong lesson away from that.
If you’re writing for others, you should think about the experience level of your audience. Are you writing for beginners or experienced players? Do you need to explain core concepts like positioning or can you assume your audience already knows that and jump ahead? I generally think it’s better to assume a lower, more broad level when writing my reports but we’ll get to those and my method a little bit later.
2. What is the purpose of this battle report?
Why are you writing a battle report in the first place? Battle reports need to do one or both of the following: Inform and entertain. Ideally, your report will do both, but that need not be the case: If you’re writing for strangers and your game was a casual affair between friends with no real strategy, then your report needs to be entertaining, laced with humor and good storytelling and pictures of pretty models. In that case you need to focus on telling a more narrative story about the hangout and what happened. You want the reader to live vicariously through you and your experience, feeling some spark of that thrill of playing a game despite not having been able to. If you’re in a campaign, you want to tell a story that weaves into the broader narrative you and your friends are creating.
On the other hand maybe your game was more competitive, or the audience is looking for some kind of competitive insight. Maybe you played a practice game testing a new book or army list. Your battle was a by the numbers affair that was more about learning than anything else. That’s not a bad thing! You can focus less on entertainment and more on informing – give the reader insight into how to play, what you learned, and what you’ll be doing differently the next time you play.
If your report is neither, then it shouldn’t have been written in the first place. Not every game needs a battle report. Some times you can group several together, i.e. “here’s what I learned from my six practice games,” and write about what you learned over the course of all of those games.Â
If you’re writing for yourself, the purpose will be mostly informative: What mistakes did you make? What were the moments which surprised you? If you lost, how did you lose – did you overcommit? Lose on primary or secondary?? What decisions did you make and how did those improve or worsen your odds of success? If you made those same decisions next time, would you expect to win again? These are the questions you want to address, because understanding those is how you’ll improve.
This is also where you want to generally avoid talking about dice, barring some truly insane happenstances. Yes, dice impact games – this is especially true in close games, where dice will have more of an impact. But everyone has dice stories and they’re never particularly interesting (though they can be entertaining with the right context). Instead, focus on whether you could have avoided relying on the dice, or how you could have baked in a failsafe for bad dice. Sometimes it’s unavoidable, but other times you’ll find you’ve put yourself in a situation where you have to rely on getting good dice to win and that’s not sustainable.
3. What was interesting about the game?
Your audience doesn’t need all the details. Too many new battle report writers tend to go overboard, giving every detail or going into way too much about what happened on a given turn. This is a trap – more detail may seem better but without very detailed images to go with your report, most of that detailed description is going to get lost – readers, even experienced ones, are going to struggle to visualize the board and the board state. So instead focus on the key details. When I write my shorter battle reports for my weekly “Road Through” column, I tend to focus on the following details:
- The lists. I give a rundown of the opponent’s list, what I think about it. What in there worries me? What did I think it was trying to do?
- The Mission. Is this good or bad for me? How’s the terrain affect my deployment? Who has the upper hand here?
- Who went first. And not just who went first, but who wanted to go first – there are plenty of times I’d rather go second, and it’s not so much important to know who’s going first as it is to know if that’s what they wanted and how that will affect the game.
- The game’s flow. What were the big moments in each turn? What was the overall flow of the game like? Were you the aggressor or were you playing defensively? Were you up or playing from behind? And in both cases, how did that flow affect your decisions?
When it comes to picking details, the why and how are more important than the what. Don’t tell us what you did, tell us why you did it – help the reader understand the strategy behind your decisions and what you learned. Then tell us whether it worked out and how it impacted the game. Find the “high leverage” moments – not every moment in a game matters, so you want to focus on the moments that really swung things. That big failed charge out of deep strike. That unit holding on with one wound. Your decision to interrupt a combat. How you spent your CP, and why.
4. What were the Key Lessons Learned?
Finally, focus on what you learned, and what you think the reader should learn from reading about the game. What were the big mistakes you made? What were the decisions that paid off? What would you do again and what would you change if you had to play this one again. This is especially important if you’re writing a report for yourself or your team – you want to focus on those key takeaways so that the reader knows how to either learn from your failures or replicate your success.
If you played against a faction for the first time with your army this is super important. Focus on what the key surprises were. What did you not expect? Did you underestimate them? What was their game plan and how could you have thwarted it during the game? And what could you have looked for during the game that would have signaled these things to you. It’s always easier to play against a faction or army you’ve played against before, and you’ll get even more out of that if you turn a critical eye to the experience. Your readers will appreciate it too.
Game Tips for Writing Better Battle Reports
Writing a good report starts before you sit down to write – you’ll get your best results if you play the game with an eye toward writing a report later.
Take notes and photos. Writing good battle reports starts with taking good notes. Notes come in two forms: physical notes and photos. Back in the day I used to take notes of all of my games and jot them down in the Games Workshop battle notebooks. I filled two of those things and then transitioned to using the Tabletop Battles App in tenth edition. In addition to round-by-round scoring I’d jot down notes on who went first, plus any key plays or events – for that Grey Knights game I noted my opponent swapping out his Callidus Assassin for a Culexus before the game via Stratagem. These notes can be time-consuming to write, so what I generally try and do when I take them mid-game is use quick phrases or words that will jog my memory later.
These days I do all of my note taking in the Tabletop Battles App, and over time the app has gotten even better at tracking details like the terrain used and army-specific features like Pain Tokens and Blessings of Khorne. I generally try and take a photo at least once per round, and if there was a key moment or showdown I’ll take a photo of that closer to the table. Taking photos of the table has been a lifesaver, by the way – there have been multiple games in my career where something has changed or a unit was moved and we needed to revert the board state, or when an opponent has claimed something and I’ve been able to go back and show the photo of the board state to either verify or disprove that claim. It’s just great to have a record of the board state.
Don’t wait. The longer you wait between your game and writing the report, the harder it will be to write. Sit down and write while your memory is fresh.
Use your photos. Those photos you took? They’re great reference tools for jogging your memory, and they’ll be crucial to your report. Make sure your story lines up with the visual evidence and tell a story around the pictures you’ve taken.
Be charitable. You should generally assume your opponent was playing with good intentions. At the very least, you should try and present them in the most positive light that you can. They’re not going to be writing in your article defending themselves, and if you have a large platform, you can cause them real problems over something that was an honest mistake. If someone was a particularly bad actor, it may be better to just not mention them by name at all.
TheChirurgeon’s Step-by-Step process for writing a Battle Report:
If you just start your reports thinking about (and answering) those questions, you’ll be well on your way to writing better reports. But to give you some additional help, here’s my step-by-step process for writing a battle report.
- Establish the Narrative.
Writing a battle report is basically telling a story (or doing journalism, if you prefer). And like telling a good story, you’re going to need to establish a narrative, with clear reference points, imagery, stakes, conflict, and pacing. Before you start writing your report, establish the narrative of your story. Is this a come-from-behind victory where you snatched victory from the jaws of defeat? Was it a complete rout, where you stomped your hapless opponent into oblivion? Was it a fiasco of disastrous rolls where nothing went right? Whatever you decide, lean into it – emphasize the details that play into that narrative, and don’t dwell on the ones that don’t. Don’t lie, (or lie if you want, whatever), but don’t go out of your way to tell us things that don’t fit the narrative unless they’re important. And if you have a bunch of key details that don’t fit the narrative, maybe you should consider a different narrative? - Define the armies.
The armies are important. We get it. But they’re also boring. If you’re gonna go through several games or tell us about your tournament list, then yes, give us the full list (or better yet, link to it – you’ve got google docs. On Goonhammer, we use expandable text for the lists). Otherwise, give us the broad strokes about your army and your opponent’s. Note the structure and the important stuff – what does this list do? What is it trying to do? What about it worries you? What’s going to cause problems? If you’re playing a campaign game, who are these forces and why are they were? What’s their narrative purpose for fighting? - Set up the game.
Spend a sentence or two setting up the game. Give us the quick recap of the mission and deployment, but don’t spend any more time on this than you have to. If it’s a special mission or game with cool rules, sure, tell us about that. What’s more important here is your plan – how do those game details affect your army and what are you going to do about them? How are you going to win, and what do you expect your opponent to do? This will set up an interesting beat later, priming the reader for you to pay off whether your plans did or did not work. - Give the highlights and lowlights.
It’s time to tell the story. And I mean a story, with a legitimate beginning, middle, and end. Don’t focus on the play-by-play. Instead, give us the highlights and lowlights. Tell us about your warlord punching a dreadnought to death. Tell us about the big gamble that paid off. Tell us about your opponent wiping an entire unit off the table with a lucky volley of fire, or when your meltagun raptor literally missed the building he was fucking standing on. Tell us about how your plan proved to be a rousing success, or a complete disaster. If you had to change plans mid-game, talk about that – what had to change and why, and whether it worked. And talk about your opponent’s plans too – did they make any key mistakes? What could they have done differently? Again, the goal here is not to be incredibly comprehensive, but to relay the important bits of information that convey value to the reader. - Add some cool photos if you have them.
If you’ve got cool photos to add, put them in here. Again, we don’t need the play-by-play. Give us a shot of the table at the start for context, then show us some cool moments that you can put next to your descriptions. Full table shots are useful to show deployment and the flow of the game, but without detailed diagrams they’re hard to follow. Mix it up with some close-ups of key models and moments. - Give the outcome.
Tell us how the game ended. Who won, and what was the final score. If you were playing a tournament, give us your ongoing record after each game. Recap how you’re feeling and what you’re hoping will happen next. If you were in a campaign game, talk about what this means for both sides and how it will affect the ongoing narrative. - Point out learning moments / insight.
Similar to the highlights/lowlights, point out what you learned and how your expectations shifted during the game. Talk about what worked and what didn’t. If you’re planning to change up your strategy in the future because of this game, tell us why and how. This is more or less the most important part, but the highlights and lowlights and the story you’ve told up to this point should more or less set the stage for these and support what you’ve learned. if you took away a lesson that wasn’t supported by your story, you need to either change your lessons or your story. - Simplify.
Next go back, read what you wrote, and trim it down. Take out the unnecessary sentences. I guarantee you, your reports could stand to be shorter. Unless you’ve got a truly epic game to describe and word counts to fill, your reports should cap out at five paragraphs: One to set up the game, three to describe the early, middle, and late-game action, and one to give us the final results.
Final Thoughts
If you do these things, your battle reports will be more fun to read. If you can make them funny as well, then do that too. If you can’t, don’t try and force it. Just focus on telling better stories and communicating they key lessons learned. Even if you’re recapping a tournament, there’s no reason your battle reports need to be dry. Tournament reports can be as much about the experience of the event as the games themselves, but how hard you go in that direction will depend heavily on your audience and what they’re looking for.
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