First the huge Errata and Faq drop and now we get the much anticipated Matched Play Guide! The Old World’s answer to the General’s Handbook. Another little quality of life addition we have all been yelling for. All along with the buzz of Cathay on the same day?! It is a good day to be an Old World player. So what do we have here and does it live up to all the hype?
Before we continue, just a gentle reminder that we have an affiliation with Element Games, where you can buy the Old World Matched Play Guide for £14.02 (15% off RRP). It also gives a little kick back to the site too!
Let us start at the very beginning since it is the most important part I believe. One of the very first sentences is “the Old World is a game that thrives upon narrative”. Shots fired! It is true though. Majority of the games I have played and have seen played, are not what we hear complaints about. People aren’t going to casual matches and throwing out 2 dragons, tons of Pegasus Knights, Dragon Ogre spam, etc. The vast majority of players actually do not need this book. It goes on to talk about matched play and tournament play and the joys of a high competitive level and how this book can enhance that. This is not to say this book is solely for tournaments or high level play. The casual player can enjoy this book and it’s scenarios and objectives just as much, but it definitely does a lot to control a lot of the feel bad lists that are out there, or at least tries to.
Let’s skip ahead to the organizing the event section. This part details just about everything you would need to, well, organize an event. From the organizer, to referees, to the players, and everything in between. They even awkwardly note that players “must” use official games workshop and forge world miniatures, but I guess that would really be up to the Tournament Organizer (TO). There is also a section on pairing players and how to pair them in rounds after the first round, as well as the usage of a spare player if there is one.
On to the controversial part of the book. They do add a tournament points table. It calculates how many points each player will score a round from 0 for a crushing defeat to 6 for a crushing victory. These are based on the size of the game and the difference in victory points. You often see tournament points based on a scale from 0-20 because of the range of scores, so this is wildly different than many of the standard methods currently used. It does provide an easy way to do this for those running their first tournament and we will have to see if this new table causes any headaches for TOs running events that a 0-20 point system might alleviate.
Now we come to what people have been homebrewing for a year now. Army composition. They have laid out 3 different universal compositions but aren’t super clear how to use them. The first is Open War which is basically the rule book with no comps at all. This is important to note that we don’t have to comp every game or every tournament with this book being released. We also have Grand Melee which has been commonly used by many already and limits a single unit to only be 25% or less of the total points. Sucks to be Warriors of Chaos players that bought a Lord on Dragon in this world. This also affects units as well, so Death Star units also take a hit here too. Casters are also capped at 1 level 4 per 2000 points and 1 level 3 per 1000 points. The other comp is Combined Arms and this one limits the number of the same unit you can take with max 3 for characters, 4 for core, 3 for special, and 2 for rare. The army rule overrides this, but these keep units with no restrictions from getting spammed. It is obviously up to the TO but I imagine you can use one or even both of these 2 new ones concurrently, but I do like that there is a universal set that people can just reference when a tournament says they are using Open War or Grand Melee and Combined Arms. Hopefully these are enough, and we don’t have to see a lot of other homebrew comps coming up anymore, but time will tell if the rules changes and this book will have fixed the need for heavy comps in tournaments.
They touch on the terrain and battlefield and deploying but we won’t go into that. They do lay out 3 different game length rules. Fixed turn is a 6-round game, random game length is rolling after the 5th round and adding a dice where the game ends when you roll a 10, and break point where the game ends when an army goes below 25% total Unit Strength. This allows for easy mixing and matching of rules to create a tournament pack.
It also goes through common objectives and VP scored. Many of these are the same as the main rulebook. One that was in the errata and now here, is the addition of gaining VP of half of the points for a unit at 25% of its starting wounds. Now keeping that dragon alive with 1 wound doesn’t deny 500 VP anymore. They also add that you get 500 VP for breaking the opponent through the Break Point game length so basically get that extra 500 VP for the stuff that was still alive when the game ended.
Here is the bread and butter of the book. They added 6 scenarios. They are pretty cool, and I will not go through them all. Buy the book or find some leaks but they look quite fun. The main part is that they each recommend certain game lengths, have their own scenario special rules for most of them, and have recommended secondary objectives. This makes it easy for a TO setting up a tournament or even casual players rolling up a scenario, to determine the best ways to play it. Although, we could just as easily pick one not recommended and play that too.
Secondary objectives are the part of the game that will change it the most, and can be picked for any scenario. The first one, baggage train, requires you to defend a baggage train and capture or destroy your opponents for VP. Next, special features are like the main rulebook but have unusual properties that are rules you will roll for at the start of the turn that offer benefits, as well as the VP you get for controlling it. Domination is basically controlling a table quarter with more Unit Strength than your opponent for VP, which was actually a standard way to score VP in every game back in older Warhammer Fantasy Battles editions. Lastly there is Strategic Locations (x). If you’ve played Age of Sigmar or 40k you know these. These are objectives on the table and (X) can range from 2-4 objective markers to control. Now here is the caveat for most of these, outside of domination. To control something, it has to be a core unit and it has to be unit strength 10 or greater. If you want to score secondary objectives, you will have to bring and utilize your core units. Will this be enough to get players to stop referring to a “Core Tax” like it is a bad thing and want to take more core units to score? This is another time will tell kind of thing, but I hope it does add variety to list building and maybe keep people from trying to keep their core units as close to the minimum as possible.
The final way they added VP to be scored is from secret objectives. These hold up to their name since they get a couple paragraphs and are on the last page of the book so they are quite secret. That is unfortunate because I think that these are one of the coolest things that they added. There are 12 different secret objectives that reward VP for completing. When you write your muster list for a tournament you pick 6 of them. When you battle you can choose one to try to complete for that game and you can’t use it again for the event. So, a 5 round GT, you bring 6 and use 5. I absolutely love this rule and will be encouraging its use for any tournament I go to and will even be implementing it in my escalation league.
There are also rules for doubles events and how to run those including army composition and minor rules changes. They also have 3 scenarios to use for a doubles event, and these also use the same secondary objectives as the single player games. There are also rules for team events with how to match using vanguard, battleline, and rearguard assignments for team play. This is actually a really cool system so check it out and spread the word and hopefully teams become popular in The Old World like it is in 40k because I would love to try this!
All said and done, I am not disappointed in this book. The ease of being able to set up a tournament or league where you can just say we are playing scenario 2 at 2000 points, using Grand Melee and Combined Arms, with secondary objectives baggage trains and special features is incredibly convenient and easy to do. I do like this for casual and tournament players alike and recommend picking it up. Will this fix all of The Old World’s problems alongside the Errata? I will be keeping a close eye on the meta to find out but at the bare minimum, it makes it feel like a fresh new game.
Now that we got this book out of the way, though. Let’s give us what we really want. A narrative campaign book!
