Warmachine is a miniatures tabletop wargame published by Privateer Press. Check out www.privateerpress.com for all the details.
There are great piles of information at Warmachine University. about how the game works. But the best way to learn is to get some games in.
The game is most commonly played at tournaments at 75 points, but starting out a bit smaller can make it much easier to get up to speed.
The core of a Warmachine is the Warcaster and their Battlegroup. Usually, your warcaster is a powerful mekanical and magical prodigy, well armed and provisioned with powerful abilities. Each Warcaster has a unique once per game feat that can change the course of the battle during one turn of the game. But if your warcaster if your most powerful piece, it is also the piece that must be kept safe – or you loose the game.
There are 3 Win Conditions in a normal game.
1) Killing your opponents Warcaster.
2) Meeting Scenario Goals.
3) Forcing your opponent to run out of time.
A warcasters Battlegroup is a group of Magically bonded giant fighting robots, that channel their controllers will into the fight. Each turn Warcasters can allocate resources to their battlegroup or to their spells or to their personal combat prowess/defense. But thats not all.
Armies also include: Units of infantry, Solo warrior models, Giant Battle Engines. A great army list will take forces that synergize well together.
There are a lot of choices.
There are 13 factions. Most players start off collecting one of these. Some alot never play anything but their faction. Others switch faction, trading off their previous army for new things. And some people collect more than one faction.
Each faction has a broad play style.
Khador, has lots of powerful, tough and strong models. It doesn’t have alot of tricks or guns, and it seems quite slow. But about 2/3rds of the Khador Warcasters have ways to speed their army up.
Cygnar, has lots of very high tech equipment. But things seem a bit on the fragile side. But they have powerful Warcasters that often have ways to make parts of their army tough.
In the major factions there are 12-16 Warcasters. Alot of the time you can take an army and switch the warcaster and it will play completely differently.
To start off with its worth having a look at the battle boxes for two factions.
Major Beth Maddox, leads a battle group of 2 light warjacks and a heavy warjack.
Viscount Koslov leads a battle grout of 2 Heavy Warjacks.
These are 0 point armys. Each warcaster comes with some free points. To these battle boxes a 75 point army would add may be 3 10 man units, or 6 more robots and some solo warriors to make a full army.
We are going to try and write some articles about the kind of lists we like to play over the coming months. We are also going to write up some reports of some of the events we go to.