Return to the Border Princes

 This past winter, Steve organized a Regiments league that used the Border Princes map from the General's Compendium to track score. It was great fun and reignited my desire to organize a true map campaign. Playing games of Regiments with the boys is always a good time, but I wanted to share the excitement another layer of strategy could add to the game and show how much fun linking all these separate battles could be like we do in Mordheim but with an army scale game.

The Border Princes map campaign is a lot less cumbersome than the original Mighty Empires, but still has a level of depth that makes the decisions made on the map matter for gameplay. Each player starts with an HQ placed at the edge of the map and a single banner within that space. That banner represents one of your armies. Every turn, players submit orders for each banner they have under their control. They can move, fortify their position, or raze the map section they are in. Fortified banners get bonus points and defensive terrain features if they go to battle. Razed map sections lose any special rules and do not count towards victory points at the end of the campaign. Banners moving through tiles capture territories for your little kingdom and more banners are generated at your HQ once you control enough spaces. When one of your banners occupies the same tile as an enemy banner, you play a game of Regiments to determine who takes it and the loser retreats. Banners can lend support to one another during combat. Friendly banners adjacent to one in battle add points to that force! Strategic positioning of your forces will give you a sizable advantage over your enemy.

The map has a variety of environments that modify how you play on it and as well as gameplay in Regiments games. Rivers, swamps, and mountain ranges all impede your movement during map phases, casting doubt on whether your banner will reach its destination. There are locations with specific scenarios to be played in battles there, like the Warrens and Geistenmund Hills. The ancient tower of Tor Anrok gives players unrivaled control over movement in the surrounding tiles. The orcs found within the Iron Claw camp can be recruited by greenskins and harass and pester other races, adding or subtracting points from armies battling there. 

Every army gets a special rule that either modifies map level play or Regiments games. Examples include Orcs and Goblins being able to force march one banner per turn to potentially move 2 tiles instead of 1, Vampire Counts banners growing in size for the turn immediately after beating an opponent, and Warriors of Chaos being able to pursue a routed foe to force another battle in the next turn!

It really is a near perfect campaign with a lot of opportunities to add your own flourishes and hack up some of the rules to better suit your play group. The rest of the General's Compendium is really sick, too, with tutorials for making scenery and a lot of insight into making games your own. It aligns so well with the indie gaming/IRWT way of thinking that it should be a stable in everyone's libraries. It is long out of print, but you can find pdfs easily with your favorite search engine. Worth the read if only to see that none of what we are doing is new. Gamers have been gaming this way forever.

I've said the above and more to most of the War Council (some multiple times. Sorry!) in hopes of getting a little traction. Sadly, we are spread very thin across New England and the campaign can generate a lot of games to play each turn. Coordinating 6-8 people over such a large space, each with adult responsibilities requiring flexibility, made a full War Council campaign almost impossible, so instead I grabbed three of the guys I game with the most for a smaller version that would let us keep things moving without becoming an absolute shit show. This campaign season, the Border Princes are contested by the Barrow Legion (Undead, me), the Covenant of Blood (Warriors of Chaos, Brad), A mysterious unnamed force (Dark Elves, Alex), and the Gnawing Hunger (Skaven, IPT). We decided to play for 20 turns and whoever has the most territory at the end is crowned the Lord of the Border Princes. Special territories like Aldium and Tor Anok are worth 5 territories while the fortress of Malko at the center of the map is worth a whopping 10!

We're about 7 turns in, but here's how the campaign started. Alex placed first and chose an excellent starting position. His HQ sits in the mountains, requiring any attacking forces to pass a difficult terrain roll to take it. He is also adjacent to a road, which allows for some rapid movement south. The proximity to Tor Anok and its elf-specific bonuses didn't hurt either!

Brad's Chaos Warriors chose the south-west of the map as their home. Like Alex, he has good access to a road as well as a bridge to safely cross the Blood River without making a check. The river will also impede invading forces. 

I placed the fortress of the Barrow Legion high in the mountains in the northeast for the same reasons Alex chose his starting location. It gives the Legion access to a number of roads and rivers and is close to the thematically aligned Geistenmund Hills.

Ian's Skaven took the last remaining corner. Though there are no roads nearby, the long river insulates him from attacks from the north, letting him build is empire without worrying too much about the undead. Brad's focus seems to be on the north, so perhaps there's some potential for western expansion?

Here is the map as of the fight phase in Turn 7. The intervening turns were largely expansion of territory and securing a few important locations. The Barrow Legion immediately sent a banner to Malko, capturing the fortress town for the undead. Chaos struck out and captured the merchant town of Aldium while the Dark Elf forces installed their wizards in the tower of Tor Anok. These two have been chasing each other across the intersection of the Old Silk Road and South Road, each beguiling one another with unorthodox movements. The empire of the Gnawing Hunger had grown unimpeded, drawing the attention of the undead and the Covenant of Blood. Banners met along the Blood River and in the bogs surrounding it, giving us our first real battles of the campaign!

So far, its been everything I'd hoped for. A little strategic discussion, a lot of shit talk, and the joy of moving markers across a map. I'm excited to see how things shake out and what feuds erupt from these initial skirmishes and border disuputes!