When it was released Battles of Westeros came with the tagline “a BattleLore Game”, a subtitle that probably does not mean very much to many people, and I don’t think it particularly did at the time either, but which I think is a fascinating insight into its creation - and possibly it’s ultimate failure. BattleLore is a game designed by Richard Borg and was sort of a medieval history entry in his ongoing Command and Colorrs series of games. This was a series of fairly light wargames that combine dice, hexes, and either blocks or miniatures in a tactical level game about (usually) historical battles. Battles of Westeros represents an interesting off-shoot from the core series, but to fully explain why I think it is so interesting - and why despite that I no longer own a copy - we should consider the history of the series it came from in a little more detail.
In 2000 Avalon Hill Games, the classic American wargame company which was owned by Hasbro since 1998, published a game called Battle Cry designed by Richard Borg. Battle Cry was a tactical level game about the battles of the American Civil War, and it had several interesting features that would underpin the series of games that would largely define Borg’s career as a designer. Battle Cry was played on a board with a hex grid that was subdivided into three columns. Units were represented by simple plastic miniatures and terrain was cardboard tiles that were placed over the relevant hexes on the board. Players activated units by playing a card from their hand which would tell them what of the three board sections they could activate units in and how many units they could activate there. It was an easy game for players to learn but contained significant strategic depth, and it had ample replayability thanks to the many battle scenarios that came with the game.
In 2004, the publisher Days of Wonder released Memoir ’44, a Richard Borg design in the vein of Battle Cry but now about World War II. Days of Wonder are famous for their lavish games and Memoir ’44 was a gorgeous production, with little plastic soldiers, tanks, and artillery to populate its battles. Memoir ’44 is still one of the all-time wargaming classics, a quick to play, simple to learn, but immensely fun little tactical wargame. This brought the system pioneered in Battle Cry to a much larger audience and spawned a whole stream of (mostly) excellent expansions. It is probably still the most popular game in the series.
Following on from the success of Memoir ’44, Days of Wonder released BattleLore in 2006. BattleLore deviated a bit from its predecessors. It was a medieval fantasy game, where scenarios about the Anglo-Scottish wars would see dwarves fighting on the side of the Scots, or where the French might bring Goblins with them to fight in the Hundred Years War. It included a mix of historic and fictional battle scenarios, a giant spider, and a magic system and deck of spell cards. There were a lot of moving parts to BattleLore and it never quite seemed to find its audience. Perhaps it was too historical for fantasy gamers or too fantasy for history enthusiasts. I enjoyed the time I spent playing BattleLore but I found it to be more complicated than I wanted. If I’m honest, it was the magic cards and Command Camp systems that I found the most frustrating. The Hundred Years War expansion included rules to exclude most of the magic rules but went out of print quickly and was nearly impossible to find even when the game was still being published. I do still own my original BattleLore box but it’s in storage and I haven’t played it in years.
2006 also saw the release of Command and Colors: Ancients, the first to bear the name by which the whole series is now known, by GMT games which was a straight historical take on ancient Roman warfare and remains one of the most popular games in the series. While Ancients is now considered a classic and an all time bestseller for GMT, BattleLore did not receive the same glowing reception.
BattleLore plugged along over the years, receiving a slew of expansions – many of which are devilishly hard to find – before the publishing rights to the game were bought by Fantasy Flight Games. FFG would continue to release expansions for BattleLore, and in 2010 they released Battles of Westeros – a game very much inspired by BattleLore but designed by Robert Kouba instead of Richard Borg and with several interesting deviations from the traditional Command and Colors mould. Battles of Westeros is a game that I absolutely adore. It is also a game that I no longer own. I have complicated feelings about it, basically. Let’s start with what I like about it, then we can move on to why I eventually traded it away.
Battles of Westeros is one of the most interesting games about medieval warfare I’ve ever played. It completely discarded the traditional Command & Colors division of the board into three sections. Instead, if you wanted to activate units with a card you chose one of your commanders and played the card on them. They could only activate units within their Command Range, usually any space within two hexes and they could only have so many cards played on them in a round. Each round you also were given a random assortment of chits you could spend to activate individual units which gave you some options beyond just the card play. The cards were also pulled from separate factional decks rather than a single shared one.
BoW also had more complexity as most units had at least one special ability, and many units were unique to their respective faction, creating much greater level of asymmetry than seen in previous Command and Color games. On top of that it completely threw out the usual turn structure of Command and Colors. Instead of players simply taking turns playing cards until someone won, Battles of Westeros was divided into turns and rounds. On each turn players would either play a card or use a token to activate a unit - with the complicating factor that each unit can only be activated once per round. Well, sort of. There was also a Rally mechanic where you could spend a flag token to reduce your morale (there’s a morale track that sometimes can be an instant-win but sometimes not) to Rally a unit which then lets you activate that unit again that turn. This is also all without getting into the Engagement rules and Flanking Attacks, both of which are, again, very cool but also one more thing to track! It all makes for great decisions and interesting interaction, but it’s also a lot to keep track of in what was traditionally a fairly simple system.
I also really liked that the dice in Battles of Westeros were d8s. I could justify this by how I think it better represented differences in the quality of armour between units, and that is true, but really I just really prefer rolling d8s to d6s.
Looking back on it now, it is clear to me that Battles of Westeros owed as much to classic hex and counter game design as it did to Richard Borg’s earlier games. Elements like the command auras, the activation system, and the more freeform shape of the battles are much more reminiscent of my experiences with Men of Iron than with Memoir ’44. That said, the legacy of BattleLore is still there – particularly in how combat is resolved. There are no combat tables in Battles of Westeros - instead units come in one of three types - light, medium, or heavy - each of which has its own colour. When you attack you roll a number of dice determined by the attacking unit and for every symbol you roll that matches the enemy unit’s type you deliver a hit. The three types are not evenly distributed on the dice, though, so heavily armoured red units are far harder to hit than lightly armoured green units.
If I find it so fascinating, why don’t I own it anymore? The simplest reason is that Battles of Westeros, as many of you will have guessed, is set in the world of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series (FFG had the book license at the time, so it is very much based on those and not the series Game of Thrones, a subtle distinction). Here’s the thing: I don’t like A Song of Ice and Fire. It has been too long since I last read a book in the series (I read the first two) and little would be gained by me trying to explain why it does not appeal to me. Suffice to say, there are things to like about it but overall, I am not a fan. This means that while I find the moment-to-moment gameplay of Battles of Westeros really engaging, I don’t get invested at all in the battles like I would if they were real historical events. When playing Battles of Westeros, I kept wishing I was using these rules to recreate the Battle of Benevento or Crécy.
The other reason I gave it away is that it just was not getting played. Over the many years I owned the game I only played it a handful of times. This partly reflected my greater interest in miniatures wargaming during that same time, but it was also the result of the niche the game sat in. Battles of Westeros presents itself as if it is a game in the Command and Colors line, but it is a significant deviation in rules from those series and on top of that is chock full of chrome and little complexities that make it a much harder game to teach. It is also a long game, with many games decided by reaching a certain number of rounds rather than eliminating X number of enemy units. While you can easily play a game of Memoir ’44 in thirty to forty minutes, getting a game of Battles of Westeros in under 90 minutes was a struggle and the big battles could run for hours. That is not on its own a problem, but it is a misalignment between the expectation of what the game should be like and the reality and that can make it harder to pitch it to someone who you are hoping to play it with. Dedicated fans will find time to play it, but I just found other Command and Colors games easier to get to the table, particularly because neither myself or any of my friends were particularly enthusiastic about the subject matter.
Battles of Westeros is long out of print and copies can go for shockingly high prices – especially for some of the expansions. I wouldn’t say that it is necessarily worth buying a copy, but if you find yourself at a convention or a friend’s house and you have the opportunity to play it, I absolutely encourage you to do so. It’s a fascinating piece of game design, and I would love to see someone pick up some of its idiosyncrasies and apply the to a game with a setting that interests me more. Some elements of its design were later used in BattleLore Second Edition, this time a fully fantasy game with no history whatsoever, but that game is also out of print – and importantly didn’t have d8s.