In the Christmas/New Year/holiday rush, one game got completely lost in the pipeline. Played and recorded, it languished ironically forgotten for something that won Best New Wargames Rules award in the yearly Wargame Illustrated vote. That’s right, we’re talking Midgard: Heroic Battles!
Midgard: Heroic Battles is, at heart, very simple: multibased units, standard measurement (“spear throw”) based on chosen base width, and stamina as a stat representing loss of lives and fighting spirit both. You’re not even supposed to paint that many minis: the author suggests 8-12 28mm minis per infantry unit when using 12cm base width. Other scales are acceptable and supported as long as both you and your opponent use the same base width. So if you want to save playing space, 6mm units can have 8cm base, though I’d probably lean on 12cm anyways for that MASS BATTLE feel.
The unit statlines are fairly simple Midgard: Heroic Battles. Combat stats tell you how many dice to roll in shooting or melee (halving if the unit is below half strength), how much stamina (HP) it has and how many hits you have to score to hurt them (Armor 3 means that you need 3 or more hits to cause a single point of stamina loss), and reputation shows how many points you lose if the unit dies. Since games are won or lost over reputation collapse, you can’t just throw units into the woodchipper!
The real kicker in Midgard: Heroic Battles is the heroes. Just like great men and women of legend, they sway the tide of battle based on how they fight and how they die. Regular units have little in the way of impacting the game-winning reputation score (killing a unit just causes a rep drop for the enemy and no gains for you) while heroes can barely fart without a reputation fluctuation. Getting stuck in with the boyz (or without them) is good, fighting duels is good, charging is good, dying, retreating, or using Mighty Deeds to avoid death is bad. So is being the single survivor of your unit: you are literally being punished for attempting to bubble-wrap your beatsticks.
Each turn, a hero gets Mighty Deed points equal to their levels, and they’re free to expend them – there’s no saving them for another turn. They’re closest to the hero power pools in Middle-Earth, but less restricted. They also go down as your hero loses stamina points and thus levels: really no hero-hammering your way out of this one! Even the mightiest hero can be bled via a thousand cuts.
When it comes to regular guys duking it out, Midgard: Heroic Battles presents us with a neat thing to consider: killing zones. Each unit projects a Spear Throw-wide and deep square in front of it. This is the killing zone. Enemy units can’t freely maneuver in it, being forced to either change facing to the enemy and/or charge, or to retreat. Nobody is going to leisurely traipse and maneuver when the enemy is mere meters away. A few other rules – like how many dice you get in shooting – interact with the killing zone as well, lending it that much more import. Plus, it probably prevents all sort of gamey unit arrangement tricks.
Now, a quick word on army building in Midgard: Heroic Battles. While there is roughly a handful of unit classes – infantry, light and heavy cav, etc., – the actual unit templates are more varied. For example, artillery is actually a kind of monster! On those templates you then layer traits to make what you want to make. For example, there’s a trait that lets frontline infantry to swap out with their (hopefully) fresh comrades to their rear, simulating Roman legionnaires taking shifts in the fight. Hero building is even more in-depth, starting with their power level. A lowly level 1 champion may only have single Mighty Deed to make the unit is attached to shoot better, but you can go much, much higher. The book also provides plenty of 300 point example lists as well as ways to expand them to 400 points.
Midgard: Heroic Battles may not be my favorite game of 2024, but it’s loaded silly with great ideas. It is very much focused on getting your heroes into the thick of it without imbuing them with the invulnerability of a Warhammer Fantasy hero. You WILL have to risk it for the biscuit – and you’ll be happier for it!
