Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)In my dreams, I imagine a game ... it is filled with fantasy magic, monsters and battle, overflowing with toy figures to push around an a brilliantly artistic, colorful board, adaptable so that I can play different scenarios or maybe even design my own, easy to teach to my dubious friends and even easier to play.
BattleLore, it turns out, is the promise of my dream - but not quite its fulfillment. Now, I believe Richard Borg to be a game design genius and I sincerely like the folks over at `Days of Wonder' but their products tend to leave me with a heightened state of ambivalence. The quality of their game box and its color printing are absolutely superb - but their choice of cover art is pedestrian - especially compared to the other components in their box. Their rules are gorgeously printed in full color replete with illustrations - but the organization of their rules makes the sequence unclear and overly complicates the simplest of concepts and tasks. As a former game designer, I found a number of brilliantly conceived linkages built into the rules to allow for unlimited expansion ... and yet these feel like abrupt dead ends as they are portrayed in the written rules. Such problems made it difficult to grasp the overall flow of the game and how its component rules fit together into a working system of play. Once we understood the rules, playing the game was easy and fun - but getting to that point was work and difficult.
Then there were the absolutely incredible number of fantasy figures included in the game - knights, archers and warriors of various strengths and kinds - that seemed literally to overflow the box and needed no assembly in order to play the game. That was wonderful but once again instantly offset by the small number of fantastic creatures included for play. Moreover, these were limited to dwarves, goblins and a single humungous spider. The iconic staple of epic fantasy - the dragon - was nowhere represented or even hinted at.
Perhaps this is the aspect of BattleLore which, for me, was the most disappointing - lack of fantasy context. The two opposing sides in the game are - French and English. I don't know about you but I have visited both France and England and while both were fantastic, I didn't count them as fantasy trips. The very first scenario in the game is called Agincourt, October 25th, 1415 under the leadership of the opposing Henry V and Charles d'Albret. Now for all you Shakespeare and Henry the Fifth fans, you may want to start your game with the St. Crispin's Day speech but I was leery. Was this game a fantasy game or a historical simulation game? It seems unable to decide.
All of this appears to be set in France - admittedly a France of the 13-1400s populated with some dwarves, goblins and one huge spider - but France nevertheless. This game proclaims on its cover `Epic Fantasy Adventures' and yet it contains only the barest of elements of what we think of as epic fantasy. This is my biggest problem with BattleLore; that it does not deliver the context of epic fantasy for which I had so earnestly hoped.
If you are looking for a fabulous design in a deceptively simple game with breathtaking tabletop displays ... then you will find this game well worth the price. It is achingly close to the game of my dreams ... but also achingly just short of perfection.
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In a world that bridges history and fantasy, BattleLore puts you in command of a vast array of miniature troops on the battlefields of Medieval Europe. Players are introduced to the card-driven BattleLore game system through historical armies of men, but those troops are quickly supplemented with mercenary armies of fierce dwarves and goblin hordes and powerful, mythical creatures. Soon players will be employing Lore Masters - men of faith and magic, tricksters, and grizzled warriors - to lead their armies to victory on the fields of battle!
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