Swear faith to me, and you shall have mercy! I need battle lords such as you!
I unbox BattleLore Second Edition from the relative safety of a hotel room in the heart of Auckland.
Ahhhh, BattleLore. I spend countless hours on the first edition by Days of Wonder, updating the rules summary, painting the figures and creating and maintaining the website BattleLoreMaster. I even managed to get some of my fiction on the back of one of the expansion sets. There was a brief, heady period when it seemed I was going to get the job of writing the background fluff sourcebook for the game. But, unfortunately, that came to nought (as did a later offer of doing some writing for FFG) and DOW sold BattleLore to Fantasy Flight Games. After releasing the last few expansion sets, everything went quiet until the release of the BattleLore-inspired Battles of Westeros. It seemed that the original BattleLore was dead and buried due to the high production costs of the original game and the uncomfortable fit between its historical, light-hearted fantasy and the more serious fantasy espoused by Fantasy Flight Games.
But then, last year, BattleLore came to life again. A new edition with a few rules changes, new miniatures and a transplant into the FFG fantasy world of Terrinoth (a world, unfortunately, that still suffers from a touch of generic fantasy-itis). I shunned the new edition, thinking I’d had enough of this particular game to last me a lifetime, but something about this system keeps bringing me back—the perfect level of difficulty and game length? The visual spectacle when all the miniatures are finally painted? Who knows. But it seems that yet another version of BattleLore has joined my collection.
Let’s unbox it together from a hotel room in the heart of Auckland in New Zealand, where I recently picked up a copy.
Unboxing it is great! But boxing it up again is no fun whatsoever. A great game deserves a great box.
I agree, and after just getting Battle of Five Armies I’m reminded again about how Fantasy Flight Games has managed to ignore the entire concept of ‘box insert’ over the years, replacing it with a useless cardboard divider. They make great games, but I do think we get ripped off in the box storage department. No doubt they would say that it allows them to put more stuff in the box with the saved expense, though I suspect it actually means they get a larger profit margin, since other games like BoFA manage to do it. Annoyingly, it’s set a precedent for other publishers too, and no box insert is becoming more and more common.
Anyway, a foamcore box insert design will one day become available here, when I get the time to design one.