Games Are For The Playing

Digging through a set of games in storage in my parents shed I found my old Battlemasters set from MB games. This was a somewhat weird artefact of the ~90s in that I believe it was supposed to be a gateway to Warhammer Fantasy Battle but had very little Games Workshop heraldry apart from the Citadel Minatures tag on the front. My copy never saw use beyond me setting it up and fiddling about with it myself as I went off down an Epic 40k route afterwards (Titans ftw).

Though my hoarding instincts had weakened sufficiently to part company with it, all the gamers I had known for a while were peers and long past this game into full on wargames of whatever sort. This could have been stripped for parts as my old Space Crusade was for 40k but for whatever reason, Battlemasters had stayed (relatively) complete.

Looking in the box, I had never gotten to painting it - I had apparently added the Imperial side expansion (another cannon, extra knights and men at arms) but had not even gotten as far as taking them all off the sprues. There is an interesting thing to note here that lots of the plastic minis were shared with Heroquest - or the sprues once designed were reused for as many games as they could. I would imagine the genesis of Battlemasters being something along the lines of 'here are our plastic minis available today, what can we do with them?'.

However! With the passage of sufficient time comes the hour of all things - my friends had aged sufficiently that their kids in turn were old enough to be playing things like this and it being the Christmas season families were gathered. A happy coincidence saw one of those friends already booked to visit and they were convinced to take it off my hands in a very stereotypically Irish - "please take this thing" "I couldn't possibly" "You would be doing me a favour" "But you could sell it" "Just take it so I don't have to deal with it" etc. etc.

And then happily, not two hours later, I get action shots back.

The whole thing plays on this fold out plastic hex map, something like Memoir 44 in that you have units and a card deck then you move the units you draw cards for. The Imperial side gets a cannon, the Chaos side gets an Ogre, otherwise both have cavalry and infantry and ... I think you had to capture the tower?

In any case this was the first time the game has been actually brought to table, ever, after 25 odd years of sitting on shelves and in sheds. Turns out there were a few of the minis missing when it was taken to table - no doubt scattered during playing and putting away over the years. It could have gone in a skip somewhere along the way but happily it has survived to actually reach the hands of its intended audience. Either the younger generation will play it as intended or the older generation will get to paint up the components and use them in their TTRPG games. I know there is a box of Reaper mini's from a Bones kickstarter on the shelves in that house so I figure they will find use.

An on-going objective for the past couple of years has been to bring the things on my shelves to table in actual play, so I am going to count this as a very unexpected win in that category.