Sunday I had the opportunity to play some War Machine. Unless you have been living under a bridge, you should know a little about the game. If not, shoot on over to Privateer Presses website and take a look. The miniatures look awesome if you are into steam punk Victorian stuff.
Overall, I think War Machine is a decent game. It is by no means perfect and suffers from a scaling problem. There is a crazy amount of stuff to track. You will need something to keep track of focus and spell effects. You will also need something to track your jack system status. Grease pen and card protectors work great. Yeah, this game uses cards for the unit stats.
I think the game probably plays best at the 25 point range. 11 points is really too little, but would make real quick games. A single mistake would spell doom at that level. I found that 15 points feels right for learning since you can have an interesting mix of jacks and units. The game still moves pretty fast at that level.
I feel 35 points would be pushing the upper level of what the game can realistically support. There is just too much to keep track of and not enough focus to really spread around. Sure you can play larger games, people do it all the time. I feel that you would need a bigger playing area.
A key tactic in the game is to know when to utilize the special ability that your war caster has. In some respects you need to think about the game at least one turn in advance since the order that you activate your units in can make a huge difference. It is a sad day when you do not use your own special ability.
I also think that how War Machine handles cover and concealment is probably the best way I have seen in a miniature skirmish game. They essentially use penalties to hit, which makes a lot of sense. I also like how the deviation of missed area attacks is handled. I really hope Warhammer 40K adopts similar rules.
I did manage to get in a few games against different lists. I played my own list, with no changes between the matches. I own 15 points of Cygnar, which is half painted at the moment. It consists of the starter box and a Black 13th Unit. In the games I played the jacks I had were not as effective as I had hope. You really need to have extra focus to put on them to get them to do something interesting. For the most part it seemed they were big targets.
The Black 13th however were exceptionally awesome! They had an answer for everything. I was really surprised at how versatile they were. Reading about them on the internet really does not prepare you for what they can do. Even in the game where I faced the all stealth list, they were the go to unit. I think if I played them more aggressively, I might have won all the games I played.
Overall I like many aspects of War Machine. I think it is a game I could play off and on for a long time but only if I can get a decent 4x4 table made.
