Your Move Games of Brookline, Massachusetts is set to add a number of expansions to its Origins Award-winning Battleground: Fantasy Warfare, a card-based tabletop wargame. The advantages to Your Move's card-based format are numerous. Fielding an army of miniatures can cost thousands of dollars and require hundreds of hours of meticulous painting as well as elaborate precautions (in terms of protective packaging) for portability, while Your Move's simple, but elegant solution involves replacing expensive minis with inexpensive cards while retaining the strategic complexity of major tabletop campaigns.
The BFW game comes packaged as factions in non-random Starter and Reinforcement Decks ($14.95 each). Each Starter Deck includes 18 unit cards, that faction's 30-card Command Deck, two reference cards and the basic rules and a list of two 1500-point armies that can be built from the deck. Reinforcement Decks include 50 unit cards, including two unit types not found in the starter, and the advanced rules. So far six factions have been released (Men of Hawkshold, Orcs, Undead, Elves of Ravenswood, Dwarves of Runegard, and Umenzi Tribesmen) with both Starter and Reinforcement Decks. Due out this year are a Terrain Package (May) and three new factions, Lizardmen (July), High Elves (August) and Monsters, Mages & Mercenaries (October), which will be available in both Starter and Reinforcement Decks.
Battleground: Fantasy Warfare is targeted at hardcore gamers (it typically ranks very high in consumer ratings on sites such as Boardgames Geek) and has a strong appeal to the typical male gamer demographic (18-40). Many miniature gamers who are already heavily invested in a traditional miniatures wargame enjoy playing different games and BFW provides a very reasonably-priced, easy-to-learn, but strategically complex alternative.
Your Move Games, which also produces the reasonably-priced ($14.95), intrigue-filled board/card game hybrid Succession, is about to provide gamers with even more alternatives with non-compatible variants that take the BFW format to the world of historical military miniatures games and science fiction miniatures games. Battleground: Historic Warfare, which is due out in October/November, will allow gamers to re-fight the Second Punic War (Rome vs. Carthage, Hannibal & his war elephants), while Battleground: Science Fantasy, which is slated for an early 2008 release, will allow gamers to battle across the galaxy.
