OUR REVIEW

Battles to Go

POCKET BATTLES

Orcs vs. Elves

I’ve always been attracted by wargames but, usually, they take too much time to study, set up and play. In the recent years the market has been really flooded by a huge wave of light wargames: starting from the Richard Borg games like Commands & Colors: Ancients, Memoir’ 44 and BattleLore down to the new releases like Magestorm, Battles of Westeros or Conflict of Heroes. The aim of the designers is to find a good balance between complexity and simplicity; of course, there isn’t a one-way solution but it depends what one is looking for.

Paolo Mori and Francesco Sirocchi, in designing Pocket Battles, took it to the extreme, a light wargames system that could be carried in a pocket. They try to introduce really a lot of nice mechanics including army personalization with this simple, but not trivial game.

The first release for this system is Celts vs. Romans, followed the year after by Orcs vs. Elves. I’m going to describe Pocket Battles starting from this last release but the rules are always the same, what differs are just the armies. If you like you can play Romans vs. Orcs!

The game is played directly on the table, no need of a map, on a hypothetical battleground divided in 15 zones in a 5x3 grid; 6 zones for each player including left, center and right (front and rear) and 3 engagement Zone (left, center and right). Each unit, during the game, occupies a zone and there is no limit how many units can occupy the same zone. The units can only move from one zone to an adjacent one, not diagonally.

The armies are made of units and each unit comprises one or more troops. There are 30 troops available for each side and players have to build up army using a fixed number of points and following some rules we will describe later.

Each player sets up his units in his 6 zones and the battle start.

The battle is made up from rounds and each round is made up from alternate turns. During his turn a player can make a redeployment action, which actually is a free movement of one zone, and then has to make one action with a unit or pass, spending just one order token. To activate and use a unit you need to spend orders and each round you have a limited number of orders tokens, depending on the size of the armies. Every time you use a unit in the same round you have to use a number of orders tokens equal to one plus the orders tokens already on the unit. That means that you need to have an army with several units because using always the same one is not possible. This simple mechanic really works fine and you will seldom use the same unit more than twice in the round. To be clear: if you have six orders tokens actually in the same round you will activate 6 different units once, two different units twice or just a single units 3 times.

Actually, what an activated unit can do is just an action that could be a movement, an attack or a special action.  You can attack/charge units in the enemy front zones with a unit that is in your corresponding front zone. You can shoot with units in the front zone and you can move from one zone to an adjacent one.

The battles are simple: each troop has icons (one or more die) representing the number you have to roll to hit with that unit. During an attack you just roll and check all the troops in your unit to see how many hits you score. If your unit has these icons: 3, 5, 5 and 6 and you roll a 2 and a 5 you will score 2 hits. Usually the defender has to remove one troop from the attacked unit for each hit. Of course, based on this simple mechanic Mori & Sirocchi built up a universe of exceptions and rules to make troops and armies different. There are troops with more attack strength (two or three dice), other troops that can roll more than one die and other that can sustain more than one wound.

To mark a wounded troop you have to use order tokens so it could be nice that a troop is not killed by a single hit but this cost you orders/actions.

The attacked unit, if it survived, can attack back.

When both players are not able to perform more actions/orders the round is over and the order token are taken back.

Shooting is a bit different: troops able to shoot have white dice icons (black dice for melee combat) and can usually shoot from front zone to front zone or try to shoot at enemy charging units. Some special troops, like siege weapons, have the ability to shoot from the rear zone.

The game ends when a player has been able to kill half or more of the enemy army and usually it takes something close to half an hour.

Actually, Pocket Battles really is a light wargame, in the true sense of the word, but is not trivial at all, since you need to think a lot in building up your army and playing it.

You have to set up tough units in front protecting special units and leaders in the rear; you have to occupy all the three zones (left, center and right) with your units because an enemy attacking an empty zone can go directly to the rear.

Every troop has a cost in deployment points and a formation value that set maximum number of troops that could be included in the same unit. Usually leaders have formation value 1 - that means they will be form a unit alone. What do you have to think about when preparing your army is that all the troops in a unit usually inherit the traits/ability of each troop in the unit. So a unit including Bugbears (with the Impetus skill) will roll 2 more dice attacking with charge or all the elves in the same unit with a wood pack will roll one more die in the engagements. You can set-up really good and expensive units or try to have many small and cheap units.

The great freedom in preparing an army offers endless solutions: you can assemble a standard Elf army with archers but you can also invest in the Treeman and leaders. You can try the “lucky shot” with a Boulder Thrower or make a more simple, though Orc army with Bugbears, Gnolls and Orcs.

The 4 armies released until now, Roman, Celts, Orcs and Elves, are really nice and different and we are looking forward to the new releases. The new confirmed set will be “Ancients #2” including Persians and Macedonians.

Players: 2

Age: 10+

Duration: 30+

Designer: Paolo Mori, Francesco Sirocchi

Artist: Chakroun Karim

Price: ca. 15 Euros

Publisher: Pegasus 2011

Web: www.pegasus.de

Genre: Tabletop, wargame

Users: With friends

Special: 2 players

Version: de

Rules: de en

In-game text: no

Comments:

Simple mechanisms * many strategies possible * easy to carry along * short playing-time

Compares to:

First game of this kind, basically all Cosims

Other editions:

Pocket Battles, Z-Man Games

My rating: 5

Andrea Ligabue:

A light wargame providing fun, lots of planning and interesting strategies, the armies from different boxes can be combined any way you want.

Chance: 3

Tactic: 1

Strategy: 3

Creativity: 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory: 0

Communication: 0

Interaction: 3

Dexterity: 0

Action: 0