Warmachine Two-Player Battle Box review

Writing a review of a miniature war game isn’t as straightforward as writing a review for a board game. For most people a board game is going to be a completely standalone affair; everything should work straight out of the box and you shouldn’t need to add expansions to make it work. However with a table top battle game you’re going to expect to add extra units, add extra factions and even have some form of wargaming table and scenery to hand. Therefore to review Warmachine we’re going to split the review into multiple parts. This first review will cover the Two-Player Battle Box as a single entity. The second part will cover the game as a whole.

But first an introduction; Warmachine is a table top miniature wargame based on the steam punk driven world of the Iron Kingdoms. In the game each player takes control of a warcaster. A warcaster a powerful mage who is able to use their magic to control warjacks; giant steam driven robots that look like a locomotive auto-bot taking part in a game of American Football. The aim of the game is simple; kill the opponent’s warcaster. Without a warcaster Warjacks are nothing more than scrap metal and wasted coal. Warcasters are also supported by a variety of units, characters and battle engines.

The Warmachine Two-Player Battle Box includes everything you need to play a game of Warmachine. The only extra things you will need is a table to play on and maybe some scenery. The box includes two Warmachine forces including a good spread of Warcasters, warjacks and units. Included in the box are around 25 points worth of Khador and Protectorate of Menoth miniatures. The Khador are based on soviet Russia and their warjacks use brute strength and heavy armour to beat their opponents into scrap. The Protectorate of Menoth is an order of religious nutters who look like what would happen if the Knights Templar had access to robots and burn their foes with holy fury. Not only does the box include miniatures but it also includes a quick–start guide, a full colour mini rule book, dice, unit cards and even a little tape measure.

Some components where warped, dipping them in hot water soon fixes them.

The flash and sprue points that will need cleaning up.

The models provided in the box are all plastic but are of excellent quality. They have loads of detail and the sculptures really do look like lumbering robots of death. The miniatures are a very good selection and all of them look really cool. To me some of the Warmachine models can look a little goofy but I’m more than happy with what is in this box. The main criticism with the miniatures is they do have a lot of flash and sprue points that need removing before painting. In some cases these sprue points are pretty large and need some significant tidying up before the model looks respectable. Anyone with experience with miniatures will have no problems. However, this is a beginner’s box and the level of skill required may be too much for someone completely new to the hobby. These problems can also extend to the assembly of the models. All the minis are multipart so require gluing. The material used is some form of plastic resin so most polystyrene cements won’t work. The parts don’t fit immediately and require sanding to assembly correctly. The worst culprits for this where the Khador warjacks who’s waist to chest connection required a lot of sanding to fit correctly. The issue gets worse when you move beyond the warjacks. Included in the box are two warcasters and two five-man units, none of which have assembly instructions. Personally I found this quite fun, treating the models as little puzzles but again for a starter box set it needs instructions on how to assemble all of the miniatures. Some of the plastics have warped in the box, the worst culprits being the swords of the menoth infantry. These can easily be fixed by heating up the components, I poured a little hot water on them.

The assembled forces of the Iron Kingdoms.

Two rule books are included in the box. The first is a quick start guide (which can be downloaded here if you fancy a peek) that introduces the main concepts of the game and is suitable for using with just the warcasters and warjacks. It’s very well written and describes enough of the core concepts that you can get playing quickly and not have to worry about too many of the rules. Neither cover nor terrain is included in the quick start rules so you can use them to start playing on any surface. Also included is a mini rule book. This A5 sized book is full colour and includes all the rules from the Warmachine Prime MkII rule book. What aren’t included are the backgrounds and unit descriptions of all the factions. This book unfortunately suffers the pitfalls of a many large rulebooks; with so many rules it’s hard to find the one you want in the middle of a game. When the layout of the rules doesn’t follow your logic then it can make searching for things frustrating. A good example of this is the rules for how to move over different kinds of terrain are not in the movement section of the rules but are instead included in a separate terrain section near the rear of the book.

All the rule books and statistic cards you need are in the box.

The two-player battle box is a perfect introduction to Warmachine especially if you are considering collecting Khador or The Protectorate of Menoth. There are some issues with the miniatures that could put off newcomers but these are all part of the hobby and you will get this with most miniatures. If you were to buy just the miniatures separately it would cost twice as much so this box represents brilliant value for money. In addition you don’t need to buy the full size Warmachine MkII Prime rulebook as all the rules are already included here. If you’re still not sure you could go halves with a friend and take faction each. My grumble here, and it is a minor grumble that extends to any company who produces similar box sets, is that I wish this set was repeated for other factions. Not every player will want to collect the factions included. A Cryx & Cygnar box set in addition to this would have given new players more choice and this could even be extended to a Retribution & Mercenaries set as well. I would buy all three.