Dragon Rampant, The Definitive Pick-up-and-Play Fantasy Wargame

Overview

So a few weeks ago I got hold of a copy of Dragon Rampant, the fantasy battle rules by Osprey Publishing. The game was released in 2015 and the rules were written by Daniel Mersey, the same delightful chap who did Lion Rampant, the historical medieval rules by Osprey. Anyone coming from Lion Rampant will quickly be at home here as much of the rules are the same. However, Dragon Rampant adds a great deal of fantasy flavour, as to be expected. The book is a fairly slim, approachable volume weighing in at 64 pages. The book itself is clearly laid out (though not indexed) with some stunning artwork. The art really is wonderful, as is usually the case with Osprey. It retails from Osprey themselves for £11.99. Within you will find rules for how to run a battle, as well as the usual wargame stuff; how to handle terrain, how to form cohesive units from your vast collection of miniatures. What is important however is that the rules are generic and allow you to build your own unit types, permitting you the use of any models in your collection. The game generally favours fun over competitiveness, with luck playing a rather large amount in activation of units.

Mechanics

The game uses d6’s and I can tell you, you will never need more than twelve at once, which is a nice change of pace from games where you find you run out of dice and have to start rerolling the ones you’ve already used. When it is your turn, you select one unit that has not been activated yet and choose one of three actions, ‘move’, ‘shoot’ or ‘attack’. To represent the line of command, as well as the unit’s individual discipline, you must roll two dice to determine whether the unit follows your command. If it does, then you carry out the activation as normal, if it doesn’t, it ends your turn. In the games we played I approached this mechanic tentatively, expecting to not like the loss of control it inevitably means. However, once we started playing I realised it was great! IT makes the game move faster because it’s always flipping between whose turn it is. It keeps everyone playing involved in the game and is much more inclusive than a true I-GO-U-GO setup. Another unpredictability in the usage of unit’s is the ‘Wild Charge’ mechanic.  Units with this special rule must attempt to charge the enemy if they are within range. It creates some very interesting emergent gameplay and makes the game feel like you as commander have to be more reactive rather than calculating every move with utmost delicacy. In this sense I feel as though Dragon Rampant is the most ‘real’ fantasy wargame I’ve ever played. I feel more like a commander having to send out his orders and react to the unexpected tides of battle. It feels more like a battle and less like chess.

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