Deth Wizards

Snarling Badger recently released Deth Wizards, a skirmish wargame in which you play a necromancer and undead minions. I've enjoyed Snarling Badger products so far, and I like the idea of playing a necromancer with a little team of wights and wraiths and zombies. I bought the physical book and the optional reference cards, and today I played my first solo game in story mode. This is my review.

Rules

The really basic rules for Deth Wizards are pretty simple.

When you activate a miniature, it can move and attack (in any order).

When you attack, you roll a number of d10 equal to the miniature's Offense value. Each result equal to or greater than your target's Defense value inflicts 1 damage.

That's it. There are no further wound rolls or saves. You just roll a pool of dice and hope for high numbers. It makes for pretty quick game play.

Story

Before you play a game of Deth Wizards, you get to build your necromancer and choose what undead minions you want to recruit. This was a true pleasure, because a good 90% of the game's flavour is imparted here. It's a good 40 pages of content (literally 40% of the book), during which you get to read about different kinds of necromancers and then choose which one you want to play. You also get to choose your necromantic spells at this point, and it honestly feels like you're building a 5th level Pathfinder magic user, except it's a 1st-level necromancer in this game. You start this game as an established necromancer. You're powerful. You have minions, you have some seriously dangerous magic.

Finally, you recruit your initial team of undead. There are various classifications of undead, including shamblers (like zombies, which can only be destroyed with a critical hit), rattlers (like skeletons, which are hard to damage because they're just bones), spirits (the book text confusingly uses the keyword "ethereal" but the undead table and the cards use the keyword "spirit"), and so on.

There are so many cool options that you're likely going to have a hard time choosing what you want to play. Depending on how picky you are about WYSIWYG, it might come down to what miniatures you happen to have on hand. Fortunately (or unfortunately, in terms of strategy) for me, I coincidentally just finished painting a bunch of undead miniatures, so I had nearly everything I could possibly want. My first army featured a necromancer with no ranged attacks and a diverse horde of minions, and while some aspects of that worked in my favour, I did lose my first game. However, I had so much fun, and the gameplay was so quick, that I'm definitely going back in as soon as I rebuild.

The real curse is the metadata

I say the gameplay is fast, but admittedly things slow down once you get to the numbers.

First, you have to calculate the main stats of your Heroes (the necromancer's enemies), because they increase depending on the difficulty of the scenario. It's simple math, and you only really have to do it once at the start of the game, except then you have to write it down or something so you don't forget it.

On page 61, the rulebook says "On the Hero cards, next to each stat you will see a box. This box is where you will place a dice – or write the result of the dice if you like – to represent the total of the calculation" but I guess the card design must have changed after publication because there are no boxes on them. The cards have too many values placed too closely together for dice to reasonably work. So you have to remember or jot the score down somewhere, or just keep doing the math in your head.

Secondly, the Durability (that's health points) scores are enormous. The Heroes in the first scenario have 16 Durability each, and even a basic Villager has 8. That may not seem like much until you start playing and have to try to track the HP of every miniature on the table.

In many wargames, a miniature can endure maybe 1 to 3 wounds before it's removed from the game. That means it's trivial to either place a double-sided token next to a miniature (side 1 is 1 wound, side 2 is 2 wounds, and removing the token and miniature is 3 wounds). I had 3 Villagers and 4 Heroes in the first scenario for a grand total of 88 possible wounds to track just for the enemy alone!

Wounds aren't the only thing you have to track, either. Some Heroes can gain a circumstantial boost to Defense, and there are conditions your undead can impose, so there's often a need to mark a miniature with some additional token. It's a lot of metadata on the battlefield, which I don't mind except that the metadata is attached to every single miniature. It's a lot to track.

The fix is simple, though. Write it al down on paper, and keep the paper handy during your game.

Initiative

My least favourite aspect of the game is its initiative sequence. In Snarling Badger's Space Station Zero game, I love the way you can steal initiative with a dice roll of progressively increasing difficulty. In Deth Wizards though, the policy is that you activate up to 4 points of minions, and your necromancer, and then your opponent takes a turn. Then you activate 4 more points of minions, and your necromancer. Then your opponent takes another turn. You must activate your necromancer a minimum of twice each turn, but each minion only once.

I tried playing rules as written, and almost instantly lost track of which miniatures had been activated. The rulebook suggests using a token to represent this, but I already had dice tracking Durability and tokens representing various conditions and boons, and I literally couldn't fit more tokens in my mob of melee fighters.

I tried using the I-go-you-go method, with my necromancer and minions activating first, then the Heroes, and then a second activation for my necromancer. It kind of worked, but I think in the future I'll likely just use a card system, as in Blackstone Fortress and Black Ops.

The twist

There's a brilliant twist in the game that I haven't mentioned yet. Your necromancer doesn't have a Durability score like all the other miniatures. Instead, your necromancer has Necromantic Energy points, which serves as both your Durability and the points you spend on spells. Yes, you drain your own life energy to cast spells, which is both very powerful and very dangerous. It's like playing a Black Magic: The Gathering deck, but with miniatures. Imminently entertaining, and in fact the sole reason I lost my first game.

Necromancers are just misunderstood

If you think about it, necromancers aren't actually evil at all. They're anti-death, and it's hard to imagine anything less evil than that. If the villagers and self-appointed heroes would just let the necromancers of the world have the dead bodies and stray souls, the world would, at the very least, be a more interesting place.

Deth Wizards lets you play the part of a misunderstood genius, and it gives you the power to defend yourself and your undead pals. Most importantly, this book is inspiring. Seeing your undead army shambling through a graveyard toward is a dark fantasy dream come true. Deth Wizards makes it happen.