For me, the Blackstone Fortress and Cursed City releases of the Warhammer Quest boxed game from Games Workshop are practically perfect games. They're extremely replayable, but they're board games and are, appropriately, bound to their boards. They each tell a specific story. Blackstone Fortress is a delve into a blackstone fortress, and Cursed City is a struggle to save a cursed city. The mechanics of the game are easy to learn, and the rules are surprisingly robust considering that they fit into a simple rules booklet and each character's profile card. It occurred to me that the Warhammer Quest system might secretly be an all-purpose skirmish wargame complete with a built-in AI for single-player mode. It seems like a bold experiment, but I've been leaving the boards for Warhammer Quest in their boxes, and I've been using the characters, mechanics, and rules for a generic wargaming.
Many common annoyances of a skirmish wargame are solved by modern Warhammer Quest.
Wargames can have a lot of rules. The more flexibility you want in the game, the more rules you have to manage. Because Warhammer Quest is a campaign-based game by design, actions for combat, exploration, healing, and more, are provided. Because character cards contain special actions specific to a miniature, the additional rules that add variety to your game are literally written down right in front of you. It's easy to refer to a character card for exceptions, and once you know the basic universal actions of the game system, you're really only referring to your character cards during game play.
Granted, part of what's making this easy is my own familiarity with Warhammer Quest. If you've never played Blackstone Fortress or Cursed City, then there's still a learning curve just like with any other board game or wargame. Still, I find it easier to manage than many wargames. Even Kill Team (2018), which is one of the most compact games published by Games Workshop, suffers from information overload. After you've assembled your kill team, you have to learn the game rules, the rules specific to your faction, plus the rules specific to each miniature's specialty. Even a game like Black Ops has rules specific to specialist roles, besides a bunch of rules governing special actions. Both Kill Team (2018) and Black Ops provide a fun game experience, and I enjoy them both, but using Warhammer Quest rules often provides about 70 to 80 percent of the same experience with a lot less flipping through rulebooks.
One problem I have with skirmish games is the number of wounds you have to track before removing a model from the battlefield. In a wargame with a full army, each soldier typically has just 1 or 2 wounds it can take before dying. You don't have to track wounds. Your squad is hit with 2 damage, so you remove 2 soldiers. If it's a particularly well-protected squad, maybe you remove 1 soldier. Either way, it's a no-brainer.
In a skirmish game, where you only have 6 or 8 models on the battlefield, the rules allow each model to withstand lots of damage so that you're not left with just 2 models by the end of round 1. To me, that lacks realism (insofar as a game of toy soldiers can feel realistic), and anyway it's too much work to track the health of lots of little people. Most Warhammer Quest characters have 4 wounds, but each damage you take blocks out 1 action slot. In other words, tracking a character's health is the same mechanic as tracking how many actions you have left, and you manage it all on that single character card you're already using to determine what kinds of attacks you can take during your turn. It's a clean system that manages to put all the things you need to track in one place.
Everybody has different ideas about how initiative ought to work, and even those opinions can change from game to game. Personally, I find initiative to be one of the most annoying mechanics in any game. I acknowledge that it's important, I just don't like doing it. When it happens once, it's too abstract but when it happens at the start of each round it's a burden. No matter who wins, it feels unfair.
Warhammer Quest, like Black Ops, uses a deck of cards for initiative. You shuffle a deck of cards, and then lay the cards out on the table. The order of the cards is the order of activation during that round. It's a clever system because you feel like there's a fair variety both during the round and between rounds, and you never know quite what to expect. If you really really need to activate before the enemy, then you can spend an action to attempt a gambit (an Agility roll to move yourself forward in initiative order). Using cards makes it easy to track who's activated and who hasn't, and the unpredictability makes the chore of determining initiative actually feel fun. It's definitely one of my favourite initiative systems.
Wargames are often pretty open ended. In my games, I usually designate "loot boxes" that soldiers can spend an action to search. When someone searches through a loot box, I roll on a random table of effects or items and reward the soldier or squad accordingly. I love coming up with interesting effects based on the rules of the game I'm playing, or inventing new items for a squad to take out into the battlefield. However, I have to admit that this imaginative freedom can get overwhelming if it happens too much in a game. My battlefields often become littered with glass tokens or scribbled notes to remind me that this or that squad currently has a special trait associated with it.
When I play Warhammer Quest as a wargame though, I sacrifice a little bit of that freedom for the comfort of the cards and tokens included in the box. Because Warhammer Quest is a campaign, it includes upgrades for your characters in the forms of equipment cards, and effect markers in the form of cardboard tokens. When a character lays a trap, there are special tokens you can use as a reminder. When a character gains a cool new item that grants a new power, you have a card with the effect written on it. These are all components from the Warhammer Quest game, so they're always close at hand. To be fair, lots of other games use tokens and other game components, but I like that Warhammer Quest contains everything in the box already. You don't have to wait for the next "season" of Kill Team, or hope for cool supplementary cards in the next issue of White Dwarf. Because Warhammer Quest was devised and sold as a boxed game, an entire campaign's worth of content exists in the box for you to plunder and use.
For all attacks and saves, Warhammer Quest uses specialty dice. That's a controversial decision, because specialty dice are special and what's wrong with standard dice anyway? I love standard dice. What's more, I love standard six-sided dice. Everyone's got them, everyone knows how to use them. But it's not always that simple.
All things being equal, you probably would say that a roll of 5 is better than a roll of 4. But the more wargames you play, the more you realise how many ways there are to calculate whether 5 actually is better than a 4. After all, there's armour saves and weapon strength and damage rolls to consider. In some cases, 4 is better than a 5, as it turns out.
Love them or hate them, specialty dice do a lot of lifting for your mental load during game play. With specialty dice, you don't have to keep a mental map of what values are required to bypass armour, nor what the to-hit threshold is for a specific weapon. When you see a single mark on Warhammer Quest dice, you have dealt (or blocked) 1 damage. When you see a double mark, you've dealt (or blocked) 2 damage. You don't have to put any more thought into it than that.
Partially as a side effect of having easy specialty dice to roll and partially because there's rarely a sequence of rolls in any single interaction, each miniature's activation goes quickly in a game using Warhammer Quest rules.
When your miniature attacks an NPC, it's a single roll. You don't roll to hit and then roll to wound and then wait for the enemy to roll to save. You just roll to hit.
When your miniature attacks a miniature controlled by a player, your opponent does get to roll to save.
Non-player miniatures in Warhammer Quest games are controlled by a simple AI system unique to the miniature group activating. Sneaky miniatures might be prone to falling back and luring your miniatures into traps, while brutes tend to rush in and attack once or twice. Cleverly, a miniature's action also depends on its current state. A miniature that's currently hidden might shoot from cover, while a miniature that's exposed might seek cover. You just never know what to expect, but it's almost always exciting.
All you do is roll a d20, and then look at the back of the miniature's card. It couldn't be simpler, and in fact it might seem too simple at first. More than once, I was convinced that the AI had betrayed me by making the enemy miniatures do something obviously stupid. But what comes around goes around, and eventually even a miniature that retreated for no reason on one turn comes back with a vengeance later.
Very minor modifications are needed to play Warhammer Quest as a free-form wargame. For instance, movement is listed in hexes rather than in inches, so unless you play on a hex map you must convert that to inches. With movement that's often listed as 2 or 3, however, you'll probably need to play on a pretty small battlefield or else double all measurement values.
Warhammer Quest also assumes you're playing a well-defined mission. If you're just putting characters on a battlefield with the intent of just fighting it out, then you might need to limit the number of rounds in your game, or define some clear objectives or goals for your team of toy soldiers.
And you'll probably need to experiment with which enemies you throw onto the battlefield. Reinforcements depend entirely on a dice roll, so if you don't have the right mix of enemies you might find yourself all out of opponents by round 2, or else flooded with an endless horde of enemies.
As long as you've played either Blackstone Fortress or Cursed City and you're familiar with the rules and enemies, it's easy to make simple and obvious modifications to rules, and to design a reasonable mission for your tabletop. The first few free-form games were less satisfying for me than the board game equivalent, but once I understood what I wanted out of the free-form version I was able to adjust how I set up my battlefield, and ended up having lots of satisfying games afterwards. If you love Warhammer Quest, you might love Warhammer Quest as a plain old wargame. Give it a try!