Robot Viking

Arcane Legions, the new mass combat miniatures game from Wells Expeditions, officially released yesterday. We’ve got some new details on the game’s “insider’s club” and unit creator. If you’re into alternate history, fantasy battles or fast (yet tactically rich) miniatures games, you might want to take a look.

If you click on the “arcane legions” tag at the bottom of this article, you can check out the other previews and reviews of this game that Robot Viking has done. In a nutshell, you construct a large army out one of three factions: Egyptians, Romans or Han Chinese, then battle your opponent for control of tabletop territory. Units suffer damage in the form of figure attrition, which directly affects each unit’s flexibility, strength and overall capability in a simple, elegant way.

There’s an exclusive fan club called the Centurion Club (I think they called it that just to anger us Han warlords). It costs twelve bucks to join for three months, and it gives you access to exclusive units (which must be purchased), an online collection manager, a special message board and, most interestingly, a unit creator. I’ll get to the unit creator in a minute. The important thing you need to know about the Centurion Club right now is that you can join it for free for the first month. It’s sort of a beta test period. This is actually not made very clear when you sign up — they take your credit card info and apparently charge you a penny for the free month, and will auto bill you at the beginning of November if you don’t cancel, which I am not a fan of. It should be opt-in, not opt-out.

In any case, the unit creator is an online application that lets you take one of the game’s unit bases, then apply any figures to it in whatever arrangement or formation you want. You can add any special abilities in the game and create a truly unique unit that matches your style. It then calculates a point value for the unit you’ve built (so even if you build an astonishingly powerful unit, it might be the only one you can afford to use in your army). There’s also a special code generated that allows you to use your custom unit in official tournaments — opponents can use a computer and possibly an iphone or Blackberry to check the validity of the code.

Here’s the crazy thing about building your own units: you can mix factions on the same base. Build a Roman unit with solid defense, but put some Han archers on there to make it brutal at range. There’s a built-in weighting system that makes it more expensive, points-wise, to place cross-faction figures together on a base. It costs more to get those Han to fight for Roman leaders, you know.

This sort of customization is really groundbreaking in a collectible miniatures game. It strikes me as the kind of thing gamers sit around daydreaming about. “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?” “Yeah, but there’s no way anyone would ever do it.” And Wells Expeditions has done it.

Related posts:

1. Arcane Legions Preview – 7th Legion Testudo
2. Warhammer Fantasy: Empire Strategy Guide
3. Arcane Legions Initial Playtest Report
4. Arcane Legions Could Be a Game Changer
5. Monsterpocalypse Designer Reveals “I Chomp NY” Secrets