Warhammer: Diskwars
2-4
14+
45+
“The cost of victory is blood, the cost of defeat is everything.”
-The Empire at War
Set amid the constant warfare of the Old World, Warhammer: Diskwars is a game of ferocious, fast-paced tabletop battles for two to four players. At the heart of the game’s conflicts are its disks, which represent heroes and units from across the Old World. During the game, you activate these disks, flipping them end over end to move them across the battlefield and position them to attack.
With a host of terrain cards, objectives, command cards, and more than sixty disks for the game’s four races, the Core Set includes everything you need to build your first armies and dive into the fray!
images © Fantasy Flight Games
User Reviews (2)
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Image a typical card game in terms of keywords and stats. Now round those pieces of cardboard. Make distance matter, add a command system, and add an element of chance. You get diskwars.
To be honest the disk flipping mechanic is really gimmicky. It’s interesting that the same disk has some differences, but really it makes it more AP prone.
Other than that, it is a solid game. Really easy to learn the rules, the only part I wasn’t 100% clear on if the LIFO resolution approach scrums (melees with multiple engagements). Looking at the rules a year later it seems to favor the reading that all disks both attack and a counter in engagements, which wasn’t intuitive to me at the time I first open up the game. Regardless a fourth example on the multiple engagements would’ve been nice.
Wounding versus damage was interesting, it really helps abstract the concept of wounding in comparison to damage for some less experienced wargames.
Simple dice and the range stick are only used in ranged attacks, this makes the gameplay fast. Command points by the numerical value on the cards was interesting especially because it has a RPS mechanic tied into as well. The command system doesn’t inhibit the turns and adds a bit of additional tactical flair by giving specific bonuses or disadvantages.
The engagement mechanic, simply if there’s a disk on top of another disk, the disk below is pinned and cannot move off. It seems pretty nifty at first, but pinning happens quite frequently, it makes the disks hard to read (the disks being laden with information), and sometimes the engagement resolves with neither side dying, meaning in the next round the disk underneath isn’t going to be able to move.
I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in wargaming, but doesn’t want to buy into a game system just yet. Try this cheap box out, and if you are interested in the style of game in a few months, pick a game you know you’d enjoy thematically.
I consider myself a miniature gamer first and foremost. So I’m not inclined to like a game that seems like it’s trying to be a replacement for a miniature game. Luckily, that’s not really what this is.
Warhammer: Diskwars is a relatively light strategy game with surprisingly little luck. You use points to build an army of disks that represent your troops. You have semi-randomly determined objectives for your game, then you set up you take turns setting up terrain (and this can greatly affect the game).
At this point the game is a pretty straightforward move and attack style game. Movement is accomplished by “flipping” the disks. That is, if the disk has a movement of 5 you would be able to flip the disk over 5 times in any direction during the course of its move. All other ranges are determined with a range ruler. Disks that end on top of enemy disks are said to be “pinning” those disks and during the combat phase they will deal damage to one-another (no dice rolling for this). Ranged attacks are pretty much the only things that use dice. Magic attacks are automatic damage from range which makes them pretty powerful.
There’s a lot of powers that the disks can have to add variation and depth to the strategies which makes the game very cool. Much more than I can go into here. It’s a game I didn’t expect to like, and yet I do.
Games can take less than an hour which is perfect for a game like this. If it was a longer game I’d rather be playing one of my mini games.