Warhounds 2 Warmasters

A series following a collection of would-be Admirals taking on the challenge of building a fleet in an entirely new game-system; Dystopian Wars by Warcradle.

The Princess Bride Admiral

As a wise old man once said…

‘boats, boats, boats’

So, I was sat minding my own business, watching Netflix, painting Titans, chatting on discord or some combination of the above, when all of a sudden there was a message in the W2W group chat from Jay: ‘Sooo, hear me out guys. Do you like boats?’ (Ed note – this is entirely false. I said ‘Random question: has anyone here played Dystopian Wars?’. Alex responded with Spidey-Senses tingling meme and then we all started googling and saw they had Jaeger and turning templates and it all just snow-balled from there.) I saw the magic word ‘boats’ and so sought more information. From there, I saw steampunk vibes, boat on boat violence and, before long, the Couronne.

After being tricked and falling hard into Titanicus, it seems my ‘one system rule’ is well and truly out the window… I like boats, okay? While Dropfleet Commander never quite grabbed me enough to take the plunge, apparently, I have a weakness for tiny boats, with filigree… (pretty boats boats boats).

And so, I’m there, curious about boatly things, I go online and bring up Wayland games and have a scroll through and there she is; The most beautiful miniature I have seen all year: ‘La Dame Liberté’. Oh my is she pretty. I think I then went to the group chat and said, ‘I want that one’ and excitably squealed in text form about pretty little French boats, not yet aware that with the French I also get the Italians, and Portuguese.

I did have a scroll through like a sensible person to look at other factions, and nothing grabbed me like La Dame Liberté had. When I found out about the full alliance faction featuring Italians, Portuguese, and south America as well, I think let out a little ‘yippee’ on a hangout voice-chat! (Ed Note – Second falsehood – Have you considered entering a career in politics? -that ‘Yippee’ was anything BUT small!) I, after spending maybe an hour or 2 excitably squealing about pretty French boats with their trim, found out that Jay was also looking at the Alliance faction BUT being the lovely responsible adult he is, he relented and chose a different faction than the one I’d just spent literal hours getting all excited for. (thank you, Jay, x) (Ed Note – It’s fine… I didn’t want to paint all of those glorious filigree-fronted ships or try my new verdigris technique out on the Liberty statues or any of the other awesome stuff Alliance have…),

Due to poor impulse control at 5 o’clock in the morning, and a real soft spot for ‘old’ models (please ask me about my metal nuns), I caved and bought someone’s collection of 1^st edition dystopian wars models – back from when the Alliance wasn’t the Alliance as they are now and was just the French Republique – on ebay. Alongside this impulse buy, TWO couronne battlefleet boxes, a box of Gubbins were purchased giving me the rules, necessary accessories, and such to play the game.

I built the boxes mostly following a guideline given to me by Jay (Ed Note: Wine + Basic Reading of Rules + New Recruit + Assembly Instructions = Profit?), with a few tweaks made on new recruit by me, this mostly boiled down to a single guiding princeple: I wanted fire weapons!

As for how I was planning on painting these absolutely beautiful vessels. I had no idea. Yet.

After stressing and overthinking my last few Titan projects and finding myself, shall we say, dissatisfied with how they had come out, I think I need a project I can take easy and not stress over. Go back to basics, as it were. To begin, I painted some of my ebay ships – a lot of the heavy lifting was done by drybrushing and washes, and honestly, I’m quite pleased with them. They are quick, low stress and have a nice finish. Did I underestimate myself? I wanted a simple blue grey on the bulk of my ships, with a bright yellow decking. At time of writing I’m seriously considering keeping away from metallics on these ships, with the exception of French fanciness and filigree.

So I picked my faction based solely on how they look – what can I say other than one faction is clearly prettier than all the rest… that and flamethrowers! From that initial moment of seeing the Statue of Liberty flamethrower aircraft carrier and deciding ‘Yep that’s my jam’ and then onto the first few boats I built, anywhere the build instructions had an option to put a heat lance or a lancet, I put one. I was considering picking up an Oriflamme battlefleet box next to acquire even more Fire-throwers.

Looking back at having dived in a few weeks ago and, at time of writing, now played 2 games (both very basic, learn the rules kinda games. Do the dumb thing! Make the rule do the thing!) I now know I want to play with floats not boats! Conveniently the Alliance Faction offers options here and I might be able to do just that using the alternative Main Fleet option I have. I say all of this with a lil bit of learning still to do on the basics of list building in this great game of boats we have discovered.

Until my current fleet is painted I am showing truly incredible self-controlin not making further purchases, yet. I think I’ll likely hold off on the Oriflamme for a while as I’m looking at the Vauban battlefleet boxset. This set will give me a much wider array of Airborne units to field in a game I was sucked into, initially, by the idea of boats… trust me to immediately change direction from ‘boats boats boats’ to ‘floats, floats, floats’…

Until such a time as I get permission (from myself or one of my responsibles) I intend to just have fun with some Carrier spam – messing around with my many SRS tokens and actually getting used to them, finding how to get the most out of them specifically as my faction. Fielding TWO Couronnes is truly a wonderful thing to see on a tabletop.

Away from the tabletop and more digital: Tabletop Simulator; a tool that has served me very well throughout the 2020s. From playing 40k almost everyday with random other players online during the lockdowns to letting me play board-games I hadn’t committed to actually buy, all of that giving me well over a thousand hours! It’s a wonderful tool, though, and if I want to get further into Dystopian Wars without throwing money around to try out things, I will likely spend the occasional evening playing boats on TTS with some of the other Admirals in this series. The reality TTS for myself these days is quite simple, though; whilst it can be useful it doesn’t scratch the social itch for me, like at all.

The reason I adore these sorts of tabletop games the way I do is simple enough: the communities who play these games, in my experience, are always absolutely lovely and full of wonderful people. I can drink a coffee and chat with a mate on discord while playing games on TTS, and it’s a good time, but its just not the same as doing so in person.

So, summing things up: I’ve played 2 games, one of which was bare-bones with a focus on just getting through the absolute basics, actions, shooting attacks, we ignored so much of the game, and just had a laugh whilst learning. We added more in as we went along to get to grips with how a units activation should go. My second game was a case of overestimating things with a game of 2500 points! For Jay and I had a very clever and yet awful idea: more points equals more boats equals more experience equals more learn (Ed Note: I maintain this was an amazing idea and will die on this hill). Jay was good with it, I was not… what we DID learn was that my brain needs time to process and smaller scale scenarios to learn games, you’d think I’d know this by now, right? But after a weekend of theory crafting, playing out some isolated encounters and actions, talking all-things-boat: I am well and truly on the ‘boats, boats, boats’ hype-train.

I am going to get the washes and drybrushes out and pump out those boats. I literally got home from work, sat down to finish this article and as soon as I’m done writing the painting begins again! My goal is to get 1000 points painted by 19th of March, which is when I should have my third game. I don’t know how to end this thing, so, I guess there is one last thing to say about this game and this series: I like boats.

“Boats, Boats, Boats”