Wars of Orcs and Dwarves is a mass Fantasy Battle Miniatures game, designed by John ‘Buck’ Surdu that can be played with any miniatures of any scale.

It’s designed for solo, 2 player & team play and features a balanced Magic System.

The rulebook contains, army lists, scenarios and campaigns.

It’s fun to play, streamlined, intuitive & based around reactive game play that keeps both sides continually involved in a game that resolves in 2-3 hours

The rules are currently on Kickstarter until 19th July, so over the next two or three weeks I’m going to be taking a look at different aspects of the game.

Wars of Orcs and Dwarves is a mass fantasy battle system. What Buck means by that is is that it is not a skirmish, or even a super skirmish game that might have 50-100 individually based figures in an army. This is a game of big battles with units fighting as a unit rather than individual models, a bit like the old Warhammer Fantasy Battle game. You can of course use miniatures that are individually based, if that is how your miniatures are based, but they are formed up into blocks that represent a unit of maybe 500+ troops. The game has been designed from the start to be suitable for solo play, and mechanisms are built into the core rules to allow an imaginary opponent to a solo player to make ‘intelligent’ tactical decisions. We will devote a complete blog to solo play over the coming weeks. You can use any miniatures to play Wars of Orcs and Dwarves; figures of any scale, figures from any manufacturer, figures representing any fantasy species. The reason that this is possible is because the rules define armies behaviors and reactions generically, categorizing there doctrine as Deliberate, Reliable, Aggressive, Swarming or Mindless of Sentinent Undead. Any fantasy (or even historical ancient or medieval) army can be defined this way. The rules contain example army lists for typical fantasy armies such as Orcs, Dwarves, Goblins, Hobbits, Elves, Ratling, Beastmen, Undead and Humans, but the beauty of the rules is that any other army can also be defined using its doctrine type. We will devote a hobby blog to this concept, latter.

Wars of Orcs and Dwarves can be played solo, by two players or by two teams of players each commanding a Brigade of Troops.

A unit is represented by five bases if it is of average size, four if it is under strength, six if it is above strength. The base size is not really important. We recommend 2″ or 50mm bases and find these easily accommodate four infantry, two cavalry or a large creature like a troll, but it does not really matter how many figures you have on a base. Some play testers have used 10mm Warmaster figures on 40mm bases, and other playtesters have used 3″ bases as that was how there existing collection was based.

A brigade typically consists of 4-6 units, and an army typically contains 2-4 brigades. In a one player a side game a player might command one or two brigades. During playtest we have played many multi-player games with 3-4 players per side each commanding a brigade.

We have also tested playing Wars of Orcs and Dwarves using existing Warhammer, Lord of the Rings and Warmaster figures on there existing bases and will be making movement trays available that take 4 x 25mm round or one 40mm round base to hold Lord of the Rings or other miniatures on round bases and movement trays that take 20mm square, 25mm square and 25mm x 50mm bases to hold Warhammer miniatures.

Click here to take a look at Wars of Orcs and Dwarves Kickstarter campaign