Warhammer Ancient Battles
Encyclopedia
Miniature wargaming
Miniature wargaming is a form of wargaming that incorporates miniature figures, miniature armor and modeled terrain as the main components of play...
produced by Games Workshop
Games Workshop
Games Workshop Group plc is a British game production and retailing company. Games Workshop has published the tabletop wargames Warhammer Fantasy Battle and Warhammer 40,000...
's Warhammer Historical Wargames
Warhammer Historical Wargames
Warhammer Historical Wargames, also known as Warhammer Historical, is the publisher of Warhammer Ancient Battles and other game systems. It is was imprint from the BL Publishing division of Games Workshop...
imprint. It is a rulebook for historical wargames developed from the popular Warhammer Fantasy Battle
Warhammer Fantasy Battle
Warhammer: The Game of Fantasy Battles is a tabletop wargame created by Games Workshop. It is the origin of the Warhammer Fantasy setting....
by Jervis Johnson, Rick Priestly and the Perry brothers.
Playing the Game
Games of Warhammer Ancient Battles model hypothetical battles between historical armies. Battles are fought between armies of miniaturesMiniature figure
A miniature figure is a small-scale representation of a historical or mythological entity used in miniature wargames, role-playing games, and dioramas. Miniature figures are commonly made of metal, plastic, or paper...
. The game is played on a table laid out with model scenery to look like a battlefield, on which the units of miniatures are maneuvered. Large numbers of Dice
Dice
A die is a small throwable object with multiple resting positions, used for generating random numbers...
are needed to resolve combat and shooting - handfuls of them.
Development
Several of Games Workshop's staff had begun experimenting with using WarhammerWarhammer Fantasy Battle
Warhammer: The Game of Fantasy Battles is a tabletop wargame created by Games Workshop. It is the origin of the Warhammer Fantasy setting....
rules to play historical games before Warhammer Ancient Battles was written, and Wargames Illustrated magazine included some articles that had been written on the subject. This led to the development of Warhammer Ancient Battles as a spare-time project. It was published under the name "Warhammer Historical Wargames."
Based as it was on Warhammer Fantasy, Warhammer Ancient Battles served as a bridge for fantasy wargamers to discover historical wargaming but also attracted wargamers who had never played the fantasy version. Games Workshop eventually brought the project back in-house, with Rob Broom running the Warhammer Historical Wargames department that promoted an increasing number of books.
To accusations that the rules were only a throwback to an earlier era of wargaming, Jervis Johnson pleaded guilty. The rules, he said, were intended to be fun and informal, rather than dominated by requirements of super-detailed historical accuracy. And, the designers had rejected the approach of contemporary rule sets as being too abstract.
The game rules were heavily based on the fifth edition of Warhammer, with magic dropped and more detail added for ancient weapons and formations. The two games have developed in different directions since. Modifications to the core rules have been included in some of the more recent supplements. The WAB 2nd edition consciously took the rules even further from its fantasy origins.
Following the success of Warhammer Ancient Battles Warhammer Historical branched out into other areas:
- Warhammer English Civil War
- Legends of the Old West
- Warmaster Ancients - the application of the epic scale rules for Warhammer Fantasy to non-fantasy armies
The Rules
The rules are written for individually based figures and this approach was in marked contrast to the element based rulesets current amongst ancient historical wargames when the rules were first published. Standard bearers, musicians and officer figures are given specific advantages - seen by some as giving the rules more character.Second Edition
A second edition ruleset was released in April 2010. The revision aimed to encourage linear battle formations and to make flank attacks easier. Changes include allowing cavalry to make march rules despite infantry and capping bonus troops in melee for the number of ranks of the formation to 2. The first edition had had some elements that derived from its origin as a fantasy set and the revision aimed to remove them. Hence, the influence of characters has been reduced. Adrian GoldsworthyAdrian Goldsworthy
Adrian Keith Goldsworthy is a British historian and author who specialises in ancient Roman history.-Biography:Goldsworthy attended Westbourne School, Penarth...
approved the changes that encouraged shallow formations (except for phalanxes and others that did fight in deeper formations) but was sceptical about the open order rule which to him smacked of "light heavy infantry" - a wargaming myth in the view of Goldsworthy.
Supplements
The core rulebook includes army lists for "Early Imperial Roman" and "Barbarian" armies. A range of supplementary books has been released to provide more army lists, each focusing on a particular period and place.- Armies of Antiquity. Released soon after the rulebook, this was intended to help players get started, by providing a large number of basic summary army lists. Many of the lists have been superseded by later supplements.
- Chariot Wars. Covers armies of the ancient civilisations in the Near East, and Trojan WarTrojan WarIn Greek mythology, the Trojan War was waged against the city of Troy by the Achaeans after Paris of Troy took Helen from her husband Menelaus, the king of Sparta. The war is among the most important events in Greek mythology and was narrated in many works of Greek literature, including the Iliad...
. - Fall of the West. Covers Roman and Barbarian armies of the 4th-5th centuries.
- Shieldwall. Covers the British Isles, France and Scandinavia in the Dark Ages.
- El Cid. Covers the Spanish ReconquistaReconquistaThe Reconquista was a period of almost 800 years in the Middle Ages during which several Christian kingdoms succeeded in retaking the Muslim-controlled areas of the Iberian Peninsula broadly known as Al-Andalus...
in the 10th-13th centuries. - Alexander the Great. The armies of Alexander the Great and his enemies.
- Armies of Chivalry. Designed to extend Warhammer Ancient Battles to a slightly later medieval period, this includes new rules as well as a set of summary army lists covering Europe in the 14th-16th centuries.
- Spartacus. This book is based around a campaign following SpartacusSpartacusSpartacus was a famous leader of the slaves in the Third Servile War, a major slave uprising against the Roman Republic. Little is known about Spartacus beyond the events of the war, and surviving historical accounts are sometimes contradictory and may not always be reliable...
' slave revolt. - Byzantium : Beyond the Golden Gate. Covers the Byzantine EmpireByzantine EmpireThe Byzantine Empire was the Eastern Roman Empire during the periods of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, centred on the capital of Constantinople. Known simply as the Roman Empire or Romania to its inhabitants and neighbours, the Empire was the direct continuation of the Ancient Roman State...
from 6th-12th centuries. - Hannibal and the Punic Wars. Covers the Punic WarsPunic WarsThe Punic Wars were a series of three wars fought between Rome and Carthage from 264 B.C.E. to 146 B.C.E. At the time, they were probably the largest wars that had ever taken place...
between Rome and CarthageCarthageCarthage , implying it was a 'new Tyre') is a major urban centre that has existed for nearly 3,000 years on the Gulf of Tunis, developing from a Phoenician colony of the 1st millennium BC...
in the 3rd-2nd centuries BC. - Vlad the Impaler. Covers the general time and region of the OttomanOttoman EmpireThe Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries...
Turks. - The Art of War. Details the armies of ChineseChinaChinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
history and prehistory, as well as those of its neighbours at the time (such as the Hsiung-nu), up until the Three KingdomsThree KingdomsThe Three Kingdoms period was a period in Chinese history, part of an era of disunity called the "Six Dynasties" following immediately the loss of de facto power of the Han Dynasty rulers. In a strict academic sense it refers to the period between the foundation of the state of Wei in 220 and the...
era. - Age of Arthur. Features armies from Anglo-Saxon England.
- Siege and Conquest. This features rules for raids, sieges and settlements. It does not include any army lists though it does include things that can be added to the armies derived from the lists in the other books. The reviewer in Wargames Illustrated considered a key feature of this supplement in that it facilitates battles that take more varied forms than a simple head to head battle.
Community
The game is supported by a high-traffic discussion group on Yahoo! GroupsYahoo! Groups
Yahoo! Groups is one of the world’s largest collections of online discussion boards. The term Groups refers to Internet communication which is a hybrid between an electronic mailing list and a threaded Internet forum, in other words, Group messages can be read and posted by e-mail or on the Group's...
, the WABlist, and Warhammer Historical Forums (the former a non-Yahoo message board). In addition another group WABMedievalBattles focuses on the medieval period.
In the UK, Warhammer Historical runs a gaming weekend twice yearly.
Not all players play WAB "out of the box". The historian Adrian Goldsworthy
Adrian Goldsworthy
Adrian Keith Goldsworthy is a British historian and author who specialises in ancient Roman history.-Biography:Goldsworthy attended Westbourne School, Penarth...
prefers the rules because he finds figure removal a more natural way of recording casualties than is offered by element based rulesets. However, the rules he plays along with his club have a number of additions and he fields an Early Imperial Roman army
Imperial Roman army
The Imperial Roman army refers to the armed forces deployed by the Roman Empire during the Principate era .Under the founder–emperor Augustus , the legions, which were formations numbering about 5,000 heavy infantry recruited from Roman citizens only, were transformed from a mixed conscript and...
based on a list that he has devised himself.