It's a good time for rank and flank fantasy wargames - Warhammer: The Old World is going strong, Kings of War 4th edition recently arrived, and a new version of Oathmark is due this Summer - and skirmish gamers have never had more choice. Conquest: First Blood sits in the rare middle-ground between the two kinds of miniature wargame, bigger than skirmish but more flexible than rank-and-flank: and when publisher Para Bellum offered me the chance to test the updated rules ahead of their launch, who was I to say no?
To put my cards on the table, I hadn't played either First Blood or its army-scale big brother Conquest: Last Argument of Kings before, so if you already play, I might be about to spout off about a bunch of things you already know and which haven't changed between editions.
But if you were only aware of Conquest as "those games with the awesome miniatures that are too big to use as proxies for Warhammer", I will heartily recommend giving First Blood a look. I received review sample armies from Para Bellum over a year ago, but an afternoon demoing the updated rules were my first time playing with them - and now I'm budgeting to expand my collection.
First Blood and Last Argument of Kings use the same, 38mm scale fantasy miniatures; every mini is playable in both games, from basic infantry to truly colossal monsters. The scale of an army is similar to those used in Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game, at least in terms of the number of figures, though your list might have more huge beasts in it than an MESBG battleforce. And in 38mm scale, huge means huge.
List-building is simple and open-ended. Some regiments are mainstays, and others are restricted; you can't have more restricted units than mainstays. Your choice of Warlord character also turn a unit into a mainstay, which is as close as the list-building gets to enabling skews - my Vargyr Lord let me field Werewargs as the bulk of my force.
You're limited to a single regiment of each type, and the number of reinforcements you can add to that regiment limited by the game size - though after deployment models are fairly independent. Then each list has a few optional character upgrades to mop up any last points.
Compared to Warhammer: The Old World there are fewer universal special rules to reference, and units only have a few unique special rules. And compared to Age of Sigmar, army special rules are really simple. My Nords roll extra dice when fighting monsters bigger than them, and if they rally get to move back towards the enemy immediately; my opponent had the disciplined City States, who could move their models through one another, and could improve their Resolve by pre-programming the order their units activated for the turn.
The game uses blind deployment, players placing their unit cards face down within their deployment zone before revealing them one at a time. There's very interesting choices here, since you get a little flexibility about where a unit is placed after you reveal its card - you can shift your infantry towards cover if your opponent has revealed some opposing ranged units, or push your archers back into your deployment zone if the enemy's fast cavalry are perilously close.
Combat is simple and characterful. When a model attacks, it rolls a pool of D6 based on its Attacks stat - low rolls are better. Everything but a six is a Hit, which gets assigned to any adjacent enemies - though the number of Hits you can pile onto a single foe is limited by your Combat stat. Each targeted opponent rolls its Defense dice, and tries to match each Hit with an equal or lower Defense result to cancelt them out. Any they can't cancel turn into Wounds. A unit that hits zero health must test Resolve or die - if it succeeds, it breaks from combat and falls back.
The system results in units that feel different from one another despite being described by fairly few stats. My Werewargs have 4 Attacks but 2 Combat, meaning they can reliably generate good hits, but can't concentrate their damage onto one target. As if it wasn't obvious they should be fighting groups of infantry, their Bloodlust ability gives them extra dice when they do.
Contrast that with the Ugrs, who have both 3 Attacks and 3 Combat - they're generally better at piling into a single target. Meanwhile my opponent's Polemarch character had 3 Attacks but 4 Combat - allowing him to absolutely wallop one target, but only if he's receiving a bonus attack die, say by outnumbering them.
It's not the very fastest system, but it generates interesting decisions, particularly when special abilities are involved. It's really hard to miss, even if your Hits have very high numbers that are easy to negate with a Defense roll - so abilities that reduce the enemy Defense stat are very impactful.
The melee ability Cleave X is a common way to do this, and one that you'll find often on the game's most impressive monsters: Hits of X or less reduce the target's Defense by a die. The Ugr's have Cleave 3: if you roll a great spread of low rolls, you can throw them all into one target to completely negate its Defense, or spread them out across single-wound infantry, slashing their Defense in half and forcing them to try and block you with a single die.
My demo games weren't representative of the full scope of First Blood, both through my narrow model selection, and because I got critical rules about Resolve tests wrong until near the end of our last demo. That makes this review useless for working out if the game has any big tactical imbalances - but both players had a fantastic time playing. The rules carried enough slack and presented a sufficiently interesting challenge that major misplays didn't spoil the fun. Critically, the error was because I'd forgotten a basic rule, not because the rules themselves were tangled and stuffed with edge cases (which is absolutely a problem in The Old World).
If you're already a First Blood player, or collect the full version of Conquest, come and share your best table tales in the Wargamer Discord community - why not drop a picture of your army in our dedicated members' army gallery? For a round up of the best stories on Wargamer every week, ensure you're subscribed to our site newsletter.