Territory control in Warlord Ascendant

Hello, everyone! Today I want to talk to you about my upcoming solo/co-op/PVP skirmish game, Warlord Ascendant. First of all, it will finally be available for purchase on all platforms (DTRPG, Amazon, itch.io) the 7th of November! It's taken longer than I expected, but I'm super excited to finally have it ready.

One of the reasons why I decided to make a skirmish game is that there wasn't one that had all the elements I wanted. Nordic Weasel's work got really close, and for what I know about what's coming both 5 Leagues and 5 Parsecs will eventually become my ideal skirmish RPG games, but right now I wanted something different:

- Soloable, or at the very least, co-op

- Character progression

- Warband progression

- Small scale

- Terrain and minis optional

- Territory control

- Ideally a dark setting (fantasy because I'm on a fantasy kick lately)

So as you can see, it's quite a list of specific demands. Like I said, many games out there have these elements, but I can't think of any that has them all. The closest ones would probably be Necromunda or Mordheim, but those are not soloable (not out of the box, at least, we all know everything is soloable). So I decided to make my own. 

Among the list of things that Warlord Ascendant has, there are two things that I think set it apart from other games: its pace and scale, and the campaign map.

Warlord Ascendant plays very well as a traditional minis + terrain skirmish game. If you have the space and the tools, you can play it as you would play any other small scale skirmish game. But if you're like me and don't have the space or are a bit tired of spending 40 minutes setting up a battlefield, and want to jump straight into the action, Warlord Ascendant has you covered. All you need is a bunch of tokens (or minis, or standees, but I use tokens) to represent your warband and their enemies, and a battle mat of some sort. I've been using this one, which is amazing because you can draw on it and erase it after, but the large Loke battlemats are perfect as well. The fact that it has a smaller surface and squares to measure things instead of having to pull out the rulers makes games super quick: during playtesting my battles lasted 30 min on average. You're also limited to 3 actions (4 if you control the battlefield's Strategic Point), which also makes it super snappy. 

The campaign map is when you zoom out after a battle, and plan your next moves. This is a hexmap that is randomly generated as you explore, and you can find all sorts of interesting locations for you to visit or conquer. There are many strategic resources in the map that will grant you access to new abilities, gear, and other advantages, so it's in your best interest to try to not only capture them, but hold on to them. This is especially fun when you play a game of PvPvE, where each one of the players start at a different point of the map and slowly conquer it, until your borders meet and you're force to fight each other. This sort of game is played best with each participant playing their own matches and simply updating a shared map, and then meeting in person when two player-controlled warbands want to fight over a specific point of interest. There are tons of interesting things that can happen in the campaign map!

So that's it for now, I hope that you'll join me next week on the battlefields of No Man's Land when Warlord Ascendant is released!