Lost Protos? Battle Masters
Okay, This is something that bugs me.. and its a bit of a quickie this week.
While I haven’t played in YEARS (I really wanna get my set done up as I picked up a new one a few years back because my ‘family’ one is missing all the ‘Chaos’ side) I love Battle Masters. Maybe it’s not the best game in the world but it’s a great introduction to mass army battle, while the plastics can be a bit soft, they are very much of the era where I have such a love for them. It’s part of the MB-GW cross-over stuff where I think it was purely MB wanting to get into the newly re-growing ‘War gaming’ field and GW wanted more exposure and it gave them the money to get into really jumping into plastic moulding which they had started on a smaller scale.
anyway.. Other games around the time, Heroquest, Space Crusade, Advanced Heroquest, Advanced Space Crusade, even The Warlock of Firetop Mountain have plastic miniatures but Metal prototypes are well known and in some cases, were released. Box photos often show a good example of these metal prototypes.
However.. Battle Masters.. I have NEVER seen any sign of prototypes. I have two different box variations which appear to use the same photos of the figures and painted examples and all appear to be plastics. Not a sign that they are metal painted to look plastic or anything. For years, this has kinda stood out to me as … odd.
Okay, I think maybe, since alot of the figure types are generic enough they could be based on ones from the normal citadel range but still…
On a side note, 2 expansions were released. But they weren’t really anything. They were just some extras of the same figures (much like HQ had for the first two expansions) with some new ‘how to form an army’ rules. Technically, it did give 2 new units. the Chaos Lord and the Imperial Lord, but really, both we just small rule tweaks on what was there. The Chaos Lord was just a Chaos Champion and used the same card to move, and the Imperial Lord was a Lord Knight. The army building rules were just giving points to different units so you could pick a number and each create a army using that number.
The White Dwarf #156 article claimed ‘a number of expansion packs are planned for Battle Masters, which will bring even more varied forces to the battlefield, and extend the game’s tactical range’. But this never really happened. While BM was one of the last lot of MB-GW games, which might have had something to do with it, I would have loved if they had done an Elf and/or Skaven expansion. You also have undead as possible and maybe some more. Not too hard to do up some rules and I’m pretty sure some people have over the years.
