Tabletop Tales: Dystopian Wars Beginnings

For a long time it’s been difficult to get into hobby war-games such as Battletech or Warhammer, usually because of the price; since Games Workshop and other major developers are European it can get very pricey for what is essentially molded material with game rules. Games Workshop is the notorious one here, currency conversion rates increase kit prices; not something to look forward to when you’re mandated to own most of your armies models to even consider playing the game. This has cemented the price of miniatures in general at an average rate of $20-30 for a squad and $100+ per army. My goal was to have two legitimate forces for under $60 each while also having something “nice to present” even unpainted and playable with minimal assembly.

No matter how long I did my research I kept finding myself looking at Dystopian Wars for its scale and simplicity. The basic plot is that Antarctica discovered an special element (Sturginium) allowing for the construction of gigantically proportioned weapons and vehicles; leading to a WW1 style scenario where everybody declared war against somebody else dividing into Imperial Bond or Grand Coalition forces with Antarctica hating both. The element allows for crazy things like colossal warships, battleships, tanks, and more. 

The majority of the online community for DW plays with naval armies, I couldn’t find many Armored or any Air forces being played on Youtube. For the sake of gigantic tank battalions I optioned for Armored forces to start with; since the rules allow for mixing a little bit of air or even floating naval units to my force list should I wish to. Naval and Air models can have large turn widths while most Armored units use the 45 degree template. 

Half of my order consisted of “older” print models while the rest were newer ones. Besides various different shades of resin, there’s no noticeable difference between the old and new castings. One thing I did notice though is that the 1.0 army boxes lacked the “MK1” drop-on choice for the Taka-Ashi landship inside while the 2.0 boxes had all the options for the units contained with one exception: The Russian box landship drop-on does not match the one in the picture, thankfully not having any specific game rules like other drop-on’s have. 

As others have mentioned in unboxing these miniatures the majority of the models have imperfections on the bottom of the figures where people won’t see them, and the turrets had ugly flashing on them (like all pewter parts made ever) that sometimes didn’t clean up as well as they should. Each model has many fine details, some of which represent the models weapons. In cases like tiny fighter tokens coloring them differently sets them apart by type and in some cases denote Ace wings

As for craftsmanship the models are top shelf yet come with no documentation for assembly or play (the old blisters had outdated rules-cards, boxes had nothing). Since the majority of vehicles are single pieces or have one or two dropped on parts this isn’t that bad, until you get something like a mobile airfield with parts that are not immediately obvious in their purpose. In cases like the “Taka-Ashi” walker and “Mauselle” mobile airfield several parts must be permanently glued before the model can be used  while the other 99% of my models can be freely packed and unpacked with little risk of damage and minimal assembly, often sharing parts of the same factional design (turrets for example are often shared by several models from the same army list)

I went for the French for the design of the above plane flinging Arbelete support tank, which contributes to the number and strength of my support aircraft; every force gets ten free wings of support planes but carriers and models like the Arbelete grant additional air support. My French strategy is to cover my advance with dive bombers and fighter screens. My second army is built of a Russian core and Tank-Hunter box along with extra Orlov heavy tanks. I found myself meeting the goal of having enough units to play a reasonably sized game between my French and Russians, having already ordered a Russian landship to supplement the fleet.

Each box may of lacked any type of rules but did come with sets of game aides (tokens, templates, etc) that must be cut apart before use rather than being punch-outs. The 2.0 core boxes each came with a set of command cards used for the game and a set of super teeny tiny dice for the infantry and plane trays, while both came with enough infantry tokens I found myself wishing I had more of the plane trays you can seemingly only buy from Spartan Games. What I didn’t know it came with was a single random objective marker (from objective markers box set) and with my French I got the best one…

While I may be complaining about the lack of any game related materials being in any of the boxes besides tokens and templates it’s not like all of the faction unit lists and the game’s rule-book aren’t a free download on the Spartan Games website. I was able to learn the game far before I had the miniatures to move around on the table, meaning I didn’t have to sit around thinking “What if I hate the rules but love the miniatures?” and was able to make a fairly informed decision before pulling the trigger. Many miniatures games do release their rules free now, but this only started recently.

As for the rules of Dystopian Wars, it’s an “I go, you go” style war-game where one player moves a squad of units, shoots with all weapons he can, then the next player does the same. Unlike other miniature games however there is an extreme focus on individual unit play-styles, every different size class of unit and type of weapon can behave specially within a fairly easy to learn rule-set. Every type of attack uses the same “build a dice pool from six sided die” mechanic with sixes usually “exploding”; meaning that you get to count that six AND reroll a die to potentially roll another six.

Bigger vehicles just naturally have better dice pools where smaller models need to gather into 2-5 model squads to roll the same kind of big dice pools. This gives lot of credibility to a balanced force list as well as an experimental one where some games favor specific play-styles more than others. In addition to models the player uses a set of command cards to directly influence the battlefield at the expense of giving the other side victory points for doing so. Destroyed models yield half points, while captured capital models yield double their points. Victory is obtained through gathering enough points to fulfil the objective rolled at the start of the game (or drew through the objective cards provided in the core boxes) normally mandating you destroy enough of a certain size class of enemy vehicles. 

So the conclusion is like any other hobby war-game, you need some money to spend to gradually increase the size and amount of forces to play with. Though if you play Call of Duty this should be nothing new to you. Dystopian Wars is a game you can buy into very cheaply because of how long it’s been around and it still gets support from its developer (new models have been appearing bi-monthly). It’s a game you and your friends can transition into, strategize, and replay for quite some time.