Was Mordhiem Actually Good?

 First post of 2024, so let's kick the year off with something that'll get the mob riled up!

Was Mordheim, the beloved Games Workshop skirmish game, actually good, or is it just a case of rose tinted glasses?

The answer is sort of both? Let me preface this by saying that I'm not saying Mordheim is a bad game, or that people shouldn't play it. Hell, I've played Mordheim and had a blast. With the right group of people, and several pages of house rules, the game can be fun. Being critical of something doesn't mean I hate it.

Mordheim does three things really well, so let's talk about those really quick.

1) The sheer depth of customization of your warband. You can go absolutely fucking crazy and make basically any warband fit your play style. That's some quality game design there. I always hate when I find a faction I like in a game and the game then goes "Okay, you can now play them exactly this one way or get fucked every game" and Mordheim does a good job of avoiding this. Yeah it sort of nudges you in some cases, and some warbands are clearly better at certain things than others, but I've never felt like Mordheim was forcing me to choose play style over looks. 

2) The narrative opportunities are off the charts. This is probably Mordheim's biggest selling point to me. I like being able to create little backstories for my dudes, and see their story play out on the table. With the customization options in the warbands you get a lot of chances to really make the warband feel like they're yours, and by naming all your dudes and giving them some little back story you can even make two warbands from the same faction feel wildly different. And this leans into the third thing Mordheim does well...

3) That God damn campaign system. Yeah, the campaign system in Mordheim slaps, and I will never really speak ill of it. In fairness, it's a lot of book keeping after every game, but compounded with the warband creation and narrative aspects it just works. It's deep and fun and adds a whole new layer to the game. Seeing dudes level up and get better, or have a bad day and lose a limb just adds so much character to the game.

But Mordheim does have one tremendous flaw. It's absolutely a product of it's time, and that's not the compliment people seem to think it is. The core rules for the game are kind of shit, and have not aged well.

Mordheim comes from a time when GW was sticking to keeping things to a singular system for the most part. So Mordheim shares most of it's rules with Warhammer Fantasy, and condensing down rules for a mass battle game to a skirmish game often doesn't work. IGOUGO and a phase system in a skirmish game just feels so clunky and unintuitive, and it makes the game feel dated and weird to me now. These two things alone already make the game feel antiquated, even when you consider that other games at the time were already doing shit like alternating activations (the superior activation system). But then it gets worse.

As was the feature of the time with GW products, it's a bloody table emporium. You wanna hit someone with a stick? Check a table of your weapon skill against theirs. Oh you hit them? Now check this other table comparing your strength against their toughness. Wanna shoot someone? Better check that table to see what you need to roll to hit for your ballistic skill. 

And look, tables can work. But you can't go overboard with them. Wargods uses a table to resolve melee attacks. Bushido uses a table to determine how much damage an attack does. Battletech uses tables for hit locations and cluster shots. But somehow the old GW method just feels wrong to me. It's even worse when you consider that just five years later GW would release another skirmish game that plays way smoother.

Yee haw, bitches!

Legends of the Old West dropped in 2004, and uses the same core system as the Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game. And it just feels like such a better system. I know this is years after Mordheim came out, but it just shows up Mordheim in basically every facet to me.

And again, Mordheim can be fun. I've had fun with it. But I think we all give it a little too much slack and overlook how poor the core mechanics actually are. Anytime I've brought this up to friends the response is always "yeah, but it's Mordheim and no other game offers that sort of experience." But that's simply not true. Legends of the Old West, made by the same god damned company, offers a similar experience with better rules. Maybe it's not as wildly customizable simply due to the constraints of the time it takes place in, but good lord is it a smoother experience. Not to mention other companies offerings like Black Scorpion's Cutlass! and Tombstone (although I admit I'm not really familiar with the latter).

But what if you want a fantasy game? Nothing compares to Mordheim, right? Frostgrave is the big name people go to, but it lacks the full warband customization that Mordheim offers, and that's valid. So I present to you a great alternative:

We Redwall now.

Burrows & Badgers is, by far, one of the best skirmish systems I've ever seen in my life. It does do the whole "you must move before taking an action" thing that always rubs me the wrong way, but it's top notch shit. And as far as a fantasy skirmish game built around a campaign system, it blows Mordheim out of the water. Alternating activations, no tablevaganza to resolve combats, and the tiered dice system works so well in a skirmish game to really help differentiate models from each other.

Warband construction? Even deeper. There's no set weapons or characters for factions, so you can basically go wild and make exactly what you want (within the confines of the rules). And you're encouraged to name all your dudes, and no cannon fodder mooks to be seen (unless you count mice as cannon fodder).

And the campaign system? Also just as good, if not better, than Mordheim's. It does everything Mordheim's campaign system does, and then some. There's bases and resource management in there on top of all the other stuff. It gives you the same experience, plus some more.

So why do we keep defaulting to Mordheim? For many, it was probably their first experience with skirmish gaming. For most of us it was our first experience with this sort of narrative driven miniatures gaming. For some it's that tie to Warhammer, the allure of a familiar setting and the ability to, in some cases, reuse old models with ease. And for some it's simple brand loyalty, or some sort of fear of anything not made by GW.

But can we stop acting like it's fucking flawless? Can we acknowledge that the core rules aren't great, and that it needs to be houseruled to actually function is some cases (seriously, why is armor expensive and shit)? Can we simply stop acting like it's the only cocking option for that type of game?

Mordheim can be fun, and even my jaded ass can be talked into playing with the right people. But people putting it on a pedestal like it can commit no wrong while the main mechanics ooze so much pus is both disingenuous and unhealthy. 

Expand your horizons and you'll find plenty of games that have come out since that surpass Mordheim as both a game and an experience. Do they owe it to Mordheim for what it did? Yes. But they have done it better, and they deserve to be recognized for that.

Anyway, here's to the start of what will hopefully be a great year for you all.