Recent interview with Stephen Baker published by GW's specialist Jordan Sorcery (more info availlable in this thread) revealed a lot of unknown information about how was developed the Battle Masters board game and the people involved in the process.
Some of the most interesting points we could derive from such interview were a few details about the first prototype/s of the game, which I will try to summarize here:
- - The game was always intended to include minimum 100 miniatures since the beginning of the project, so we may assume that all prototypes had such amount too.
- Rumors say that early prototypes did not included the Tower model, but included even more miniatures instead.
- Early prototypes were made with existing GW miniatures and painted.
- The prototype play mats were printed on canvas and looked awesome.
Some time ago, before being this interview published, I found in my personal archive a couple of MB catalogues showing a picture of Battle Masters game prototype. Probably this prototype was not one of the earliest ones, I guess it was just the very final promotional prototype for photography sessions, following the same concept of prototypes we know from HeroQuest and Space Crusade, however I would like to share with you some pictures that I took, which I think contains interesting details, some of them floating over my mind since much time ago.
I own an important deck of Din-A4 MB catalogues in my personal collection, but as said, only two of them showed pictures of the prototype, the rest showed the well known retail version of the board game. The two catalogues are from year 1992, one is in German, and the other in Spanish, but both show the same prototype picture in double-page format:
In a first sight you can observe that the miniatures look the same plastic ones as the final version, but the play mat art is not exactly the same as the retail product, and making some zoom in the picture we can see interesting details, which I describe as follows.
Hexagon terrain tiles artworks are also different than retail version. The flags of some units are also rather different than the retail ones, but others not:
Cannon tiles artworks also show some differences compared with the retail version of the game. We can also see in the following picture that HeroQuest combat dice were used fot the photo shooting, instead of the red dice finally included in the Battle Masters box... interesting detail, could it mean that BM combat rules were different in early prototypes and closer to the HeroQuest ones? What do you think?
And finally for me the most interesting detail about this picture... if you zoom in the bottom-right corner of the picture you could see some cards much different than the ones included in the retail version of the game:
All of this is speculation from my side, but this cards display suggests me that the prototypes could have had two different decks of cards, one blue coloured and the other orange coloured, and probably each colour belonged to one of the armies, and maybe each player drawed the cards from a different deck, instead of drawing them from the same deck like in the final version.Well, who knows, but that's what came to my mind.
But for me the bigger key point that can be observed in these prototype cards are the artworks shown... the blue one in the front shows a kind of repeating bolt thrower war machine crewed by two eleven footmen. The blue card in the back is hidden but I think it is slightly seen in its upper left corner a elven swordman silouette, so maybe this card represented a kind of elven infantry unit. Below, can be observed an orange card showing a cannon, which suggests that it is the Mighty Cannon included in the final version and represented by the miniatures of this picture, which are the same ones as retail, but wait... this cannon is crewed by a dwarf!! In the other hand, in the top of the orange deck of cards can be observed a mounted knight, which looks like the Citadel Chaos Knights miniatures from the late 80's, the same knight shown in the orange card at the back of the cannon one so... could this mean that this orange cards represented the Chaos Army units, and they owned a cannon crewed by Chaos Dwarves? or could these orange cards represent the Imperial Knights and Mighty Cannon units but they used chaos artworks... and what about the blue cards? Were they good elves or dark elves? The most famous miniature of repeating bolt thrower at late 80's was crewed by Dark Elves, however it is true that also a rare one was crewed by Sea High Elves...
Anyway, the point for me is: existed plans to include any kind of ELVES or DWARVES in the Battle Masters board game during its design process? existed plans to include war machines in both armies? well... attending to the info we know about the prototypes, now I think why not...
Also of course interesting to see that the cards showed a black icon representing the unit... why repeating the unit as an icon in the same picture of the card?? Another incognita...
I the next post I will share some pictures of how these miniatures could have looked like from the Citadel Miniatures catalogue...
