Ye Olde Inn

Dear all,

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...

I would like to upload in this post some pictures of the Citadel miniatures I guess inspired the cards from the Battle Masters game prototype.

All of them have been extracted from resources of late 80's Citadel Miniatures catalogues and rules and armies books from Warhammer Fantasy Battles 3rd Edition:

Here are some pictures of the Dark Elves Repeating Bolt Thrower that I mentioned I think clearly inspired the blue BM's prototype cards:


Here you have the very few existing official pics of the Sea High Elves Repeating Crossbow, I think also known as Elf Marine Battery, which maybe could also inspired the blue card:


Here the so famous and common Chaos Knights of such era, I guess the one wielding the sword was the one inspiring the BM prototype card:


And finally some pictures of Chaos Dwarves as crew of cannon war machines. In my opinion they look really close to the one shown in the BM's cannon prototype card:



Well... thoughts? Thanks.

Fascinating. It kind of reminds me of how the special units in Warcraft II were other creatures (representing the "alliance" of the humans with other fantasy peoples of the lands of Azeroth) rather than just all being humans with different outfits.

I suppose it creates a kind of theme, maybe similar to LOTR... where the bad guys have united all their groups and the good guys are still fighting with only one people at a time (an army of Dwarves, or Men, or Elves only). And the winning battle is when the Men, Dwarves, and Elves with the Wizard work together. This BattleMasters takes place within an earlier stage of the new war when the Empire is fielding its own human forces at first. But the prototype would be more like after they have gathered their allies from across the World for the final push against the enemy. Or something. You could make it up. It looks cool, whatever the intentions!

Thanks for sharing! Compared to HQ, I know very little about Battle Masters and I didn't have it growing up (only acquired it more recently, thanks in large part to discussions like these!).

And may I say if Avalon Hill/Hasbro does make plans to remake Battle Masters, this could be a great source of inspiration, for expansions and things!

HispaZargon wrote:Well... thoughts? Thanks.

Thanks for posting this interesting information. It's nice to see what the non-repeating map art would have looked like if they hadn't had printer limitations. I noticed that the units are all on goblin green bases, and that the skull wound tokens look like those from Advanced Heroquest. The BM dice are effectively the same as the Heroquest dice (i.e. 3 skulls, one BM-shield/evil-shield, two blanks/lion-shield), so I don't expect that very different gameplay existed; two blank sides were probably cheaper to make than two more images. I don't understand the placement of the cannon tokens in the image. I thought the interview mentioned dark elves having the bolt thrower. Could there have been a bolt thrower and a cannon for each team with a different crew depending on the faction? I remember hearing that there was a planned giant. I wonder if it was going to be based on the marauder giant.

fascinating. I wonder if plans to incorporate more Warhammer Fantasy races such as elves were intended for Battlemasters

I wonder if the late Bryan Ansell's collection contains a bag full of Battle Masters prototype figures similar to what he had for the Hero Quest prototype figures. I personally would like to see the Giant prototype one day. It would be a good place to start for designing a Giant for 90's Hero Quest.

Absolutely... the Giant would be a really good addon for the Chaos army in BattleMasters. I wonder about the idea of having a new deck of action cards for it similar to the Ogre Champion deck but with less random actions and more powerful. However I always saw difficult to introduce the Giant without altering the main cards deck because the Base Game did not included any card for Giants. In the other hand the General would be easier probably because it did not need any regular card, just reusing the cards where Imperial Lords are shown would be enough to activate the Imperial General I guess.

Anyhow. the aesthetic of the unreleased BM Giant I guess it had been inspired in the classic Marauder one from the early 90's, which it is already being sold today at GW shops for current The Old World game:

HispaZargon wrote:Anyhow. the aesthetic of the unreleased BM Giant I guess it had been inspired in the classic Marauder one from the early 90's, which it is already being sold today at GW shops for current The Old World game:

descarga.jpeg

The Marauder giant was temporarily available as "made to order", but is no longer available since last week. Maybe they will release it again?

It always reminds me of this one for some reason:

I presume the pattern for each of these MB/GWS ventures was they used existing Citadel miniatures as placeholders and for mockups until the final art was created with the new minis specifically for each game. But are those cool ideas for mods (or addons for future remake releases)? Absolutely! Thanks again for sharing this info!

b_0 wrote:

HispaZargon wrote:Anyhow. the aesthetic of the unreleased BM Giant I guess it had been inspired in the classic Marauder one from the early 90's, which it is already being sold today at GW shops for current The Old World game:

descarga.jpeg

The Marauder giant was temporarily available as "made to order", but is no longer available since last week. Maybe they will release it again?

It always reminds me of this one for some reason:

I have this 3511 Fantasy Warriors (tabletop miniatures board game) Grenadier (models) Goblin War Giant with battle platform and ballista (1991). The goblins covering him look sorta like long faced GW hobgoblins unfortunately they are much too small for GW Hobgoblins similar in size to lanky HeroQuest goblins or gnoblars but with much smaller heads. The Giant itself stands a head and a half taller than the similar looking MB7 Marauder (made models for Warhammer) Giant (1990) and has much larger thicker body proportions and stature. Both are far far larger than Games Workshop (citadel models) giants or the cardboard fallen giant template tile in Warhammer which was roughly the size of the Ogre Champion in Battle Masters.