Less Objectivehammer, More Battle March: how we’re setting up our Old World league
We’ve been doing a lot of Warhammer: The Old World thinking lately — not just listbuilding and painting, but also the very practical question of how we actually want to play our league games.
And honestly, this is exactly the kind of hobby discussion we like the most: a bit of rules reading, a bit of table philosophy, a bit of logistics, and at least a little bit of “this is Warhammer, let’s just smash toy soldiers into each other”.
Starting point: Battle March, but with a local twist
Stas dug into the rules for Battle March and Matched Play and came back with a proposal that felt very close to what we want at the table.
The rough idea was to stay close to Battle March:
- max 5 rounds,
- one of three random deployment maps,
- 4 terrain features, each up to 12” wide,
- terrain placed either as placed or scattered.
For reference, these were the rules pages we were looking at:
So far, so clean. But then came the interesting bit.
The objective question
In official Battle March, you always have 2–3 battlefield objectives, and they score 10 VP at the end of each round. Stas suggested we tweak that and let fate decide how much scenario play we actually want in a given game.
The first version of the idea was:
- 1 — a special feature, controlled by Unit Strength 5+ within 3”, worth a 100 VP bonus at the end of the game,
- 2 — two Battle March battlefield objectives,
- 3 — three battlefield objectives,
- 4–6 — no objectives, because this is Warhammer, not objectivehammer.
Which, to be fair, is a sentence that captures our group energy pretty well.
Here are the relevant rules references for that part too:
League reality hits the table
Michał pointed out something very sensible from the league side of things: in many leagues, each round has one scenario known in advance, and everyone in that round plays the same setup. That keeps things cleaner and easier to track.
His suggestion was that instead of rolling right before each game, we could roll earlier — at home, or before the first pairing in a round — and then just put the result into ChampionsHub for everyone.
Makes sense… except our league has one classic little complication: we have an odd number of players, so every round someone gets a BYE.
And that means even a perfectly fixed round scenario isn’t actually experienced by everyone. If round one is, say, the special feature game, then the player on BYE that round simply never gets to play it. So Stas argued that if fairness is already a bit imperfect because of the structure, we might as well let randomness do its thing and not overengineer it.
There was also the most practical option of all: just drop secondary objectives for now, because we’re still learning the format and already have enough new stuff to absorb.
And yes, that argument also landed very well.
Final decision: we’re simplifying
After the back-and-forth, Stas updated the plan and went with the safer version:
special features are out for now.
We’ll save them for a slightly bigger format, and for the moment keep things simpler and more focused on the core game.
Here’s the updated setup screenshot Stas posted:
That feels like the right call for where we are. We want structure, but not too much bookkeeping. We want scenarios, but not at the cost of slowing everything down while we’re still getting comfortable with the system. And, perhaps most importantly, we want games that actually happen smoothly.
Meanwhile, on the listbuilding front…
In the middle of all that, Michał also dropped a very good summary of what Stas is cooking for Cinquecento: apparently it’s something completely different from what he’s played so far.
So the current vision is a proper unruly mix:
- a horde of goblin rabble,
- a hot-headed big boss,
- a bodyguard of regular boyz,
- and a chariot.
And honestly? We love that energy.
Also, the local list-tech infrastructure keeps growing. Michał mentioned that Rozpy got an update, moved to a new domain, and is now sitting at nearly 14,800 lists. It also already includes our lists from the weekend:
And because one rabbit hole is never enough, Stas also threw in a Reddit thread on Bretonnians vs Orcs & Goblins:
And then: wait, there’s a club in Jelonki?!
No rules chat would be complete without one completely unexpected discovery. In this case, Michał suddenly found out that apparently there is a club in Jelonki — and did so with the exact level of disbelief you’d expect.
We don’t have much more to report on that front yet, but this is absolutely the kind of side quest that can grow into a proper hobby tangent very quickly.
Where we landed
So for now, our Old World league direction looks like this:
- Battle March-inspired structure,
- simple terrain rules,
- random deployment map from the approved set,
- no special features for the moment,
- and generally a preference for learning the game by playing it, rather than drowning in scenario chrome too early.
Which feels right.
Sometimes the best campaign packet is not the most sophisticated one — it’s the one that gets everyone to the table, gets the armies moving, and leaves enough room for goblins, arguments about fairness, accidental discoveries of local clubs, and the occasional heartfelt defense of pure uncomplicated violence in the Old World.