Could Bigger Tables Make 500-Point Old World Games More Fun?
We recently had one of those very Warhammer conversations that starts with a small rules gripe and quickly turns into a full-on idea for how we might want to play the next league.
This time the topic was small games in Warhammer: The Old World, especially around 500-point battles, table size, and what happens when units lose combat and get pushed around the battlefield.
The problem with tiny games on tiny tables
Stas threw out a thought that immediately felt familiar: at 500 points, the game might actually be more fun on bigger tables.
The reasoning was simple and honestly pretty compelling. On a cramped board, failed break tests and post-combat movement can mean a unit is effectively just gone from the game almost immediately. There is very little space for that messy middle state where troops panic, fall back, regroup, and then come back in a bad position.
And that messy middle is exactly what makes battles feel dramatic.
Stas compared it to Total War: units run, rally a little later, return shaken and disordered, and the battlefield turns into chaos. That kind of flow feels cinematic, and maybe it is something we are missing when we squeeze tiny armies onto tiny tables.
A possible house rule direction
The discussion quickly moved from “this feels off” to “okay, what could we actually do about it?”
One idea was to try something custom for our little “seicento” format. Stas suggested that maybe some of these retreat results should not always mean a unit is effectively dead just because it reached or crossed the edge too easily.
He also floated a more specific tweak: maybe “fall back in good order” could lead to a kind of reinforcement return in the next round. The logic behind it was very thematic: those soldiers have not completely lost the will to fight, so maybe they should not vanish from the battle quite so absolutely.
That is the kind of idea we really like discussing in the group. Not because we want to rewrite the game from the ground up, but because sometimes a tiny local adjustment can make a format feel much more alive.
House comp? Maybe.
Michał was open to the idea and suggested we could simply do a house comp.
At the same time, he pointed out an important rules question: if a unit gets forced off the board through Give Ground, that probably still means death anyway, right? So even if we want to soften some outcomes, we would need to think carefully about which results we are changing and which ones should stay punishing.
That is probably the key part of the whole conversation. We are not looking for a no-consequences version of the game. We just want to preserve a bit more battlefield story in very small matches.
Looking ahead: normal tables, bigger games
The other clear takeaway from the chat was about the future shape of the league.
Michał said that for the next league, he would rather play on normal tables, with games up to 2000 points, but maybe in a Dragon format. That feels like a very sensible direction. Bigger tables and bigger armies naturally give more room for movement, failed morale, recovery, and all the weird little battlefield swings that make rank-and-flank games memorable.
Small formats are still great for experimenting, testing lists, and getting games in quickly. But the conversation made us think that if we want those games to feel less binary, table size might matter more than we first assumed.
When the rats ran like peasants
There was also a very relatable emotional footnote from Michał, because of course there was.
He said he was crushed when his rats, in a duel with Stas, did exactly the same thing as Wilini’s peasants had done before — and they even had two heroes inside the unit.
That is one of those moments every Warhammer player knows. You build up the image in your head: elite characters, important unit, big moment, surely this block holds.
And then the dice say no.
Still, Michał also admitted that from a lore perspective, it did not even feel stupid. And honestly, that is a big part of why these conversations are fun. Sometimes the rules outcome is painful, but still weirdly believable. Skaven panicking in spite of leadership support? Very on brand.
Where we are now
So at this point, we are circling around a few ideas:
- 500-point games might play better on larger tables
- some retreat outcomes in micro-formats might be worth softening with house rules
- fall back in good order could maybe be reimagined in a more dynamic way for local play
- for the next league, normal tables and larger point levels may simply solve a lot of these issues naturally
We do not have a final answer yet, but it is exactly the kind of discussion we enjoy most: half design talk, half battle report trauma, and fully rooted in trying to make our games more fun.
If we end up testing a house comp for small-format Old World, we will definitely write up how it worked.