Wargamers in America might suddenly have noticed Eldfall Chronicles appearing on store shelves, a fantasy skirmish wargame with a broad range of arresting miniatures that promises both PVP and PvE combat. Having built up steam in continental Europe over the last three years, it’s finally available via US retail chains – I’ve been testing it to see what it has to offer.
I’ve read Eldfall Chronicle’s rules, messed around with the army-building app, built and painted minis, and tried a couple of test games. Take these as first impressions – I’m not yet confident whether or not it deserves a place on our guide to the best miniature wargames when that finally gets its overdue overhaul. But I am itching to find more time to test the game.
The product
There are a couple of two player starter sets available, each of which come with rules, two faction starter sets of four models each, an NPC water elemental, cards, and tokens. Just about any pack you buy with three or more models in it constitutes a playable party, and the rules and unit cards are all available to download for free online. There’s also a good quality army building app.
As well as the skirmish wargame, there’s also an Eldfall Chronicles dungeon crawler system called Northern Winds. The miniatures are fully compatible with the skirmish game, and there’s even a card pack to bring the models from the first wave of Eldfall releases into the dungeon crawler. I haven’t looked at the dungeon crawler at all, but it’s an interesting alternative entry point to the skirmish game.
Eldfall Chronicles’ miniatures are fantastic. The aesthetic is clean high fantasy, with a bit of Wuxia and anime influence in the mix. The entire range is cast in Unicool, a resin that holds incredible detail without being too brittle. Construction was easy and didn’t require any knife work beyond cleaning up flash. The level of detail on the infantry figures is so fine it’s somewhat beyond my ability to paint, but the monster miniatures hit a sweet spot where they’re genuinely relaxing to work on.
Now, the minis aren’t flawless. There’s some resin droop on spears and sword blades, which I’ve been able to fix by placing the bent bit into boiling water, reshaping it, and then cooling it off. A particularly spindly mage’s bident snapped during some rough handling. It was a clean break that I could fix, and I attribute it to the model’s design rather than the material – I’d expect a HIPs piece that was just as thin to be just as breakable. I get the sense the designers were pushing the detail of what the molds could produce, but have since become a bit more cautious about what will survive on the tabletop, because the newer models are more robust.
The rules writing is fairly clear, and sufficiently well translated into English. There are some naming oddities that I assume come either from the language barrier or an attempt not to directly copy another game – for instance there’s a ‘crouched’ state in which a model can’t engage enemies, is easier to hit in melee, and harder to hit at range, and that feels more like being ‘prone’ to me. The rules err on the side of brevity rather than clarity, which makes reading them pretty easy, but I expect that – unless the competitive meta takes off – players from different states will develop slightly different readings of them.
The gameplay
Eldfall Chronicles is a very low model-count skirmish game – it’s likely that each player will field a party of just four figures. The rules are deep enough that you will still have plenty of decisions to make each turn, and with so few models, every one is critical. It feels like each player is commanding a D&D party of heroes with distinct yet complimentary roles.
There is definitely some D&D in Eldfall’s DNA, because the rules are extremely similar to the sci-fi skirmish game Infinity, which evolved out of a heavily modded sci-fi D&D campaign. There are impactful differences between the two games, but existing Infinity players will be able to hop in Eldfall without any trouble.
Like Infinity, the game uses a variant I-Go-U-Go system in which one player takes an active turn with their whole party, while their opponent has a slightly more limited reactive turn to respond to their actions. If you advance and shoot at an enemy you may find them shooting back; try to disengage from combat and they may attack you on the way out; sneaking around behind a character restricts their reactions; and so on.
But a critical difference from Infinity is the way that models activate. In Infinity your ‘Order Pool’ can be spent to activate just about any model you like as many times as you can afford, allowing powerful attackers to ‘go Rambo’ or specialists to repeatedly attempt to complete a mission objective. Eldfall Chronicles is a lot more traditional. Each turn, whether you’re the active or reactive player, you’ll assign a number of activation tokens to each model in your party equal to its Stamina stat – usually that’s two tokens.
Each token lets an active model make one activation, consisting of a move and an action like an attack or a spell or a single special move like running, climbing, or jumping; for a reactive model the token gets you one reaction, like a counterattack or dodge.
When you’re the active player, even your most powerful heroes can only reliably activate twice. When you’re the reactive player, your reactions are a finite resource, and a critical component in your defense against enemy attacks. I felt this most acutely once models were engaged in melee, simply unable to raise their shield or swing their sword because they were out of tokens.
Similar to Infinity, to succeed in an action you need to roll one or more D20s and score equal to or under the relevant stat. When two models lock blades in melee, or one tries to dodge away from the other’s hurled spear, both players roll dice, with higher successes cancelling out lower ones.
Every model has a lot of stats, keywords, and unique abilities. While the kits come with printed cards, the web-based party building app feels essential, thanks to the hyperlinked explanations of all those rules. Given you’re only managing four models at a time, I found it to be pretty manageable, but there will definitely be an onboarding hurdle as you attempt to learn everyone’s capabilities. The payoff is that models feel extremely distinctive and tailored around their role.
I got a feeling for how rich this could make the game early in my first test session, when my Onatoishi – a beast of a samurai – ended up stuck in combat with my opponent’s Citadel Guard. The Onatoishi was an unstoppable force, with a massive Offensive melee stat of 16, a powerful greatsword, and thanks to the Armsmaster class and the level three Fencing combat art, the opportunity to roll three dice to strike when attacking. The Citadel Guard was an immovable object, with a Defensive melee stat of 16, the Sentinel class granting it +1 dice with its armor-piercing mace when defending, plus a shield and the level one Fencing combat art which together penalized my Onatoishi’s attack rolls by -6.
Did that sound like a lot of keywords and abilities? It is, and I’ve only mentioned the ones that were relevant to this combat – both models had more abilities besides. But with just four models per side this cognitive load is manageable. While it took a lot of referencing for this initial playthrough, the result felt dramatic – my Onatoishi’s onslaught of blows brought to a standstill by the supreme calm of the Citadel Guard.
What’s particularly compelling, in terms of list-building, is that models can all receive at least one upgrade. If there were more models in your list it would be obvious that you just make your best fighter a better fighter, your best archer a better archer. With only four models there’s a real case to be made that you might be better of upgrading your weaker models or at least diversifying the domains your elites can compete in.
NPC monsters show up in certain scenarios as complicating factors or mission objectives to be killed, and are controlled using AI behaviour cards for both an active and a reactive turn – I’ve given this a basic test. A battle against a pair of Earth Elementals proved very interesting, since their stats were nothing like regular heroes, with Agility so bad they could never dodge or even perceive enemies not directly in front of them, but Armor that only the strongest weapons could pierce, an lethal attacks. Maneuvering around them to attack them from their blind spot was essential to avoid suffering casualties during my own turn.
Holistically, the Eldfall Chronicles range feels like an effort to make really cool fantasy miniatures and then provide as many ways to play with them as possible. I’m only surprised that there isn’t also a TTRPG. If you like the aesthetic, the models are gorgeous – just as well given the price – and my first impressions of the gameplay are very positive.
I received samples of the Empire of Soga vs Helion League starter set, Imperial Banner and Queen’s Blade reinforcement packs, and the Earthen Creatures expansion pack, to test. I’ve built everything, painted some of it, and played with some of that. I’ll share some pictures in the Wargamer Discord community when I’m actually satisfied with what I’ve done!
Source: Wargamer
