Hello again Vanguard fans – or should we say Fanguards? No, ok, we’ll stop that then – in today’s blog we’re exploring one of key game mechanics: Power Dice. During the course of the brutal skirmishes between the small warbands, commanders will need to change their tactics on the fly. Battle strategies tend to get disrupted when a Despoiler is charging straight towards you! And so, to give players the option of adapting their best laid plans, we created the Power Dice.

These special dice come in three flavours (not literally, so please don’t eat them): red, white and blue. The red dice are the basic ones, giving you a maximum of two points of power to spend in a round, white also have a maximum of two points but you’ve got more chance of rolling a two and blue dice have a maximum of three points. At the start of each round you’ll automatically generate three red dice to spend during the course of that round. However, extra dice can be generated by the commanders, support and even spellcaster models in your warband, as you can see on the card below.

HOW TO SPEND ‘POWER’

Right, so you’ve rolled your Power Dice but what can you spend them on? Well, with the Power Dice we wanted to give Vanguard players the opportunity to increase their attacks, activate special abilities, use powerful Group Actions and lots more. In fact, there are eight different ways to spend your power during a turn. Take a look below:

+1 Model Activation – catch your opponent off-guard by immediately activating another model in the same turn. This is great if you want to try and secure the first turn in the following round because the player that finishes a round first will get the first turn in the subsequent round.

+1 Die – want to make sure your Basilean Sisterhood makes that all-important shot against the Nightstalker Spectre? Well, by using the Power Dice you can add 1 bonus die to any of your Shoot, Cast, Armour Save or Melee rolls.

Forced Fatigue Action – Fatigue is something we’ll cover in detail in a future blog, but basically Fatigue allows you to give an extra ‘short’ action to a model that’s already been activated in a round

Clear Fatigue – remove Fatigue from a model. Again, we’ll cover this in a future blog

Group Defence (up to 3 models) – Group Actions will be covered in tomorrow’s blog!

Group Shoot (up to 3 models) – covered tomorrow

Group Assault (up to 3 models) – covered tomorrow

Warband or Model Special Abilities – these are another of the really exciting elements of Vanguard so we’ll go into this a little bit more below…

WARBAND ABILITIES

Right from the start of development on Vanguard we knew that we wanted warbands and units to have their own range of special abilities. After all, these are meant to be the elite troops sent roving across the countryside of Mantica, so it’s likely they’ve picked up a trick or two along the way.

Special abilities cost power to use and the more powerful an ability is, the more Power you’ll need to spend in order to trigger it. The Warband Special Ability can be used by multiple models in a particular faction and are unique to that faction. Let’s take a look at a couple of examples below:

OGRES

This ability will be particularly useful when charging against weaker Grunts with a low Nerve value. Oh, and talking of weaker Grunts…

GOBLINS

In keeping with the cowardly nature of Goblins, they can elect to leg it when an enemy charges into them. This is a great tactic for luring the enemy out of cover or into charging distance of another unit.

SPECIAL ABILITIES

Along with the Warband Abilities that can be used by various units in a warband, you’ve also got the option to spend Power on Special Abilities that are unique to particular units. These can be anything from increasing the range of magic spells to extra attacks or defensive moves to avoid blows.

We won’t be able to go through them all here, but we can give a couple of sneak peeks to whet your appetite.

GUARDIAN SHAMBLER

This is a great example of a support ability. The Guardian Shambler can be used to absorb any potential wounds suffered by your elves. Perfect for keeping that all-important Prince alive.

OGRE WARLOCK

A lot of the Spellcasters can pay to boost the range of their spells, or even cast another spell for free. Some spells can even be boosted to increase their strength.

As you can see, power plays a huge role (no pun intended) in the game and can often be the key to victor. Come back tomorrow when we explain how power can be used to trigger Group Actions.

Remember, Kings of War: Vanguard is now available to pre-order. We’ve got a very special half price rulebook offer, so you can get the 160-page rulebook for just £12.49! Pre-order here.

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