Warfighter: Wave Two (Speedball, United Kingdom, Russian Federation, Eastern European Adversaries, The Footlocker)

Warfighter: Wave Two (Speedball, United Kingdom, Russian Federation, Eastern European Adversaries, The Footlocker)

Designed by Dan Verssen, expanding upon his previous design (Small packs ~£12.50, Footlocker ~£31.00), published by DVG

Multi-Play

Warfighter was easily one of the best wargame releases of 2014, presenting players with a fully-co-operative modern warfare, skirmish level card game. You tooled up all your squad with arms and equipment, and then headed up into the jungle or the desert. You could be breaking up drug cartels. You could be shutting down an ISIS bomb factory. You could be rescuing hostages. Whatever you are doing, Warfighter remains a highly enjoyable and thoroughly immersive game. Now, a year later, there’s even more bits and pieces added to make your games bigger and better.

Speedball gives you extra copies of some of the weapons supplied in the base game (handy if you’re playing with bigger teams, or want to give some of your ‘grunts’ more uniformity), as well as a hefty dose of new hardware, and some extra objectives and missions for the base game’s two existing locales. If you’re looking for the proverbial ‘bang for your buck’, how about an M60E3 machine gun? No? How about the opportunity to call in a Kiowa for some assistance?

The United Kingdom pack brings in some of our own boys and girls to join the fray, as well as all the weapons that the British Army uses on these sort of special forces missions. Especially nifty is the shotgun side saddle, which allows for speedier reloading of the always handy breaching shotgun. Just like Speedball, the set is rounded out with extra missions, objectives and enhancements.

If you want to bring the Spetsnaz in to face off against the enemies of Warfighter, then you’re definitely going to want the Russian Federation expansion pack. The Russian army’s reputation is well deserved, and this is represented nicely in their expansion pack, and in the weapons it comes supplied with. Extra location, objective, enhancement, skill and mission cards are also included.

If that sounds like you’re all tooled up, then the good news is that things are about to get a lot tougher. The Eastern European Adversaries pack is even harder than the Middle Eastern adversaries in the base set. This time, it’s the Cold War Gone Hot, and you’re looking at blowing up Hinds, shutting down ICBMs, or infiltrating past devious security teams so that you can eliminate a political target. If you’re a dedicated Warfighter player, then this is the extra challenge that you’ve been waiting for.

Last – but most definitely not least – there’s The Footlocker.

This is an absolutely massive box, designed to replace the old box you keep Warfighter in, as well as dividers and storage for all the new cards you got from these expansions, and a few more extra besides. Of course, that’s not all.

The – frankly, poorly laid out – paper map from the original game is now replaced with a much more effective and easily organised mounted board. For me, this is worth the price of admission alone.  But you also get a fully updated rulebook, a bunch of extra rules (including night missions… maybe there’s a crossover with Hornet Leader somewhere in the works here?), and a really nifty “Scenario Book”, which is a cart-load of pre-established loadouts and scenarios, so that if you’re short of time, or need to introduce new players to the game, you can skip the loadouts and go straight to the inserty stealthy kill bang that makes up the meat of the game.

Dedicated players will want to pick up all these sets – and they’re fairly priced – but they are modular, so if you’re only really interested in one, you can just pick and choose the packs you want. For my vote, if you only get one thing, get The Footlocker; or Speedball for extra variety; but if you can, get them all. And play Warfighter again.

Brad Harmer-Barnes

The Battlegames Award for Excellence is given only to those products or services which, in the opinion of the reviewer, would deserve a score of 9 or 10/10 under a numerical scoring system. Recipients of this coveted award may use the logo on their own website with pride alongside the relevant product or service description.