Getting Started with Ashfall Part Two: Building a Warband From the Miniatures You Already Own

I've got a shelf like this and I bet you do too. A half painted knight from a boxed game I bought for the terrain. Two cultists from a Kickstarter that never got a third expansion. A big monster I picked up at a show because it looked brilliant on the stand and has looked considerably less brilliant gathering dust ever since. None of them belong to the same game. Most of them have never had a dice rolled for them. This post is about turning that shelf into something you can actually play on a Tuesday evening.

Why it doesn't matter what any of them are

Ashfall doesn't care what your models are. There's no faction to belong to, no army list to build against a points cost, no keyword that has to match another keyword before something is allowed to happen. The entire game runs on one number, Grit, and Grit is something you decide, not something a rulebook decides for you. That means a knight, a cultist and a monster from three unrelated ranges can stand on the same table and fight each other and the rules will never once ask what any of them are supposed to be. Mixed scale is fine. Mixed genre is fine. The only thing the game asks is that you like looking at them enough to want to put them on a table.

I should say clearly that Ashfall did not invent this idea. One Page Rules has been doing exactly this, brilliantly, for years, and this shop sells hundreds of products tagged for it. If you want a proper wargame with army lists and points and factions that reward building a collection around them, go and play that. It's excellent and worth the time it asks of you. Ashfall isn't trying to be that. It's the thing I reach for when I want a game tonight and cannot face building a list.

The three steps, and there really are only three

Step one. Pick three to six models you like looking at. That's the entire selection criterion. Not models from the same range, not models the same size, not models that make narrative sense together. Just ones you like.

Step two. Decide Grit by eye. You have 8 points to spread across your models and nothing can go above 3. Forget what the model's stat card says in whatever game it came from, if it even has one. Look at it. Does it feel big, armoured, characterful, like it should be hard to put down? Give it a 3. Is it rank and file, a grunt, a spear carrier? Give it a 1 or a 2. This is a judgement call and there's no wrong answer as long as the total is 8 and nothing exceeds 3.

Step three. Write it on a scrap of paper. Model name or a rough description, Grit number next to it. That's the whole list building step. I mean that literally, I have built warbands on the back of a receipt.

Three shelves, three warbands

Take my half painted knight, the two cultists and the monster I bought on a whim. That's four models. The knight is clearly the anchor, so he gets a 3. The monster looks like it should be terrifying but I've only got 5 points left to spread across three models, so it gets a 2, which feels wrong until you remember Grit is also how much punishment something can take, so a monster with a 2 dies in one bad roll and that's fine, that's the game working. The two cultists get a 2 and a 1. Total, 3 plus 2 plus 2 plus 1, that's 8 across four models. Done.

Or say you've got six models and want the mob feel instead, a little warband of skirmishers. Six models at 8 points means most of them are 1s with one or two 2s thrown in, nobody gets near a 3. That's a completely different warband to play and it plays differently on the table too, which brings me to the next thing.

Or a middle ground, four models, one hard hitter at 3, two at 2, one at 1. This is probably the shape I'd recommend to someone playing their first game, because it gives you one model that can shrug off a bad roll and still stand, without leaving you so thin on models that one unlucky fight ends your turn early.

Elite cell versus mob, and how they actually feel

A three model warband with Grit spread something like 3, 3, 2 is what I've come to call the elite cell. Every model matters enormously. Lose one and you've lost a third of your force. But every fight, that model is bringing a big number to the die roll, and the ash track chewing away at Grit late game doesn't scare it as much because it started high.

A six model warband with Grit spread thin, mostly 1s and 2s, is the mob. You can absorb a bad roll or two because losing one Grit 1 model barely dents your force. But every model is fragile on its own, and if the fights start going against you, they go against you fast.

Both are valid. But I need to be honest about something I found out the hard way, and this is the interesting part.

The playtest, and the two rules it forced me to change

Before I put Ashfall up as a download I didn't just playtest it across a few kitchen table games and call it done. I wrote a script and simulated roughly 25,000 games, every warband shape against every other warband shape, to see whether the balance actually held up rather than just feeling fine to me after a couple of pints.

It did not hold up. The three model elite cell was beating the six model mob almost 80 percent of the time. On paper the mob should have been the interesting, riskier choice. In practice it was a trap.

Two things were broken. First, the ash track was killing weak models outright. A Grit 1 model just evaporates when the ash takes a point off it, through no fault of the player, which meant mobs of cheap models were dying to the weather rather than to anything the opponent did. Second, every kill scored exactly one point regardless of what died, so bringing six cheap models just handed the opponent six easy points on a plate. The mob wasn't losing because it was a bad plan. It was losing because two rules were quietly punishing it.

So I changed both. The ash still wears every model down from round five, but it will never take a model below Grit 1, so models now die to each other rather than to the weather. And a kill now scores the Grit that model started with, so putting down a tough Grit 3 model is worth three points and putting down a cheap one is only worth one, which means a mob of cheap models is no longer free points sitting on the table.

Those two changes closed the gap between the strongest and weakest warband shapes from about 31 points down to about 20, and roughly halved the number of games that ended with one side completely wiped out. That matters more than the raw numbers suggest, because it means relics actually get contested instead of the game being decided the moment one side loses its first model. I'll say plainly that the elite cell is still slightly ahead even now. I haven't chased that last gap shut, because this is a forty minute game, not a tournament ruleset, and I'd rather it stayed simple than got perfectly balanced and twice as long to explain.

Where to get it

The rules live on the site as a page you can read straight off your phone, and they're also a free two page PDF with a print and cut counter sheet, available from itch.io, Wargame Vault and DriveThruRPG. The counter sheet has the Ashfall track, Grit chits, Brace chits, ash markers, relic tokens and two range sticks all printed at true size, so you don't need a tape measure or any bits from another game.

If you missed it, part one covers what the game actually is and a battle pack to start with if you'd rather buy a small warband than raid your shelf. But raiding your shelf is the whole point of this post, so go and look at what you've already got, write two lists on the back of an envelope, and see who wins. The full rules are on the site if you need to check something halfway through a game.