Getting Started with Ashfall: Your First Warband for Under £45

I want to be honest with you before I try to sell you on anything, including a free set of rules. The world does not need another skirmish game, and "free rules that work with models you already own" is not a gap in the market. One Page Rules solved that years ago, and solved it properly. Grimdark Future is free, it is excellent, and this shop is full of things tagged for it because I use it constantly. If you want a proper wargame with army lists, points values and a roster you can tinker with for a week, go and use Army Forge and don't let anyone tell you that you need anything else.

So what is Ashfall actually for. It is for the evening when you cannot face building a list. You have had a long day, you want to push some miniatures around a table and roll some dice with a friend, and the last thing you want to do is sit down and cost out a unit of anything. That is the itch Ashfall scratches. It is not trying to replace your proper wargame. It sits next to it.

What Ashfall actually is

Ashfall is one page. Four to six models a side, three six sided dice, a two foot square of table, about forty minutes from setup to scoring. There is no army list to buy because there is no army list at all, just a warband you write on a scrap of paper before you play. You use whatever miniatures you already own. Nobody checks.

The setting is doing a lot of quiet work for something this short. Nine years ago the sky started coming down and it has not stopped. Everything worth having got buried under it, and warbands go out to dig up what they can carry before the air turns bad. Nobody in the setting knows why it started, and neither do I, which I think is the right amount of mystery for a one page game. You are not reading lore, you are digging things up before the sky finishes falling on you.

One stat doing two jobs

Every model has one number, Grit, from 1 to 3. That is the entire profile. Grit is how hard the model fights and how much punishment it can take, at the same time, on purpose. To attack, both players roll a die and add the model's current Grit, highest wins, defender wins ties, the loser drops one point of Grit. At zero Grit the model is spent and comes off the table, dropping any relic it was carrying where it stood.

The reason I like this more than I probably should is that a wounded model is a worse fighter, immediately and automatically, with no separate wound track and no lookup. Your best model at full Grit is dangerous. The same model halfway through a bad fight is suddenly the one you need to protect. You feel that shift on the table without a single extra rule. Actions are Strike within an inch, Shoot within twelve, Brace for a bonus to your next defence, or Seize to grab a relic. That is everything.

Why the game has to end

The Ashfall track is the one mechanic I would point to if you asked what makes this game feel like its setting rather than a generic skirmish with a paint job. It starts at 1 and climbs by one every round. At 3 to 4 the sky is bad enough that shooting range drops to six inches. At 5 to 6, every model on the table, yours and theirs, loses a point of Grit at the end of the round, whether it did anything that turn or not. At 7 the game ends immediately, no matter what is happening on the table. Seven rounds is a hard ceiling and it is there deliberately. It means nobody gets to sit back, brace every turn and play it safe, because the sky itself is grinding your models down regardless of what you do. You have to go and get the relics. Scoring rewards that too, two points per relic carried by a survivor, one point per enemy model spent, and if it is a draw the player with fewer models left standing wins. Yes, that is backwards from what you would expect, and yes, that is also on purpose.

Your first warband, the Assassin Cadre

Building a warband is one rule. Eight points of Grit spread across three to six models, none above 3. So 3/3/2 is a small elite cell and 2/2/1/1/1/1 is a mob that can shrug off losses. Both are legal, both play completely differently, and that is the whole design space.

If you want a warband to start with, I'd point you at the Assassin Cadre Battle Pack, three 75mm resin figures, Serika Coilblade, Ashen Lynx and Nyx Ghostveil, for 43.99 pounds, which is 51 if you bought them apart. Run it as 3/3/2 and it is exactly the elite cell I mentioned above.

I will be straight with you about what that plays like, because three models is not a comfortable place to be. Every single one of them matters. You cannot trade bodies the way the six model mob can, because losing one model is losing a third of your warband in one go. And the Ashfall track does not care that you brought fewer, better models. At round 5 it starts taking Grit off everyone regardless of engagement, so a cadre that hangs back and waits for a good moment is a cadre that bleeds out doing nothing. This warband has to win early. It wants to be aggressive round one and two, grab what it can, and get off the table's dangerous middle before the sky starts doing the damage for you. It is a fun, tense way to play and it is not a forgiving one.

You do not need to buy anything

I want to say this plainly because it matters more than anything else in this post. You do not need the Assassin Cadre, or anything from this shop, to play Ashfall. Four models off your existing shelf, split as 2/2/2/2 or 3/2/2/1 or whatever adds up to eight, is a complete legal warband. The whole point of writing this game was to have something I could play on a Tuesday with whatever was already painted, no list building, no shopping first. If you own miniatures, you own a warband.

Everything above is the short version. The full rules fit on one page and are free to read whenever you want them. In part two I will walk through building a warband from scratch out of miniatures you already have sitting around, the odd mixed bag kind of collection most of us actually own, and how to think about a Grit spread before you put a single model on the table.