Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Burning Banners: Rage of the Witch Queen is a beefy box. It would have to be. There are dozens of scenarios and hundreds of tokens, as well as four different full-sized boards. There are two manuals and six player boards. Burning Banners is a production. It feels a bit like an event. It isn’t Twilight Imperium beefy, but it would make a good Reuben.
The quick pitch: old-school hex-and-counter wargaming married to a Dungeons & Dragons-esque fantasy setting. Players control dwarves, orcs, armies of the undead and beplagued, usually in the name of conquest. Spend money to deploy units, move the units, fight with the units. This is the fundamental turn structure of Burning Banners.
There’s more to it than that, of course. It comes with an awfully large manual for that to be everything. There isn’t much more, though, which is to Burning Banners’s credit. Though the rulebook is intimidating—I would argue it is inefficient and in need of an overhaul—the rules themselves are easily grasped. This is not a GMT design. There are few if any dangling edge cases. There are no complex charts to reference. What few terrain and combat exceptions exist are thematic enough that they’re easy to integrate. Did you know that it takes longer to move through mountains than it does flat terrain? My first game took about 80 minutes to get going, since none of us had read the rules or played the game, but we had notably few questions once we were rolling.
“Rolling” is an apt word. While many hex & counter games use deterministic combat, Burning Banners uses dice. When involved in combat, you roll a combination of 6- and 8-sided dice specified by your units, with 5’s and up scoring hits. Combat is quick and breezy, a raucous pushing of luck. Combat can be impacted by event cards held in players’ hands and by the abilities of the unique Hero characters found in each faction.
Suffice it to say that Burning Banners is not a game for the determinists among us. The event cards are swingy, and the dice rarely do what you want. Things can and do go wrong. So long as you’re able to laugh when they do, you’re going to have a great time. The world of Burning Banners is rich. It’s fun to send a swarm of flies into combat. Teeming out of the mountains with your goblin horde is a hoot. My friend Nathan never had a chance when we tried our first three-player scenario, and he had a blast.
Burning Banners is a game for people who love moving chits and chucking dice, a subset of the gaming hobby for which I have found myself growing in appreciation. Five or six years ago, I think I would have balked at this. Is it balanced? No. Not all the time. Certainly not “perfectly.” Does it reward expertise and experience? Kind of. A bit. You can’t know what’s going to happen. It’s about the joy of the story unfolding, of pulling levers and seeing what comes out. Burning Banners is a triumph.
Burning Banners details
- Designer: Christopher Moeller
- Artists: Christopher Moeller
- Publishers: Compass Games
- Release Date: 2024
- Player count : 2 - 6
- Age range : 14+
- Time range : 60 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Critical Hits and Failures, Deck, Bag, and Pool Building, Dice Rolling, Hexagon Grid, Income, Scenario / Mission / Campaign Game, Team-Based Game, Variable Player Powers, Variable Set-up, Worker Placement, Different Worker Types
- BGG Geek Rating: 8.34296 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 4.0.
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