Would a Dungeons and Dragons miniature skirmish game allow you to hire its titular beast into your starting team? No! But Burrows & Badgers: Second Edition is totally cool with you hiring a badger – and is an excellent rule set besides.
Listen to the Fortified Niche episode.
Burrows & Badgers 2E is set in the fantasy land of Mercia. Politically and narratively, it’s England before any sort of unification, with anthropomorphic animals replacing people. Aesthetically, it’s medieval fantasy land that also reaches as far ahead as Victorian England. What that means functionally is that your bands of adventurers will sometimes shoot each other with a gun instead of swinging a sword or casting a spell.
The game engine runs on dice sizes and roll-offs (or, more rarely, regular target numbers). This already spoke to my heart as dice size magic charmed me as far back as Force on Force. Characters have long statlines covering both offensive and defensive stats, many pulling double duty: for example, Nimbleness is both ranged defense and initiative!
An important part of Burrows & Badgers 2E is crits and fails. If, in a roll-off, you roll the highest possible result for your die, that’s an immediate +7 to your result. This would be fine if not for the fact that your to-hit result (minus the enemy rolls) is also your damage result. This can get a little swingy and, in the campaign, favors upgrades to accuracy rather than damage. On the other hand, the fails – rolling 1 – are handled better… in that your character gets a fate point (granting re-rolls and more) for it. Hey, you’re already down after rolling so low, no reason to kick you!
Characters all have two actions they can do per turn, in any combinations, though doubling up imposes a negative on the second roll. It’s an elegant system, especially when you consider how simply it handles stealth – or that bane of every game, difficult terrain. To focus on the former, regular movement allows your mini to move its dice size in inches. However, for difficult, you roll that die and only get that many inches of movement. Easy!
But who cares about excellent combat rules that put anything present in Necromunda to shame when you have campaigns to worry about?! Burrows & Badgers 2E is definitely meant for campaign play, and thus building a warband is fast an easy. Choose a faction, mind all the numerous benefits (and some drawbacks) that it gives, and hire some anthropomorphic animals to fill out the roster. Creature size only matters a little, but not having arms (if you’re a snake) is a somewhat more important. Oh, and if you want a wizard? It’s as easy as making the chosen critter more physically frail for every starting spell purchased.
You’re unlikely to run out of battle scenarios any time soon (~20 are present in the book), and the post-battle sequence is a lot of fun. Not only are you tending to injuries, hiring replacements (there’s even a catch-up mechanic), building up your base and sending troops to work, but also exploring the world for fun and profit. There are three different level of risk/reward to choose from and that alone puts the game above Verrotwood. Whether you get something good or something bad, you can clearly feel that it was as much the result of your choices as the whims of the dice.
Burrows & Badgers 2E is a fun game, one that charmed me the more I played it. It wouldn’t be too hard to hack it into a Mordheim replacement, but it’s also good enough to run as is, with anthropomorphic animals – and that’s isn’t even my usual oeuvre. Too bad the only module I found on TTS had AI slop standees – Peter Johnston’s art deserves better!