Burrows and Badgers is the rightful heir to Warhammer skirmish classic Mordheim

When I opened up a review copy of Burrows and Badgers, I had some preconceptions about what I would find. It’s a skirmish wargame set in a fantasy version of Britain populated by anthropomorphic animal folk: I was expecting something like Bloomburrow, Redwall, The Wind in the Willows, or Mouseguard. What I didn’t expect was a set of rules that perfectly evoke the spirit of classic Warhammer skirmish spinoff Mordheim.

Released in 1999, Mordheim is older than some of this site’s readers, so I’ll give a brief summary for their benefit. It’s a spinoff game from Warhammer Fantasy, in which bands of explorers venture into the titular City of the Damned in search of fame and glory – and usually meet a grisly death on the blades of their rivals.

Though long out of print, it has an active community of fans kitbashing models and building utterly gorgeous Warhammer terrain to represent the ruined city. John Blanche and the other artists depicted the chaos-warped city of Mordheim and the baroque and decaying Old World with feverish intensity. Its characters are drawn from the fringes of the Warhammer Old World factions and it had an accompanying model range of wretched, crooked figures.

Burrows and Badgers is similarly low fantasy; just look at the landsknecht swag on this hench badger. But it’s a setting where an ‘anthropomorphic animal’ could be a hedgehog in a cute little helmet, not a braying man-beast spawned from the warp madness of chaos.

It’s the rules rather than the aesthetics that make me think of Mordheim. There are just some weird little idiosyncrasies in Burrows and Badgers that differentiate it from most other gang-based skirmish wargames, but which also appear in Mordheim. It suggests a designer who was heavily inspired by that game, and wanted to put their own spin on that style of gameplay.

In Burrows and Badgers you’ll construct a band of animalfolk heroes from a frankly enormous list of possibilities. There are 48 statlines that range from tiny shrews up to massive beavers and falcons. Almost all of these beastfolk are available to all of the game’s ten factions, though the Undead are pretty much restricted to a force of their own.

Factions come with unique abilities and restrictions. These shape how likely your heroes are to gain certain types of upgrade as they gain levels, grant access to certain rare items when you recruit your band, and each offer a unique way for Heroes to earn experience points during matches.

A lot of what you’ll do with your heroes on their turn is standard skirmish gaming – moving, shooting, biffing stuff in combat. But it’s rounded out with extra activities that feel very Mordheim coded.

Models can hide, forcing their foes to pass an awareness test before they can be targeted. Climbing is integrated thoughtfully into the core movement rules in a way that makes some models much better at it than others. Once you’ve got the high ground, heroes can make diving charges, gaining a bonus to hit as they leap off a higher storey and right into a foe’s face – a signature Mordheim move.

As in any good campaign game, missions will give your heroes experience, and there are plenty of skills to gain as they level up. You’ll also earn Pennies from your victories, which you’ll spend on new recruits or rare equipment from the general store. Injuries received during a mission can turn into serious, ongoing wounds that reduce a hero’s effectiveness, and heroes can even be killed outright.

Between missions, healthy heroes can ‘train’ for extra experience, ‘labour’ on permanent improvements to their den, or ‘wander’, which is an evolution of Mordheim’s ‘exploration’ system. Exploration is an iconic minigame in Mordheim: you roll one die for each hero who made it through a mission conscious, with sets of matching dice giving you a random encounter from a large table. It drips with theme, but the probability of rolling more than three matching die results is so low that you almost never get the most interesting results.

Burrows and Badgers makes it far easier to see all the most outlandish results, for better or for ill. For each model who wanders, you decide how far afield it will go, and whether it heads off alone or joins a group. The further away a hero travels, the bigger the risks they face, but also the greater the rewards. Models that group together can modify the results of the die roll, but only get to make one roll.

If your warband has taken a battering and you want to play it safe, you could use all your rolls on the local wandering table, perhaps earning a few Pennies from helping out with a harvest, or receiving a free firearm from a friendly gunsmith. Wandering into the wilds could see your model stumble into the den of a great cave bear and receive a major injury, or return with a haul of treasure and a magical item from the wreck of a sunken ship.

My impression so far is that Burrows and Badgers shares Mordheim’s vision of what you should be able to do in a skirmish campaign game, even though it executes on those ideas with a different dice system. It also has the benefit of having Mordheim to look back on, and there are some differences that seem really promising – though I’ll repeat, I’ve only given it a read through, not a playtest.

If you want a newly recruited magic-user character to come with lots of spells, you totally can – they’ll simply rack up multiple levels of the negative abilities ‘weak’ and ‘delicate’ which make them noodle armed and brittle boned. It’s a “yes, and” approach to army building which lets you do the cool thing, at a cost.

Your band also has a Pension pot, which accumulates money as your models suffer major injuries: should you retire an old hero, you can draw down from the Pension fund to pay for a new recruit. This seems like a great idea to stop bands going into a death-spiral after suffering some bad defeats, and is particularly important for the relatively low model count of starting warbands, usually only four to six models.

The rules for the original Mordheim are still floating around the internet, as are several fan expansions, and it’s a game well worth playing. The original designer Tuomas Pirinen also made an unexpected return to tabletop game design after decades in the videogame industry with Trench Crusade. It’s very different from Mordheim, but it’s a set of rules I’ve been very impressed by.

If you love anthropomorphic animals and strategy, Root is well worth your while: it has a spot on our guide to the best strategy board games, and we’ve got a handy guide to help you identify the best options from the many Root expansions.

Have you painted up some animalfolk minis that you’re particularly proud of? Are you still playing Mordheim to this day? We’d love to see your minis and hear your tales in the official Wargamer Discord server.