NECROMOLDS
The play-dough smashing wargame you didn’t know you wanted
What does defeat mean for an individual soldier in a wargame? Being spirited away by a giant hand? Tipped on its side, prone? Neither of these really approach the fidelity of being eviscerated by a plasma cannon or skewered by an arrow through the chest. What if, instead of a giant but gentle hand removing a hard working unit from play, that hand descended with the intention of smashing the defeated figure?
That’s where we start with Necromolds, an entry-level family friendly game of war and attrition that uses play-dough monsters as the ground troops slogging it out on a neon battlefield. It’s a jump for Clint Bohaty, the game’s designer, from his previous tile flipping, fox hunting game, Hounded.
“It’s a fantasy monster army moulding and smashing game,” says Bohaty reading from the box with a grin, commenting it reminds him of old Warhammer boxes.
“It’s a skirmish game that you can play with your family,” says Bohaty, “it’s an introduction to wargaming – a rules light miniature wargame where both players are wizards battling each other on by raising up golems to fight on their behalf.”
Let’s explore the smash-or-be-smashed world of Necromolds and see if it really is the way to trick your family into wargaming.
RISE FROM YOUR GRAVE
All of the monsters, or golems, in the game are created from spell book moulds which players fill with their clay and close to form their army. This army is raised from the ground itself in a form of geomancy, or play-doughmancy, each monster offering its own themed collection of debris and detritus that it’s formed out of. The idea from the game came from something equally as magical however, tabletop gaming convention halls.
“Whenever I go to game conventions, I love to play. I usually just play a tabletop RPG, but I like to get a wargame in,” says Bohaty, “I just think it’s so fun to move all those little minis on the battlefield. And usually the people who host miniature war games at conventions are super talented.”
“I think it was in 2017 I noticed that more and more families were playing D&D together. But I didn’t see any families or young kids in the wargaming room. And I thought that was kind of odd because as a kid, I would think this stuff is so cool. You know, all these little
characters on these giant battlefields. So I tried to figure out, well, why?” says Bohaty, “one of the major things was how fragile a lot of the pieces are. All those miniatures that people make are so beautiful, they’re almost their own little pieces of art.”
“As a kid, I just wanted to break things, you play with your toys and like smash them against each other. And it was just so destructive in a way, but it was fun. And I thought, is there a way I could bring that into wargaming?” says Bohaty. The answer is of course, yes.
Bohaty talks fondly of childhood toys like the make-your-own-bugs fun of Creepy Crawlers and the small scale monster-filled worlds of Mighty Max. The monsters are a mix of Goosebumps and slightly forbidden knowledge, “they were scary as a kid. The cover art was weird, the dummy looks scary. There was a lot of skeletons and there was something almost taboo about that,” says Bohaty, “and I remember when I got my first Magic: The Gathering card in elementary school and I think it was like ‘a bloody heartbeat’ or something. And I remember holding it and it this object of reverence. It was this taboo cool piece of art that I had that I knew was like a little too violent for me to own.”
He also cites the D&D adjacent game, Clay-O-Rama, which sees players create their own clay monsters and making them fight. Here, the number of legs dictate the speed of a monster amusingly. Another toy, which Bohaty cites from his childhood, is Grape Escape, a kind of Mousetrap-esque gauntlet for potential death for unlucky play-dough grapes.
And of course, there’s the smashing, “if you’re making minis out of clay what do you want to do?” says Bohaty, “you want to destroy them.”
So the designer set about doing what anyone reasonable would do once they’ve had this idea. He put down the camera from his day job as a filmmaker, started learning CAD and bought a 3D printer.
“I started kind of just playing and making these spell books,” says Bohaty. The prototyping began. The spell books were key to the way the game works, as not only are they the moulds for making your armies of golems, they’re also the dice placement slots for monster actions and powers.
“Those design elements I knew right away,” says Bohaty “what we’ve ended up with, thanks to our modeller Thomas Grave
who interpreted the illustrations, was monsters that retain a lot of their details. It surpasses the detail I’ve seen in any of these kids toys.”
After a period of trial and error, including a few run ins with air bubbles and moulds that didn’t want to give back their clay, the monsters were ready.
A WIZARD’S WAR
Necromolds isn’t going to replace Frostgrave for fans of wizarding skirmishes, but it is a good way of getting the whole family into wargaming. It’s an intuitive system, from the very start of crafting your monsters, through dice based combat and to the inevitable smashing.
“You pick your monster spell books, each player receives about three and a half ounces (100g) of spell clay and you choose what monsters you want to mould,” explains Bohaty, “and then you use up your clay and whatever monsters you make, that’s your army.”
What the designer is describing there is actually what would be the points buy, or power allotment for your army. Whereas a lot of systems ask players to do some optimised maths as to which units to bring into a fight, whether to upgrade some of their equipment, or otherwise enhance their chances. Here this is dealt with by volume of clay. It’ll always be a fair fight if both players have the same amount of clay to work with from the start.
“There are some nuances in your decisionmaking when you’re picking your monsters. Some monsters work better together than others. Um, but really you can choose to make whatever you want. So, if you want to make an army all of a single monster, you can, the game supports that.”
It also adds a pleasing simplicity of ‘bigger is better’ in the game. More powerful units are balanced by being made of more clay than smaller units. It’s an elegant answer to the fiddliness of army construction.
“The clay completely erases the need of a point system in a wargame. It does all that lifting for you and it’s really, and it makes the point system really fun too because you’re just like ripping off chunks of clay making your monsters. And then once you like run out of clay, your army’s built and you’re ready for battle,” says the designer.
The game takes place on a neon-splashed 16x16 inch board, but it’s only the beginning. “The board is really is to us, a starting point for players,” says Bohaty, “and I’m really hoping that the players that who are big wargame fans, take it upon themselves to like make their own scenery or a whole tabletop. I found the board to be
the best
size for two players, given the amount of clay we were playing with and it led for a little bit of positioning early game, and then it led to battles by round two or three.”
The whole game is designed to be over in under 45 minutes, even if you’re learning the game first time. Necromolds is here to teach – usually younger – players all the basics of a wargame.
“Once you have your army built and lined up on the battle map. There are the terrain pieces, which really are there to block line of sight and to change the flow of the battle. And then there are gems which players collect based on combat dice rolls, to spend on empowering a unit for a single attack round,” says Bohaty. What we have before us is the building blocks of a wargame, army composition, strategic movement using rulers, cover, line of sight, and bonuses from combat or clearing objectives.
MONSTER RUMBLE
Combat is covered by the use of dice. We have D8s in Necromolds, for actually hitting things, but before we get to smashing other monsters through, players need to roll their D6 command dice.
“Each player rolls four command dice and those dice will give you options, like movement, ranged attack, melee attack, activate a spell, or ‘wild’,” says Bohaty, “and, and then you’re assigning those to your actual
spell books in order for your monsters to go ahead and do those things.”
With this there is the opportunity to re-roll dice too. If players want to re-roll some of their dice, the often-used discard-and-re-roll mechanic comes into play. Throw away a dice to reroll the others, which might be for the best if you’ve only got melee dice when you’re out of range. Or if you need a particular long ranged play to come off to avoid being mashed on the following turn.
Command dice are then placed on each spell book for the monster type, and all of the monsters of those that type will activate and carry out the action. This means that if you’ve got
a lobsided army, you’ll be able to move or attach with all of those units at once – making the actual army construction one of the interesting metas of the game, but not for the usual reasons.
Combat itself is simple and entirely deadly. Roll a D8 as an opposed roll against your opponent, and if you win, it smushing time.
“We found that because Necromolds is fast moving and you’re playing with clay, combat is deadly. In a melee attack, one of you is going to get smashed. And if you tie both of you are going to get smashed,” says Bohaty, “there’s no hit point rules or anything like that – so everything really comes down to those dice rolls.”