What is it?

Battle Brothers is a tactical-turn based strategy game which puts players in the role of managing a band of mercenaries in a dark fantasy inspired world. While the mechanics are complex, at it’s heart it operates using a d100 roll under system, using equipment, skills and character progression to alter the math used in combat resolution. It is available on PC, and major consoles.

Designers

Overhype Studios (I have tried to find names of designers with details on what they did, but haven’t had much luck, none of the names on their website explicitly names a lead game designer)

How I Found it:

I actually can’t seem to find the exact time I started playing it. I am pretty sure I got it on a steam sale around 2019.

How it influenced BARGE:

Battle brothers is a harsh, unforgiving game by any standard. Very deep and complex, surprisingly flexible to really let you play it how you want to, this being expanded further with expansions. Another game that I found fascinating without really being particularly good at it.

One thing I knew I wanted to do with BARGE is make weapon choice matter and few games do it better than Battle Brothers. Each type of weapon has very specific properties, attacks, use cases and feats associated with them. As you get a little better at the game, you start to appreciate how much weapon choice matters for each of your mercenaries. From the spear helping out your least combat ready bros land some hits and deny space, to armor-piercing properties of pickaxes and hammers, to the shield destroying battle axe.

While I didn’t necessarily want all of the complexity that Battle Brothers uses for BARGE, the idea of different weapons having different use cases and abilities really matched up with my goals for BARGE. I wanted players to really care about what weapons they carried on them and when they chose to use one over the other.

The less expected way Battle Brothers influenced BARGE was in regards to Armor and health. Because BARGE doesn’t use passive defense like Armor Class. I really needed to reconsider how/what Armor actually did. As BARGE changed a lot of systems early, one of the patterns that emerged felt very similar to Battle Brothers. Armor was the buffer before hit points and losing hit points reduced combat effectiveness. It wasn’t an instant influence, but adopting Battle Brothers ideas around it’s health system really helped tie BARGE together to make Armor choice very important and create tension around losing HP. While Battle brothers doesn’t explicitly have 3 hp for a bro, there are a lot of times in the game it feels like it does because once a bros armor is gone, they aren’t usually taking a bunch of big hits and standing.

I am not sure Battle Brother’s is done influencing BARGE. It emphasized positional and terrain based play and this is a design space I plan on exploring a bit as BARGE matures. While the team at Overhype have moved onto a new project called “Menace”. There is still a good deal to unpack for me on Battle Brothers and I suspect as I run into more obstacles, I will take a glance over to how Battle Brother’s solved them.