Draw a card. Move your knights. Roll the skulls. A hex-and-dice war between the High Kingdom and the Ork Horde — learned in a minute, played for years. On your phone, your tablet, or the desk you actually wargame at.
The Mac and Windows builds are in testing right now — ask to be a tester and you can play it today.
The muster
Two armies face each other across a hex battlefield. A Battle card is drawn, it names a unit type, and those troops march. Reach an enemy and both sides roll dice — skulls against shields. That's the whole game, and you'll have it in under a minute.
Then, when you want more war under the hood, one switch hands you melee and ranged dice, toughness, morale, charges, shield walls and alternating activation — on the same board, with the same army.
The Iron Betrayal — campaign intro
The disciplined High Kingdom against the brutal Ork Horde — 19 unit types, from levied peasants to the six-life Ogre Champion.
Basic for a fast card-driven fight. Advanced for the full tabletop simulation. Pick per battle — even mid-campaign.
Two hand-authored campaigns across the marches of Averlund — one from each side of the war.
Built for a commute or a lunch break. Save mid-battle, close the app, resume where the line broke.
Movement · try it
No hidden maths, no fog of rules. Select a unit and every hex it can reach lights up. This board is live — go on, move the knights.
A Battle card is drawn and names a unit type — Imperial Knights, say. Every one of your Knights may then move and, if an enemy stands beside them, attack. In Basic that's one hex each, and the card decides who gets to act.
Flip to Advanced and each unit moves by its own Move stat instead: cavalry ride three hexes, infantry stride two, war machines crawl one. Ride two or more hexes into a fight and you land a Charge — an extra attack die.
The ground fights too. Woods and hills give cover. Walls and hedges stop a march dead. A river is impassable except at the ford — and a lever-worked drawbridge can open one where there wasn't.
And the ground has height. Tiles sit at three tiers, and no unit leaps a cliff: you may only step between tiles whose height differs by one. So a raised plateau has exactly one way up — through its step ledge. Hold the heights and you don't just gain a bonus, you choose where the enemy has to come. Try it on the board: the watchtower stands on rock, and the ramp is the only road in.
Flip the switch and watch the same knights reach further. Both demos on this page follow it.
Open ground
Woods · cover
Hills · cover
Village · open
High ground · +1 firing down
River · impassable
Bridge · the crossing
Tower · +1 die
Attacking · try it
Both sides roll — that's the heart of it. The attacker counts skulls, the defender counts shields, and the difference is blood. Choose your combatants and give the order.
Move a unit next to an enemy and attack. Each side rolls dice equal to its Combat Value — Lord Knights swing five, Goblins scratch with one. Skulls minus shields is the damage, and every hit strips one life. Three lives and a unit is gone. The Ogre Champion takes six.
Terrain tilts the odds before a die is thrown: a unit in the tower rolls an extra die attacking and defending, and attacking across a ditch costs the attacker a die while gaining the defender one.
Height counts in every ruleset. Shoot down onto a lower enemy and you roll an extra attack die — which is why archers climb. In Advanced play melee joins in: striking downhill is +1, fighting uphill is −1, and a charge up into a braced defender becomes a very poor idea. Melee can't reach across a full two-tier drop at all.
Under Advanced rules a unit stops rolling one flat number. It has separate Attack and Defence dice — Orcs hit at 4 but defend at 2 — and armour becomes Toughness: a wound roll that lets the Ogre shrug off hits that would fell a man.
Under Advanced rules that single Combat Value splits into separate Attack and Defence dice, and tough units gain a wound-ward that shrugs hits off entirely. Flip the switch to roll it that way.
Two rulesets
Advanced isn't a different game — it's the same board, the same armies and the same objectives with more war modelled underneath. Every battle asks which rules you want before it begins, so you're never locked in.
| Rule | Basic | Advanced |
|---|---|---|
| Who acts next | A Battle card is drawn and names a unit type. Chaotic, fast, full of swings. | Roll for initiative, then alternate — one unit each, side by side. Chess-tight. |
| Movement | One hex per activation, for everyone. | A Move stat per unit — cavalry 3, infantry 2, monsters 2, war machines 1. |
| Combat dice | One Combat Value, used to attack and defend alike. | Separate Attack and Defence dice, and separate values again for melee and missile fire. |
| Armour | None — a hit is a hit. | Toughness wards wounds on a d6 roll; armour saves shrug off more. |
| High ground | Height gates movement — one tier at a time — and shooting down is +1 attack die. | All of that, plus melee: +1 striking downhill, −1 fighting uphill. |
| Nerve | Units fight to the last life. | Morale, Shaken units, retreats, rallies, leader auras, and a defence penalty for anyone pressed from two sides at once. |
| Formations | — | Charge bonus for cavalry riding in, Shield Wall for infantry braced beside their own kind. |
| Army character | Both armies fight by the same rules. | Faction traits: the Horde is a fearless mob that unravels when its bosses fall; the Kingdom is disciplined and holds firm in formation. |
| Veterans | — | Three kills makes a unit Battle-Hardened: a gold star and an extra attack die for the rest of the battle. |
| Everything else | Battle magic, war machines, the tower, cover and terrain, drawbridges, objectives and the Command deck work identically in both. | |
Every mission briefing carries a Rules toggle, and Quick Battle offers two one-tap presets — Beginner and Tabletop — plus independent dropdowns if you want card activation with advanced combat, or any other mix.
Teaching someone the game? Run the mission in Basic. Replaying it for the challenge? Run it again in Advanced. Same mission, different war.
Beyond the line of battle
And every regiment answers when you call it — each unit type has its own voice for being selected, attacking and dying, so a battle sounds like a battle rather than a menu.
Casters roll two dice plus their Magic Skill against a spell's Casting Value. Land it and a Searing Bolt, Fireball, Terror or Force Push goes off. A caster keeps every spell he knows all battle — the cost isn't ammunition, it's the roll. Fail and nothing happens; roll badly enough and the magic turns on its own caster.
The Mighty Cannon and the Ork Catapult hurl shot eight hexes down a path of tiles — with a real chance of a misfire at the muzzle. The Ogre Champion plays a shuffled sub-sequence of moves and attacks, slowing as it's wounded.
A hand of one-shot tactics: Reinforce, Medic, Frenzy, Hardened and Quick Time. One per turn, gone once played — the difference between a line that breaks and a line that holds.
The armies
Gold and steel
A hundred years of watchfires along the border marches. Disciplined, drilled and expensive — Kingdom troops hold their shape, and in Advanced play a soldier braced beside his own kind shrugs off the shock of casualties.
Green and iron
Summer mosquitoes for a hundred years — until something gave the horde a mind. Numerous, cheap and vicious. Fearless to a fault, but fell the bosses and the green tide loses its nerve and mills about confused.
The muster roll
Two are in your hands today. Four are drafted, statted and waiting their turn.
Drilled humans. Knights, cannon and a line that holds when it's braced.
Cheap, numerous, fearless — until you fell the bosses holding it together.
Not an army — a web of cells. Quiet, fast, and after something the crown can't name.
Slow, relentless and immune to fear — because fear needs a mind to hold it.
Mountainfolk. Few, slow, armoured to the eyes, and impossible to shift.
Elves. Elite, expensive and few — superb bowmen and battle-mages who cannot afford losses.
Unreleased armies arrive in add-on packs alongside their own campaigns. See every army and its full roster →
The board
Hand-laid tilesets, weather and time of day, and a HUD that stays out of the way. Nothing here is a mock-up — it's the game running.
The war of Averlund
Hand-authored campaigns with briefings, objectives and a hand-drawn campaign map — not procedurally generated skirmishes. Fight one side to its bitter victory, then fight the other side of the same collapse.
You command the High Kingdom. For a hundred years the greenskins were summer mosquitoes — but mosquitoes do not march in step, and something is giving the horde a mind. Three acts, from a burning mill-village to the last thing anyone on this border expected to have to do.
The same war from the losing side. You command what is left of the Horde, running north from extermination, in a persistent warband where your dead do not come back and every fresh greenskin is bought with plundered gold. Being the hunted is the point.
Hold a ford for points. Escort a wounded lord to safety. Survive a storm encircled. Cut down a warlord to end it in one stroke. Each briefing tells you exactly what victory looks like.
Opt-in persistent rosters: survivors carry into the next mission, veterans harden, and a wiped-out, broke warband ends the campaign for good. Losses make room — call a unit up from reserve mid-battle to fill the gap where the line broke.
No story required. Pick two armies, a battlefield — fords, plains, twin rivers, a frozen crag — set a points cap and build a force. Then set the weather and the hour: fight the same ground in clear dawn or a blizzard at night.
Add-ons
The base game is the whole game — both campaigns, both armies, both rulesets, no ads and no timers. Add-on packs bring new armies and new wars for a single, one-off price. No subscriptions, no loot boxes, nothing that expires.
Both campaigns (19 missions), the High Kingdom and Ork Horde rosters, Basic and Advanced rulesets, Skirmish, Quick Battle, the tutorial and the Command deck.
The hand behind the witch-relics, marching in its own colours at last — a third playable army and a campaign where you are the thing the marches are afraid of. Once unlocked, the Unbound field in Skirmish and Quick Battle against everything you already own.
Elves, Dwarves and the barrow-dead are drafted and waiting on art — each with its own roster, Battle deck and tactical character. Packs unlock a campaign and its armies together.
On mobile, purchases are one-off non-consumable unlocks through the App Store and Google Play — buy once and it's yours on that account, on every device you own, forever. Restore Purchases is always available if you change phone. On desktop, packs will be sold through Steam alongside the base game.
Locked content is never hidden from you: you'll see the campaigns and armies you don't own, marked with a padlock, so you always know what a pack contains before you pay for it.
Play anywhere
One game, laid out for all three. On a tablet the whole battlefield sits in front of you like a board on a table; on a phone the camera follows the fight and the card fan folds to fit; on Mac or Windows it opens in a window as big as you've got. Landscape throughout, touch-first on mobile, pointer-first on desktop.
No account, no connection, no server. The whole war runs on your device.
Battles and campaign progress are written durably to the device — close the app mid-round and pick it up later.
Nothing interrupts a battle. No energy bars, no waiting, no video to watch for a reward.
Two commanders, one device — hand it across the table between activations.
Mac and Windows builds, not a browser tab — coming to Steam. Universal on Mac: one download for Apple silicon and Intel alike.
The same rules engine and the same content everywhere. A battle is a battle whichever screen it's on.
Questions
No. The Basic rules are three ideas — draw a card, move a hex, roll the dice — and the built-in tutorial is a guided course on a live board: finish a lesson and it offers you the next one. Mid-battle, the Army Book's Rules tab has the whole ruleset in short sections you can look up on the spot, showing only the rules actually in play. Advanced exists for when you want it, and never before.
Yes. The ruleset is chosen per battle, not per save. Every mission briefing has a Basic/Advanced toggle, and Quick Battle lets you mix activation and combat styles independently — card-driven activation with advanced combat, for instance.
No. Warmasters plays entirely offline — no accounts, no logins, no servers, and your saves live on your device. The one exception is buying or restoring an add-on pack, which goes through the App Store or Google Play and needs a connection for that moment.
Identical content and rules — one engine, one set of campaigns. The layout adapts: tablets and desktops show more of the battlefield at once, phones lean on the camera and a folding card fan. Everything plays in landscape.
Yes — native Mac and Windows builds, not a browser tab, and they're coming to Steam. The Mac build is universal, so one download covers Apple silicon and Intel. Saves live in a file on desktop rather than in app storage, so they can be backed up, synced, or carried by Steam Cloud.
Neither. The only purchases are one-off add-on packs that unlock a campaign and its armies permanently. No consumables, no currency, no subscriptions.
Two players can share one device today. Online play is on the long list — the rules engine is already deterministic and controller-driven, which is the hard part — but nothing is promised until it's built.
Playtest — open now
The Mac and Windows builds are in testing right now, and we're still handing them out. Both campaigns, nothing locked, no time limit. Tell us which you want and it comes straight back to you.
Opens your mail app to hello@studiobastion.com. No form, no list, no tracking — a real reply from a real person.
Take the field
Warmasters is coming to iPhone, iPad and Android. Follow the muster and we'll tell you the day it lands — nothing else, ever.
The Mac and Windows builds are being tested right now — ask and you can have one today. Mobile follows on the App Store and Google Play, and desktop goes public on Steam. No pre-orders, no email harvesting.