About
Built for the table it came from
Warmasters is a hex-and-dice war game made by Studio Bastion in the UK — a one-studio attempt to put the feel of a big-box tabletop battle onto a phone, a tablet and a desktop without sanding the edges off it.
Why
The best wargames were the ones you could teach in a minute
The early-90s big-box war games got something right that modern strategy games often lose: you could open the lid, teach the whole thing to someone across the table in about sixty seconds, and still be arguing about a knight charge two hours later. A card said who moved. Dice said who died. Everything else was terrain and nerve.
Digital wargames tend to run the other way — spreadsheets of modifiers, tutorials measured in hours. Warmasters starts where the board game started: draw a card, move a hex, roll the dice. Then, when you want the rest of it, the Advanced ruleset hands over the full tabletop simulation — attack and defence dice, toughness, morale, charges, formations, faction character — on the exact same board.
That's the whole design thesis. One game, two depths, and the switch is always in your hand.
Principles
What this game refuses to do
No ads. Ever.
Nothing interrupts a battle. No rewarded video, no interstitial between missions, no banner eating the board.
No timers, no energy
You can play the whole campaign in one sitting if you want to. Nothing recharges, nothing expires, nothing is sold to skip a wait.
No accounts, no servers
There's nothing to sign into and nothing of ours to phone home to. The rules engine runs on your device and your saves stay there — the network is only used to complete a purchase.
No random unit packs
Add-ons are one-off unlocks that list exactly what's inside before you buy. No currency, no crates, no chance.
No hidden dice
Every roll is shown, every modifier is logged in the battle log, and the same seed always produces the same battle.
No procedural filler
Every mission is hand-built — its map, its forces, its objective and its briefing. Nineteen of them, not nineteen hundred.
Under the hood
The rules engine is the product
Warmasters is built as a pure rules engine with a renderer bolted on, not the other way round. The engine has no idea a screen exists: it holds the game state, takes commands, emits events, and rolls its dice through a seeded generator. Everything visual reads that state and draws it.
That sounds like housekeeping, and it buys three things you can feel:
- Determinism. The same battle, replayed from the same seed, resolves identically — which is why saves, undo-proof logs and reproducible bug reports work at all.
- Two rulesets without a fork. Activation and combat are pluggable. Basic and Advanced are presets over the same engine, which is why you can mix them — card activation with advanced combat, for instance.
- Content that's authored, not hard-coded. Units, decks, factions, maps, missions and campaigns are data. The studio's own editors produce that data; the shipping app has them stripped out entirely.
Built with Svelte and TypeScript, wrapped for iOS and Android with Capacitor and for Mac and Windows with Electron, and covered by a test suite that keeps the dice honest. One codebase, one engine, five platforms.
The studio
Studio Bastion
Studio Bastion is a small independent games studio in the United Kingdom. Warmasters is its war game: designed, coded, written and assembled in-house, with the world of Averlund built alongside the rules rather than pasted on afterwards.
If you want to talk about the game — a bug, a rules argument, a review copy, or a pack you'd like to see made — the door is open.