Mage Knight: Omens New Game Mechanic
Adventuring Companies

by Kevin Goddard

Mage Knight: Omens adds a couple of easy-to-learn game mechanics to the Mage Knight play environment. Indeed, players should be very familiar with the concepts behind one of the new mechanics: adventuring companies.

Collector’s Number (Num)
The collector’s number of an adventuring company card begins with “AC.” Each player may field only one adventuring company card per game.

Adventuring Company Name
The name of the adventuring company.

Ability
The ability that this adventuring company grants. All members of a player’s army gain this ability. In addition, members of an adventuring company can create formations with each other.

Point Value
How many points it takes to add the adventuring company to your army.

Cohorts
Playing an adventuring company card’s cohort reduces the adventuring company’s point cost (described in Cohort Discount, below). A player is not limited to using only the cohorts listed on the adventuring company. Cohorts in Mage Knight: Omens are drawn from the following sets: the Mage Knight Starter Set, Dark Riders, Sorcery, Omens, and future Mage Knight releases!

Cohort Discount
The number of points subtracted from the adventuring company card's point value for each listed warrior (cohort) that appears in your army.

For example, Tere is using the Order of the Crescent Sword adventuring company card in her army. She also has four of that adventuring company’s cohorts in her battleforce: one Harka Orc, one Raydan Marz, and two Delphana Masters. So she subtracts the cohort discount (7) four times from the cost of the adventuring company (35), for a final adventuring company cost of 7.

Adventuring companies provide a common theme to multifactional armies – with a simple new game mechanic. Check back next week for the subject of our next new game mechanic article: champions!

View the PDF

So, it's not completely clear, but to get this straight - once you play this your whole army is the adventuring company and anything named in the sub-area is a cohort?

Ability looks interesting anyway. We'll see what else is in store.

When you play an AC, your entire army is able to formation together, regardless of faction AND you get the ability granted on the AC. The Cohorts named in the Cohort area simply allow you to get the Cohort Discount from the AC (So playing Raydan Marz with this AC would reduce the cost to 28).

So if play 8 members of the cohort does it subtract from my build total?

Nope, it says that playing cohorts only reduces the cost of the AC card.

Nice concept, but I play faction pure.

-Q

Hrm... these could wind up being very very strong. If there is enough variety in AC's made, it could spell the last nail in the coffin for the people calling for faction purity because in many cases these may turn out to be 'as cheap as free' ( ;) ) or near enough .

It all depends though, we can't jump to conclusions until we see what the other AC cards are like I suppose.

More cards nobody need....

Anyway, MK is dead in my region before Omens is tournament legal (Reason: Angry Warlords. Only useless cards as envoy rewards).


Dark Shadow

My question is if you can reduce the cost of the adventuring company to 0 if you played enough characters. If so, that can be very powerful indeed.

That seems to be the case, as I mentioned. How good these things are will really depend on the chosen cohorts though.

0 cost and free healing attempts after one figure dies is useful. I hope the adventuring company figures are nons for the most part, not a card for multiple uniques to move together. In other words, I hope the adventuring companies are a way to boost nons so that they can better take on big uniques.

The real challenge is to build an army using the "cohorts" that will be effective, to get the most bang for your buck. As for the preview card, just how well all the listed cohorts of Rayden Marz work together remains to be seen.

bleah, I don't like the list of cohorts on this card. I like the IDEA, but not this execution.

These cards were (well, still are) a chance for WK to really reward single-faction players, or even better, reward pure sub-faction players!

I can only hope the other cards will. Why reward combos like these cohorts? people already use these types of combos to build uber-armies, reward builds that have inherent weaknesses, like pure sub-faction, and I think it'd really enrich the game.

Maybe it's not realistic, but I wish stuff like this was run by the gamers in opinion polls or something, or for feedback. Of course, I'm hoping the other cards will answer my fears....

This pleases me. Until I read the entire thing, I thought you needed every cohort for it to work. This is actually much better then I thought it would be.

That, and a Galeshi? Count me in. Can't get enough of the desert people.

Khamsin Pistoleer?
Galeshi Stalker?
Surprised nobody mentioned them. Now to see the sculpts and stats to go with the names. But now we have names. :)
I wonder if the G stalkers are a new form of Nightstalker? and the Pistoleers are nother version of the Freelancer? I hope not for the Freelancer, that was a completely worthless fig in keeping with BPR tradition.

On the other hand these Adventurer Company cards sound like they may be neat and a way to add "mercenary" companies into the flavor of MK. :D