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My Silver Bayonet Review:

Lore: 6/10

Gameplay: 8/10

Hobbying: 6/10

The Silver Bayonet is a skirmish-style wargame that has a good lineage, coming from the creator of a similar scoped game, Frostgrave. However, in my view The Silver Bayonet is a much more adventurous endeavor, having more of a narrative point of view than Frostgrave, with an easier elevator pitch.

And that elevator pitch for The Silver Bayonet is: warbands on the outskirts of the Napoleonic era fight vampires, werewolves (and each other) in a skirmish style game of gothic horror.

The Lore of The Silver Bayonet

In a way, The Silver Bayonet reminds me of Konflikt 47, in that it takes a well known historical war era and includes elements of the supernatural fighting alongside regular human troops. But while Konflikt 47 does that on a relatively large scale (platoon-sized forces with vehicles), The Silver Bayonet is on a much more intimate level, with each force being fewer than eight or nine models (usually more like six or seven), and with elements of RPG storytelling that involve getting to know your warband’s member’s personalities.

The story of The Silver Bayonet is this: there is, during the Napoleonic Wars, spirits or demons that feed off of pain, fear and rage. These demons are known as Harvestmen, and they are gorging themselves on the blood and gore of the wars ravaging Europe. But the Harvestmen have taken a step further, introducing supernatural horrors like vampires and werewolves to maraud villages and farms. And, whether intentionally or unintentionally, they have opened a rift between the living world and the fairy world, allowing goblins and trolls and more to enter.

The eponymous Silver Bayonet is a prize or badge of honor that is bestowed on a British soldier who kills one of these gothic horrors, and usually the bearer of the Silver Bayonet gets recruited by an Exploring Officer into a small specialist unit that is working to destroy the Harvestmen and their evils (and, very often, stop enemy nations from doing the same). See, in the era of the Harvestmen, the main powers of Europe–Britain, France, Russia, Spain, Austria, and Prussia–are all fighting the Harvestmen, but not together–never together. They are constantly at war with each other.

Therefore, while the foes that you will fight in The Silver Bayonet include ghosts, ghouls and goblins, those monsters are controlled in the game by a series of flowcharts–an AI for monsters–and your real opponent is your friend’s nation’s warband.

My main nitpick with the lore is that there just isn’t enough depth. There are werewolves and vampires and ghosts and goblins, but none of those are very original ideas. The big neat lore item that I love most–the Harvestmen–we never see in the gameplay.

Creating a Unit

Each nation in The Silver Bayonet has access to a different array of specialist who can be in the warband, or unit. And while many of them overlap–all can take infantrymen, cavalrymen, and veteran hunters, for example–there are some that are specific to individual nations. The Austrians can take Dhamphirs, the child of a woman who was bitten by a vampire. The Russians and Spanish can take Champions of the Faith, religious zealots who can perform miracles. The British can take Highlanders, who need no explanation. The French can take Vivanderies, women who are not soldiers but caretakers, nurses, and suppliers. And the Russians can themselves take werebears (another place where The Silver Bayonet reminds me of Konflikt 47.)

The construction of unit is based around the Exploring Officer, for whom you create an RPG-like backstory. This storytelling is part of the main fun of The Silver Bayonet: you are not merely selecting a standard commander with a standard set of stats, but you get to make up a tale for him (or her) and give them different abilities and stats to reflect their history.

These abilities come in the form of Attributes (not to be confused with stats, such as Speed, Courage and Health) which are fun flavor pieces that add a lot of customization to your characters. An Exploring Officer might have Great Faith that gives them a degree of immunity to some demonic powers, as well as a background as an Artillerist, allowing them to fire artillery pieces during a scenario. Or a different Exploring Officer might be a Master of Cover and an Expert Climber–essentially a Napoleonic ninja.

Scenarios and Campaigns

There are generally no pitched battles in The Silver Bayonet–you are almost always competing with your enemy to obtain an objective, all the while being disrupted by horrors and monsters.

So let’s look at the first Scenario of the game, The Investigation. In this scenario, near a war camp where two nations are meeting in battle, an old man comes in from the pickets telling stories of a “bogey-man” attacking farms and stealing various body parts. The two opposing Exploring Officers take their specialist units to investigate. There are five Clue markers on the table and an assortment of terrain. The players roll to see who deploys where, and then the race is on to search through the clues.

The Clue tokens are very important, as the produce not only the good news but the bad news for the players. The good news is that turning over clue tokens will give you experience and abilities that will help you to level up for the next scenario. The bad news is that monsters live underneath some of those tokens. In the first scenario there is only one monster–a hobgoblin–but finding him and killing him will give you a lot of experience. And you get experience by inflicting casualties on your opponent.

And the experience (and casualties) elements are fun because that’s where you determine whether a certain specialist lives or dies, is permanently disabled, is perhaps mentally scarred, and, of course, levels up and gets better equipment.

Hobbying The Silver Bayonet

I must admit that I love everything about The Silver Bayonet that we’ve talked about so far, and I set out to make a specialist unit of my own and play through the campaign–but I was frustrated.

It’s a models agnostic game, meaning that it doesn’t come with any pre-made kits (unlike its predecessor Frostgrave). This should give plenty of opportunity for kitbashing, right?

At first, the game appears to be very much like Sludge War, in that it is the perfect opportunity for kitbashing some Napoleonics into something new, bizarre and fun. And to some extent it is, but… not really. An infantryman is just an infantryman, and even though you give him a different uniform (the book specifically talks about varying uniforms and how you don’t have to be strict about historical accuracy) he still is just an infantryman. There’s nothing wrong with an infantryman, and I feel like the model that I made was pretty good, but to accumulate all of the models needed to make one specialist unit? Either you have to buy a LOT of boxes, do a lot of sculpting, or–best of all–have a 3D printer.

Now, I have a FDM printer (an Ender 3 Pro, which I love), but I don’t have a resin printer, and finding models was really a pain in the neck for me. I took several models from the Warlord Games Waterloo set that I’ve been raiding for bits for a year. I took the Molly Pitcher model from my Warlord Games American Revolution British Army set, and that’s also where I took my Native Scout (one of the Woodland Natives from that set). I fashioned a Highlander out of a D&D model and some green stuff, and I proxied my Konflikt 47 Soviet Ursus Infantry as a werebear. But, that’s a LOT of kits. If I didn’t have all of that stuff kicking around, that’s several hundred dollars worth of kits, and that was a little discouraging.

Because as fun as it is to kitbash (and I love kitbashing) I don’t love to see two models out of a box of sixty get used and the rest end up on a shelf. This was easier for Sludge War because in that game, although you’re using Agincourt Knights and American Civil War artillery, you’re using an entire army’s worth of it. There’s very little going to waste.

Essentially, The Silver Bayonet is a game for people who, like me, have a LOT of kits floating around in their pile of shame, or someone with a 3D printer who can buy a specialist unit for under $30 and print them all off.

Conclusion

I really like this game a lot. I want to love it. The gameplay is my favorite part of the game, especially the campaign system and scenarios. But the lore only goes so far and then it starts to feel a little generic. (I would love to see something more original than goblins and ghosts. The unique idea we get are the Harvestmen, but we don’t see them in the actual game.) That said, what exists is very fun and very flavorful.

And I wish that the hobby aspect was easier/less expensive. When I’m playing a skirmish game, I don’t want to have to buy lots of expensive army kits. That said, if you have a 3D printer (or access to a friend’s) then you’re sitting pretty.

For this The Silver Bayonet review I give the game:

Lore: 6/10
Gameplay: 8/10
Hobbying: 6/10