Tools of the Trade: War Room

Hello,

Tools of the trade will be a series of posts devoted to the tools I use for Warmachine, from paints, to paint brush to list builders. I'll be discussing my personal experince with them and everything that has to do with them.

Today we'll talk about that much talked about app, the War Room. The first thing I want to point out is what War Room was designed to be.

"War Room is designed to be a card library and a free-form tool to organize all the cards you need to play the game and requires knowledge of how to build lists. This allows the app to support army lists of almost any design."

Source: http://privateerpress.com/war-room-road-map-and-faq
Now that we have that stated, we can all agree that the current War Room sucks as a list builder. It wont do the computation for you on your theme lists, it won't stop you from adding models when you've excceded point cost or field allocation, it won't even stop you from attaching the Squire to a unit. Yes, as a list builder it sucks compared to say the old but decommissioned iBodger, the online list builder Forward Kommander works better as a list builder.

The next question I'm sure your all asking now is, "What is it for then?". The answer lies in one of the features is has that neither iBodger nor Forward Kommander has. A card library that for all intention purposes functions like the real cards. Let me break down its features that I find useful in this department.

• Once you purchase a faction deck all the cards of said faction becomes accessible as well as all future cards of said faction.
• Damage tracking on game mode

Let me now discuss what I find so useful with the features I listed, starting with the first one. Having all of your faction's cards on hand is great, having it in a portable device or in my case a tablet is awesome. When I'm out and I think of a possible synergy with certain models I often wish I had the book or the card on had so I can confirm the synergy. Now I do, and its also in an easy to access package. The card library is sorted by faction and then further sorted by model type, warcaster, warjacks, units, solos and attachments. This feature also allows me to proxy the models I want to try out before buying without the need to print out their stats or buy/borrow the card of said model. Another bonus to one who likes to proxy before buying is that once a new model is out you get the cards, you can start testing before the actual model is actually available at your local game store. Additional gravy on this is that rules and cards will be kept up to date, meaning that when you reference a card you know its the most updated version of it.

Now, personally this is what I got War Room for. I don't mind having cards, but for me having them spread on the table or on a stack and trying to look for the right card when tracking damage bogs the game down. With War Room I have all the damage tracks in an easy to access system. The nice thing about this is that once you've marked all the damages it shows you how much life it has left, no need to count the unmarked boxes in the track of a warjack or warbeast.

Now, its not a perfect system. Like many point out the list builder could use some works, well may be ALOT of work. However for what it does I think nothing else like it currently exists. They will probably improve its list building function, the community pressure is too great to ignore. So if your looking for a list builder only, then don't use War Room. If you want a cards and rules library that is easy to use and allows you to do damage tracking. Then War Room may just be for you.