A few days ago, I received a box of loot from the [*Kings of War: Vanguard* Kickstarter](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1744629938/kings-of-war-vanguard-the-fantasy-skirmish-wargame) and I plan to unbox it bit by bit to double check that everything is here and give you my opinion on these new miniatures. Based on past experience, these new models from Mantic tend to be quite good for war games and role-playing games.

However, before I get into that, here is a look at the basic dice for the game. As I [wrote before,](https://steemit.com/games/@jacobtothe/on-dice) new games are often made with custom dice and experiment with different options than standard six-sided cubes. *Vanguard* uses a d8 system alongside color-coded power dice of different colors and odds.

![20181108_003154.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmVRQRmhj1ccZwuic5D9pGCZeKt98GPYw3ii6vsZ6HuMib/20181108_003154.jpg)

Red dice have 2x blank sides, 3x one-power sides, and 1x two-power side. The white dice are a bit better with only 1x blank side and 2x two-power sides. The blue die is the best with 2x one-power sides, 3x two-power sides, and 1x three-power side. Each player gets 3x red dice plus bonus dice according to their army to generate power points than can be spent to activate special abilities, so there is a resource management aspect to using special abilities.

The d8 dice are used for all other rolls, and the game uses an "exploding dice" system. If you roll an unmodified natural 8, you get an automatic success and roll again with an additional die! Yes, these can also explode indefinitely!

More to come later as time and space allows...