Recording and writing battle reports

I think it's fair to say that most of the current regulars on this forum are pretty good at this and will each have their preferred method of doing so. This post is aimed at the users who perhaps don't write reports and would like to start, It will be a fairly brief post initially. It would also be interesting to see how other forum users go about it.


I will start by saying that in around 90% of my club games, we will have lists before the game, which makes how I record battles far easier.

List Building

I won't cover this in any depth. Suffice to say that there are two main programs used:

Battle Scribe (which is free)
Army Builder (which you have to buy)

Of the two, I much prefer Army Builder as the layout is better and it can show every rule for the specific army (including spells), so you don't tend to need to bring an additional army book with you.

Battle Preparation

I tend to have a standard battle reporter template that I use. In advance of the game, I complete certain fields on the 'START' tab of the template:

• Armies involved
• List of units/Characters

These completed fields then feed into the other sections of the template (such as movement/combat etc.).

It also contains fields for showing magic cast, terrain used, number of photos taken at any specific point. I've basically tried to cover most areas of the game and this template allows me record things going along with minimal impact on the game.

Example of my battle reporter template

Battle report template - whfb dwarf.xlsx (17.54 KB)

Writing the report

I tend to start by uploading photos to the laptop and renaming them all so I know what turn/army they relate to. It allows me to easily refer back to them in conjunction with the template when writing it up.

I then write a basic report, splitting it by:

• Army lists and thoughts
• Pre-match rolls (spells etc.)
• Scenario
• Terrain
• Deployment
• Turns (split by army)
• Results
• Post match thoughts

In this, I note down the key things that occurred each turn. Once this is done, I'll often go back and then flesh it out and try and make it a more interesting read (sometimes successfully!). 

I'll then add the relevant photos to each of the above sections.

Only once this is done will I create the accompanying maps and I use the program, Battle Chronicler, for this task. Yes it is an extra task (and can be a bit of a ball-ache) but I think it really helps give a great overview of what is occurring each turn.

I won't go into how to use the program as it has been done by others and probably in a far better way than I could do, so instead i'll add some links to some of the posts/blogs I first used when learning the program

Battle Chronicler - Official site - getting started
Olannon's Guide to Battle Chronicler (note this post has been hit by the photobucket issues!)
Fighting-a-better-battle-report-part-1 (Army list creation and terrain)
Fighting-a-better-battle-report-part-2 (Deployment and turns)

The one final thing i'll say is, I normally write and record all of these at first instance on a blog before transferring them to the forum (There are two main blogs people use: Blogger (owned by google) and Wordpress). This allows me to have a record of them that I control and will retain for as long as I want, that also shouldn't be subject to the 'curse of photobucket' (or the whim of the forum admin/owners). Being a paranoid sort, I've also started to store a word version of the battle report write ups, together with all the photos/maps on the laptop.

And as a closing item, here is an example of battle reports made using the above:

On the forum: 
On my Wordpress blog: