The Warrior Archer is a key unit in all the Caribbean style Native American factions in Blood & Plunder, and is included in several other Native and European factions as a Support unit across all of the expansion books. Their reliable ability to land hits with their bows even at long range, in addition to their strong weaponry options make this unit one of the standby units for many Native American Factions in Blood & Plunder.

Unit Description

Most Native American tribes have long-standing cultural beliefs about warfare and human life, which produces a reluctance to participate in decisive engagements. This usually means sudden archery attacks from thick concealment, only committing to a melee at the most opportune moments.

Warrior Archer Stats & Abilities

The Warrior Archer is focused on ranged shooting, and their melee stats are not impressive at all.

Warrior Archers cost 5 points per model and have the following stats (Skill/Save):

Fight 6/8
Shoot 5/6
Resolve 6

The real impressive stat here is their 5 Shoot Skill. This is the best base Shoot Skill in the game, only shared by the Boucaniers and Boucaniere. With this low Shoot Skill, the Warrior Archers can both land hits from long ranges (up to 23.99″ without any modifiers), and drop high percentages of hits on units at close range.

Their Shoot Save of 6 is excellent, and is improved by various Special Rules native to the unit, or provided by other rules from the Faction, Commander or possible Characters.

The Fight Skill of 6 is OK, but you usually want to keep this unit out of the melee fighting if you can. Their Fight Save of 8 is dreadful. Only commit this unit to melee if it is key to winning the game, or entirely unavoidable.

The Special Rules for the Warrior Archer include:

• Evade
• Hidden
• Scouts

Hidden is an excellent rule on this unit, considering its long range with that 5 Shoot skill.

If a Hidden unit is 12” or more from an attacker and in Cover (or if Limited Visibility is in effect), attacking units add a +1 penalty to all Ranged attacks against that unit, and any Special Rules that allow a Ranged attack to hit on an 11+ are negated. This rule has no effect if the unit is within a Structure, and is negated by the High Standing Special Rule.

This can help keep your unit immune to longer range attacks while you can still hit them with decent numbers! You just need to find some good cover, and keep a little out of 12″ from most of the enemy force. This really comes into play when you’re up against units with 7 Shoot skill. At further than 12″, they won’t be able to hit you at all while you can drop arrows on them with 8’s! It can be effective to put a unit of Warrior Archers on a flank and longer range and they can just keep shooting volleys off at longer distance with good effect while it feels like too much work to move a unit all the way over to deal with them. Don’t forget this valuable rule!

And if they do send a unit to root out your annoying archers, you have the Evade rule to save you!

When charged or if activated while engaged in Melee combat, this unit may gain one Fatigue to take a Move action to move away from any units that are charging or it is engaged with. When being charged, this can be done instead of making a Defensive Attack. The charging unit is still moved whether the Charge was successful or not. This unit may use this ability even if it would cause them to become Shaken, but they do not fall back a second time as a result, nor will they Go Prone.

The Warrior Archer is notoriously bad a saving in melee, so using the Evade rule is really important. Do whatever you can to avoid taking a Charge from the enemy.

You can use units with Evade as bait for your enemy. Its one of those rules that its easy to forget, or not calculate into the plans. Its always polite to remind your opponent of your rules and abilities before and during the game, but a baiting a unit to charging and then leaving them high and dry can throw the enemy off balance.

Evade also provides the ability to leave an ongoing melee, which is very rare in Blood & Plunder. If you find yourself in a melee for whatever reason, you can just take a Fatigue to leave! Not common, but it is a very powerful option.

Scouts is a standard rule on pretty much all Native American units that lets them move through difficult terrain without the -1″ movement penalty.

This unit may move through rough area terrain (not inside structures and not while Climbing) without the -1″ move penalty

This is powerful in your normal Move actions during the game, but it can compound with the other abilities that your Warrior Archer might have or gain within various Native American factions.

• Evade – When you move away, you might move further than then enemy can potentially charge again, making you safe from that second Charge attempt.
• Quick – Free moves are potentially worth more for you than your enemy!
• Skirmishers – More full sized free moves!
• Vanguard – This is a pretty rare ability for any native unit (Wabanaki from Fire on the Frontier), but it would let you deploy and them move a full 4″ at the start of the game.
• Falling back when Shaken – This is a big one. If you become Shaken in melee combat, you can retreat 4″ through cover while your enemy might only be able to follow up for 3″!

Warrior Archers Weapons

Warrior Archers are armed with Bows and Standard Melee Weapons. They have a variety of additional weapon options that we will look at in the next section.

Bows are not nearly as deadly as gunpowder weapons, but they have the huge advantage of not gaining Reload tokens. This lets you shoot multiple times per activation, or continue to Move and Shoot on every activation instead of becoming more stationary to keep up fire like conventional units using muskets.

Your targets get two important bonuses when Saving against bows: they get a significant -3 bonus to their Save target number and they can always roll as many Save dice as they received hits, even if that number is greater than the number of models in the unit. This reduces lethality by a lot but it doesn’t make bows useless. You just have to remember that you need other ways to kill things in your force.

What bows can do very effectively is help control the board by consistently laying down fire that can produce Fatigue on enemy units, depriving them of important actions, and softening them up for melee attacks from other units in your Force.

The lack of Reloads mean you can shoot up to 3 times per turn as well! Remember that every time you shoot past your first Shoot action gives your unit one Fatigue, but it can be worth it. But with that 5 Shoot Skill, shooting multiple times is going to yield results. You just need to manage Fatigue carefully. Shoot-Shoot-Rally is a solid sequence if you’re activating with 3 Actions. Avoid voluntarily leaving your unit with 2 Fatigue since it could easily become Shaken before you’re able to activate it again.

Another thing to consider with bows is that they’re always ready to fire so Command Points from outside the unit are very valuable. Commanders with wide Command Range and even Characters like Officers are very valuable with bows on the table.

Poisoned Arrows – This equipment option is only available to a couple Caribbean/South American factions in the game, but the option to use Poisoned Arrows is really valuable on the Warrior Archers. It forces your target to re-roll one successful die in their resulting Fatigue Test after you shoot them. It’s multiplies Fatigue output and can be used to great effect! Look at the South American Tribes, Caribs/Kalinago, and Caribbean Tribes Factions for Warrior Archers with the ability to take the infamous Poisoned Arrows equipment.

Warrior Archers Unit Options

This unit has several interesting options:

• If not armed with Pistols, unit may add Musket Sidearms for 4 points (not per model).
• Unit may add Pistols for 1 point per model (not with muskets)
• Unit may be upgraded to Veterans for 1 point per model.

The sidearm musket option is really valuable here. Even through it only provides a single shot during the game, the shot will usually be pretty deadly with that 5 Shoot Skill. Warrior Archers have a hard time actually knocking out models with their bows, but having this one shot that can give you the ability to take down a unit at a decisive moment. 4pts is a lot, especially for a smaller unit, but it is often worth the cost.

The addition of a pistol is not nearly as valuable in most cases, especially since it is fairly costly at 1pt per model. It’s good to have as a help against being Charged, but Evade is there for you without spending any extra points.

The option to upgrade to Veteran is intriguing but I find it isn’t necessary in most cases. If you are bring units that either rely on Spades (Warriors, African Warriors, Young Warriors), or Inexperienced units that already use your Diamonds effectively, you are unlikely to get a lot of additional value out of the upgrade since those cards will generally be allotted to them, leaving the Clubs and Hearts for your Trained units like the Warrior Archer.

This isn’t a unit option, but this seems to be the place to bring it up. The South American Commanders and the Native American Standard Commanders all have the option of taking the Great Warriors ability which can benefit the Warrior Archer. I you attach a Commander with Great Warriors Special Rule to a unit, once per turn you can apply a -1 bonus to any one test taken during the turn. This can often be applied to the Warrior Archers Shoot Skill, bringing it down to 4! This is a great time to use that Sidearm Musket! You can combo even harder with Factions or Commanders that grant the Ruthless ability for another layer of bonus, bringing their Shoot down to a base of 3.

Factions that Include Warrior Archers

This unit comes up in many Native American forces in No Peace Beyond the Line, Fire on the Frontier, and Raise the Black, plus they appear in several European and Unaligned factions as a support unit:

• Caribs/Kalinago (Core)
• Caribbean Tribes (Core)
• South American Tribes (Core)
• NPBtL and FotF Northeastern Woodland Tribes (Core)
• RtB Northeastern Woodland Tribes (Support)
• Iroquois(Support)
• Wabanaki (Support) (NPBtL and FotF)
• NPBtL Westo (Core)
• FotF Westo (Support)
• Southeastern Woodland Tribes (Core) (NPBtL and FotF)
• New England Tribes (Core)
• King Philip’s Alliance (Support)
• Tuscarora (Core)
• Choctaw (Core)
• Cherokee (Core)
• Yamasee (Core)

• Swedish Militia (Support)
• Spanish Army (Support)
• Spanish Mission Garrison (Support)
• Spanish Militia (Core in La Florida Force Option)
• Brazilian Portuguese Garrison (Support)
• Miskito Zambo (Support)
• Maroons (Support)
• Maroons: Brazilian Quilombolas (Core)
• Early English Buccaneers (Support)
• Admiral Myngs’ Buccaneers (Support)
• Cimaroons (Support)
• Juan de Serras’s Karmahaly Maroons (Support)

Warrior Archers really stand out in the 3 Factions that allow Poisoned Arrows: South American Tribes, Caribs/Kalinago, and Caribbean Tribes.

Warrior Archers Gallery

Other Comparable Units to the Warrior Archer

There are not directly comparable units to the Warrior Archer in Blood & Plunder. This unit is carried forward into the 18th century material foudn in Raise the Black but it is found less in the North American Native factions where you see the Brave unit coming into focus as the primary Core unit for most of those factions. You can arm the Brave with a bow through adding it or swapping it for their musket. But the Brave unit has 6 Shoot, focuses on Musketry with Ball & Shot, and is more of an all purpose unit while the Warrior Archer is very focused on skilled ranged shooting.

The Warrior unit with an added Bow can serve as a more multipurpose unit in many of the same Factions as the Warrior Archer. They come in at the same cost of 5 once you add the bow, but again, they have the 6 Shoot making them less deadly in the Ranged department. But they are super deadly in melee combat and have the Quick ability making the more mobile. You can see them come into center stage for the Darien and Golden Island Tribe Factions found in No Peace Beyond the Line.

The Young Warrior is 1pt cheaper than the Warrior Archer, but they are significantly different, with Quick instead of Evade and the normal 6 Shoot Skill.

Buying Warrior Archers

The cheapest way to add Warrior Archers to your Blood & Plunder collection is through the Native American Unit Box of multipart plastic miniatures. This set is not the easiest to assemble, but you have the option to customize to your heart’s content.

Arranging arms and hands to hold the bows in natural positions is a bit of a challenge, but very possible!

You can buy a great starter set of plastic Native models through the new Caribbean Natives Force Box that includes a bunch of Native Sprues and a Resin Commander.

If you prefer the ease of the 1 piece models, Firelock Games has resin models for the Warrior Archers. There is the original set of sculpts, plus a second set of models coming in the Wave 2 line of models.

And the Wave 2 Warrior Archers:

Additional Recommended Reading

• Young Warriors Unit Overview
• Warrior Musketeer Unit Overview
• Warriors Unit Overview
• Braves Unit Overview
• Pnieses Unit Overview
• Young Braves Unit Overview
• Native American Nation and Faction Overview