Warhammer, Old School

There has not been much in the way of gaming activity in the last few weeks.  We had a very relaxing family Holiday in Majorca recently and the Tour de France is currently on, during which time most things take a back seat to cycling.

Monday nights remain a fixed point on my gaming calendar though and the game scheduled for this Monday was to be part 4 of our ongoing Mordheim campaign. Unfortunately three out of the six players were unable to attend for various reasons so we decided to postpone for a few weeks until we could get a better turnout.

Instead Andy suggested a game of Warhammer Fantasy battle using the 3rd Edition rules. We all agreed and, with Ric now on board to make it an even four we set off on a nostalgia trip.

Andy kindly supplied most of the models, and knocked up some army lists. The games were all 1000points in size, which was going to be about all we could probably manage on the night as none of us had played 3rd Edition in many a year.

There were four armies on offer:

Undead
Empire
Dwarves
Bretonians

I opted for the Undead, Ric took the Dwarves, Rory stuck with his trusty Empire and Andy took the Bretonians.  We decided on 2 a side, humans vs non humans.

Dwarves and Bretonians face off.

Rory's mighty empire army

Skeletons get duffed up by some Knightly types.

Early in the game Ric started getting a healthy tally of casualties by using his cannons to blow big holes in Andy's Bretonians.  Rory got stuck straight in with his Knights and charges into one of my blocks of Skeletons.  This is where the big difference between the current edition of WHFB and 3rd started to show.  In 8th these combats would have been fairly short and decisive, whereas in 3rd the Dwarves very high leadership proved almost impossible to break, while the Instability of the skeleton meant that we were in for a long night of slowly grinding each other into lots of little bits.

The status quo was broken for me when I summoned some extra skeleton behind the unit of Knights and then charged into their rear. They promptly failed their fear test (or was it panic, not sure really) and fled the field. To add insult to injury my lone remaining skeleton horseman charged a unit of 30 soldiers and they also failed their fear test and fled the field.  In one fell swoop Rory had gone from looking like he had a sure victory on his hands to a disaster.  

On my left flank Andy was discovering just how tough dwarves in 3rd edition were and was having a pretty hard time breaking them. We managed to finish the game to a reasonable conclusion, which was not bad considering the amount of reminiscing that was going on round the table about old models and flicking through the rules to try and get things right.

All in all we had a good time and we agreed that the game is probably worth pursuing a bit.  We will probably involve some house rules, with archers being allowed to fire in two ranks already pretty much agreed upon and something needing done to allow combats to be resolved more quickly.

I am already thinking about the two WHFB armies that I own and how they can be adapted to 3rd (retrofitted?). My Orcs will not be a problem as there are enough of them to make a pretty decent army, although I may have to have a root about in the loft for some of my old rock lobbers that are in storage.

My Dark Elves may be a bit of a problem and the 3rd edition DE army is quite different form the 8th edition army. The main difference is the lack of Corsairs in 3rd,  My 8th Dark Elves was always intended to be a light raiding force and so contains lots of Corsairs, which do not exist in 3rd. Their equipment does not even exist, so there may have to be some fudging carried out to adapt.  I can always pick up some DE spear men cheaply from e-bay to use in future games.

I have no game next week as I am off to Paris for the end of the Tour de France, but the week after that we should be returning to Mordheim. I'm looking forward to it.