More Epic

Third game of the year, and another game of Epic.

Mark and I have been talking about getting in a game of Epic for a very long time, and we finally managed it.

I stuck with my Guard, while Mark brought the "13th Legion" list, which I had never heard of or seen in action.  We had previously agreed to play without any flyers, and as such I had some extra points to spend.  After some thought I added in a Super Heavy Tank Company, consisting of 2 Shadowswords and Baneblade.  I thought some added anti-titan firepower would be useful ,and if nothing else they could be used for picking of Land Raiders that I know Mark is quite fond of.

Mark's force consisted of lots of Infantry detachments, some of which were mechanized in a combination of Rhinos and Land Raiders.

Deployment was fairly standard, with the Chaos Marine spread evenly across the board, and the guard doing something similar.

First turn and against all the odds the Guard managed to get imitative!  Never one to look a gift horse in the mouth I activated the Super Heavies and used them to vaporize two Land Raiders, killing the troops inside and breaking the formation. Not a bad start.

That set the tone for the game, with my Guard performing quite well and only failing a couple of activation tests throughout the game.  Mark had some terrible luck with some poor saving throws and unlucky activation rolls.

We managed to play three turns, with me able to force the Chaos Right Flank and break through to the their back field, and Mark able to push on his right flank and get some serious gains.  In the end we ran out of time and had to call it a night.  The final score was something like 1-0 to the Guard on objectives, but as you would usually play a fourth turn and it looked like the game could easily go either way we decided to call it a draw.

Another excellent game of Epic, and against a new opponent, fielding an army that I had never played against as well. Also, my lone Sentinal Ace, Geoff, once again was the soul survivor from the Sentinal Squadron. Gonna get that man  a medal.

An Epic return

2nd Game of the year, plus 2nd Blog Post.

Ric and i had arranged to play this game before the new year, as generally that is how far we need to plan ahead to get a game in.

This time it was 3000 points Epic, Standard tournament game, Imperial Guard vs Eldar.

The table

Guard mustering for war

Eldar, lots of tanks

I opted for my fairly standard guard list, with a mixture of infantry, tanks and a few pieces of artillery.  Ric opted for a very tank heavy list, with everything mechanised apart from a few scouts.

This game was defined by two things:

• The Guard won initiative, every turn.
• Poor Activation and Rallying Roles.

We played three turns, and my Guard won initiative every turn.  That has never happened. I cant remember the last time I had the initiative in a game of Epic, mainly due to the poor strategy rating of guard against the much better ratings of Eldar and Marines. 

Poor Activation roles was a serious issue in this game, especially for myself. My poor old tank company never managed to fire a single shot all game, failing its first activation, then the Eldar managing to get past their supposedly impregnable armour  and kill enough tanks to break the company.  

Loads of tricksy Eldar Tanks.  Too many for my liking!

Guard Infantry in a sticky Situation

Rallying was poor on both sides, with one Eldar tank formation broken on the first activation of the game (Artillary for the win!) and never managing to rally for the whole game. 

Activation continued to be poor on both side, with my guard especially suffering an annoyingly large (even for me!) number of ones.  In turn three we both managed to fail at least 50% of our activation tests, leading to a lot of frustration.

The final act of the game was a failed activation test on a group of Eldar Vypers, which broke the formation and forced them to withdraw, which actually handed the Guard the victory with 2-1 on objectives.  

I cant think of a more undeserving victory than this.

Still great fun though and as always Ric was a gentlemen throughout, even in the face of my increasing frustration. The Guard must have run out of batteries for the radios or something.....

Next week a return to one of my favourite games, Chain of Command....

Still Going

The blog has been quiet for about 6 months now, mainly due to work and life pressures.

It was getting hard to find the time to do everything that needed doing, let alone the nicer, hobby related things. I decided that I would spend what limited free time I had painting and playing with toy soldiers, rather than writing about them.

Things have eased up slightly, so there may be a small return to the blog, or I may spend more time painting. We shall see.

Not really much has changed in the 6 months absent from the blog, with gaming continuing on a Monday night at my regular club, Falkirk District Wargames Club.

I have decided to abandon 9th Age completely, as I don't think it is really what I am looking for in a game.  I wasn't sure before but the publication of V2 of the ruleset was the deciding factor, as the game now feels more like work than recreation. The Dark Elf book is  a real mess, with all sorts of stupid names and pointless rules appearing so I have just given up in disgust.

I have continued to play Kings of War though, and despite being terrible at it I have enjoyed the games I have been playing. I am still using Twilight Kin, despite there being no proper list and it getting no attention in the upcoming Clash of Kings rules update. To that end I am now converting my Warhammer Orcs to also use in the game. This should involve a minimum of painting as I only need to include a few thing to make the army viable under he new rules system. 

I bought a large 15mm scale Egyptian army for use with Field of Glory in December 2016. Unfortunately Field of glory has pretty gone the way of the Do-Do, as v2 of the game went out ot print and the Caliver Books published v3, which no one picked up due to the prohibitive cost of buying a new rulebook and army lists for a couple of rules tweaks.  

Our club has since moved on to L'art de la Guerre, which is a French derivative of DBA, recently translated into English.  Unfortunately by the time I got wind of this the game was sold out pretty much everywhere and there appeared to be no plans for a reprint. I was very lucky and thanks to sharp eyes of a club member I was able to get a copy from a gaming store located in Dorset. I still have to paint the miniatures, but thankfully the new system requires far fewer so I anticipate being able to get them on the table sooner rather than later.

My 2018 gaming opened up with a game of Lord of the Rings against Dave Knight, and we opted to carry out the assault on the Deeping Wall from The Two Towers., with Dave rolling a die and ending up as the defenders, leaving me to take the roll of the Uruk-Hai.  The game went badly, probably more due to my ineptitude than anything else, but I think it is a hard scenario for the Uruk's to win.  I must admit to being "slightly" pessimistic during the game and this is the main thing I need to work on this year.

Dunlendings try to scale the wall (and fail!) while the Pike wait for the breach to be created (get on with it!)

Still no progress, and pity the poor Dunlending that climbs a ladder only to be confronted by an irritated looking Aragorn!

As usual for 2018 I don't really have any plans.  I expect to play some games and paint some stuff. It is a hobby I do for fun and relaxation so I try not to make it stressful by giving myself artificial targets.

There are very few purchases planned this year. I was looking at the impending Batman boardgame kickstarter, from Monolith, that same people that made the excellent Conan game, but a 200 quid service bill on my bike and an impending family holiday to Florida may have scuppered that idea.

I have been slowly buying Genestealer Cult models of Warhammer 40,000 and now have a fairly significant collection, to the point where I just need to pick up the more specialist parts of the list.  There is no codex for them in 8th edition yet so I am in no hurry to get this done and probably won't put brush to model until the later part of the year.  

While Genestealer Cult has got me back into 40k again (sort off) I still think the system is a bit lacking. To that end I have been slowly trying to work out how to convert my favourite system, Chain of Command to use 40k models and setting.  40k is a very different beast to WW2, with some weird and wonderful stuff going on but I am making slow progress and hope to have some sort of working prototype soon. That pretty much sums up what's been gong on, and this might be the last post for a while, or it might not.  I shall wing it and see how it goes.

Twilight Kin in action (another loss!)

The Fellowship flee from Moria, pursued by Wargs.