Battle at the Mansion, Oldhammer

Monday nights game was another bash at 3rd  edition Warhammer Fantasy Battle (Oldhammer).

Once again we opted for 1500points and I just took the same Orc and Goblin army as last time.

Fraser had brought his Undead, which had narrowly avoided getting put on e-bay thanks to the clubs recent interest in Oldhammer.  His army consisted of a couple of units of infantry, one unit of archers, two units of cavalry and a Liche riding in a chariot.

I tried to set the terrain up to reflect the opponents so we put the GW manor house in one corner, along with a couple of Graveyards and some ruined buildings.  The idea being that the Orcs had decided to raid the Manor House, not realising that someone had got there first. Being Orcs they decided that they would have a go at the Liche and accompanying undead anyway.

Deployed for battle.

I managed to get the roll of for first turn and my Rock Lobber crew promptly failed their Animosity test!  The rest of my army advanced cautiously, with the Boar Riders on the left heading of to counter the skeleton horse archers that had been deployed on my extreme right.  I started chipping away at the undead with my orc archers and my magic (fireball was the only useful spell I managed to generate).  In his turn Fraser advanced as quickly as possible and returned fire with his skeleton archers, but inflicted no casualties.  In the magic phase he summoned an Undead Hero, to allow him to control his army better.

Mid game manoeuvres.

The first combat of the game took place when my Boar Riders charged into the skeleton horse archers, on my extreme left flank.  The Boar Boyz passed their fear test and wiped out the skeletons in one fell swoop.  As it turns out that was going to be my only success of the night. In the centre the other unit of skeleton horsemen charged one of my units of goblins. There was a fanatic in the unit and he rolled a double six for movement, crashing straight through the skeletons, killing 2 and then ploughing straight into the wall that was behind them, killing himself there and then. In the ensuing combat my goblins fared badly, and as the skeletons caused fear they broke automatically, with the skeleton horsemen in hot pursuit inflicting lots of free hacks.

This then caused a raft of panic tests in my line of troops, which everyone promptly failed, withe sole exception of my orc archers, mostly because they were out of range and did not need to take one.  As my main Orc unit was in combat with a unit of skeletons at the time they were also chased, suffering lots of free hacks as well. 

It was pretty much game over at this point, as two thirds of my army was routing, with two units getting no opportunity to rally.  The final thing I did manage to do was turn the boar riders round and charge one of the units of skeleton foot, convincingly beating them.  They promptly rolled a one for their instability test, meaning that if I managed to push them back again they would all be dispelled. Alas it was not to be as the skeleton horsemen had seen of the unit of goblins that they had just beaten and charged the boar riders in the flank, who promptly failed their panic test and fled.  That was pretty much game over so we called a halt there.

The one orc success of the game. Boar Riders eliminate the skeleton horse archers.

Disaster!  The orcs lose their nerve.

This is where it all goes wrong.  Pretty much downhill from here on in.

The Orc army starts to flee the field.

The one remaining Orc unit tries to get at the Liche, unsuccessfully.

Last die roll of the game. Boar Riders fail their panic test and leg it.

This was another good game of Oldhammer, with Fraser deciding to keep his skeletons for a while longer as he enjoyed himself. 

One thing that really became apparent from this was the difference that can be made to the army by the presence of the Int, Wp and Cl stats. While it is fairly easy to get the Leadership stat up it is not so easy with the others. This really makes a difference with armies like Orcs as they have fairly poor stats in this regards. The low Int on Orcs and Goblins making their spellcasters a lot less reliable than say, elves with their very high Int, as it should be.  in the end it was the low Cool stat of the goblins that was their undoing, causing them to fail a lot of panic tests. 
Another thing we decided was that the units do not need to be nearly as big, with units of 20 Orcs probably being planty big enough and perhaps 30 for goblins as this puts of the need to make a rout test until you have lost a fair few models.

All in all a successful test and I am looking forward to my next game of Oldhammer.  It is great fun, but I will not be trying to purchase an army of Oldhammer era models as that would probably be a little bit on the expensive side!  So I will jsut use the models I have for now.

The next few weeks are all about Impetus.  Our club is hosting a tournament at the end of October and I offered my services to anyone that wanted to get a refresher on the rules.  Impetus playing seems to go through peaks and troughs at out club, with peaks happening in the run up to any tournaments that are happening, and then troughs occuring just after the tournament has passed.
I am not a tournament player by any stretch but if you want to understand how a set if rules work then the best thing you could do is play against a seasoned tournament player.

Oldhammer Test 2

This Monday night Rory and I played our postponed trial game of Warhammer Fantasy 3rd Edition, with club house rules thrown in.

We opted to use the lists from the Warhammer Armies book, with a total points value of 1500 and no wizards larger than Lvl2.

I brought my Orcs and Rory opted for the Empire.
In the end my Orc army consisted of:

24 Orc Boyz
20 Orc Arrer Boyz
26 Goblins
26 Goblins
7 Orc Boar Riders
1 4 Man Orc Catapult.

On top of this I had a Lvl20 Orc general (to lead the Orc Boyz), 1 Lvl 15 Orc Shaman (in the Orc Archers) and a level 15 Goblin hero in each of the Goblin units and a Lvl15 Orc to lead the Boar Riders.

The Orcs, laid out before deployment.

Ans after deployment.

  The Empire army consisted of 2 units if Halberdiers, 2 Cannons, 5 Heavy Knights, 8 Crossbow Armed light cavalry, 10 Foot crossbows, 30 Levies plus a few heroes, including a general on a horse and a single Lvl 15 Wizard.

The Empire army arrayed for battle.

I won the roll for the first turn and managed a fairly orderly advance. My shooting phase went quite well with the Stone Thrower being on target and taking out one of the Empire cannons before it had even had a chance to fire (hooray!).  My Orc wizard also managed to get a  good volley of fireballs of in the magic phase, eliminating half of the empire crossbowmen.

In the Empire turn they pretty much returned the favour, with the cannon blowing a big whole in my unit of Orcs but the Empire wizards fireball spell was less effective, failing to cause any casualties.  In turn two my Boar Riders charged home into the large unit of levy on my right flank, while the rest of my army closed the gap as quickly as they could.  

The Boar Riders made short work of the Levy, inflicting a large amount of damage thanks to some fluky dice rolling, With no losses in return the levy inevitably broke and ran, with the Boar Riders in Hot pursuit.

You jammy git!

Getting a bit messy.

In the Empire turn two the empire army got stuck in, with charges all round.  In the ensuing rounds of combat, my Boar Riders continued to chase down the levy, the first unit of goblins managed to beat and then rout one of the units of Halberdiers, while the remaining Empire Knights managed to rout the other unit of goblins.   The main unit of Orcs, containing the Orc general managed to beat their opponents but they passed their rout test to fight another round of combat. 

In my third turn things went really down hill for the Empire. The main unit of Orcs managed to beat and rout their opposing Empire unit, and to add insult to injury the Orc general managed to eliminate his empire counterpart in single combat.  By the end of my third turn most of the Empire army was in full rout, with the Orc army only really having lost one unit of Goblins so at this point Rory decided to call it a day.

The main scrap, with the two opposing generals duking it out.

End game, with the Empire army in full retreat.

The Orc left flank collapses.

Orc archers looking for something to do.

Boar Riders ready to wheel about to find another opponent.

In the end the game only lasted for three turns, which is quick even by 8th edition standards, never mind the slower third.  The few changes we had made to the rules made the game play a lot quicker and I am not sure that they have improved the game all that much.  All in all the game felt much like any game of Warhammer fantasy Battle, just a few of the rules were slightly different as they always are when you change edition.  I think what was missing was a more third edition approach to playing the game. we basically played whfb in the manner that we normally do: pick armies, throw down some random terrain and then have at it, last man standing is the winner. Perhaps that is not what playing Oldhammer is all about and a bit more thought is required for future games?  It is early days yet so only time will tell, but  I am going to have a rummage in the loft for my old Blood Bath at Orcs Drift campaign set and have a look at updating it slightly and see of that helps any.

One thing Rory and I did notice on Monday night was the general noise level in the club. There were 14 games going on during the evening, from a wide range of genres and periods. Of note were:

Two games of Field of Glory in 15mm

Two game of Impetus in 28mm

Four(!) games of Warhammer fantasy Battle, 3 of 8th edition and our 3rd edition game.

One game of Dux Britaniarum in 28mm

One game of Force on Force in 20mm

One game of Piquet in 15mm

One ACW game, but I cannot remember teh name of the ruleset being used.

One game of Dystopian Wars

The club has a real buzz about it just now, with a good range of games going on, and people mixing to play lots of different games. We are even starting to get involved in some historical exhibitions, with the games we put on providing a good visual aid to help bring history to life for some people. All in all a good thing.  

A busy hall, taken after a few games had finished and been packed up, including ours.

Warhammer Corner, where all the 8th edition players like to set up.

Hopefully next week I will get another game of X-wing with Ian, after having to cancel our last arranged game at the last minute. I really hate having to do that but unfortunately life sometimes just gets in the way!

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.