A Bridge to Far

Game four of our Mordheim campaign was a race to find a key, which was stashed in a shrine that was to be found across a bridge at the far end of the board.  There were four giant tics wandering about in front of the bridge as well. They were not particularly dangerous but were hard to kill, having a 2+ armour save.

There were four warbands this time:

• My Beastmen
• Andy's sisters of sigmar
• Rory's Kislevites
• Dave's brand new Marienburger warband, as Dvae had retired the remains of his Kislevite warband due to high losses.

I also forgot to bring my phone so there are no photos of this weeks game at all, which is a real shame as the table looked pretty good. Rory had brought some terrain that he had been working on with him and it really added to the atmosphere.  For pictures you would be best to keep an eye on the Alba Two warblog that Rory keeps as he took lots of photos of the game in progress.

We used random deployment this time and I ended up at the far end of the board, furthest away from the target along with Dave. Andy and Rory were deployed further up the table.

Things moved pretty quickly, with Andy and Rory moving up the board quickly and engaging the giant ticks. Rory was also taking any shots of opportunity that he could.  Dave opted to be sneaky and started to slink up one flank of the board, trying to claim the prize without anyone noticing.

I darted straight up the middle of the table, splitting my forces at the lat minute to  make a two pronged attack on Andy's sisters.  My fast left flank engaged them first and actually managed to do what I wanted and hold the sisters in place until the slower elements of my warband managed to catch up.  the shaman even managed to get his spell off, taking the elf scout out of action!  After a short but bloody affair Andy decided to call it a day, leaving my Beastmen victorious, with minimal casualties.

Meantime Rory had lost another member of his warband to a giant tic and in typical fashion failed his first rout test of the game, leaving just myself and Dave in the running.  I weighed up my odds against Dave and decided that I would quit while I was ahead. the prospect of crossing relatively open ground in the face of 4 archers was a daunting one. Especially as my screen of Chaos Hounds had already been depleted.

The Beastmen quite the field, leaving Dave's Marienburgers victorious in their first outing.

I thought I had come out of that rather well until the exploration phase when I encountered an empire patrol.  I managed to get some experience and some gear but the ensuing scrap was quite costly. I had 6 members of my warband taken out of action in the after game scrap!  Luckily no one died but there were a few long term wounds.

Another very enjoyable game with some twists.  Rory had his usual luck and couldn't seem to hurt anything with his shooting, and every second blow that Andy landed seemed to be a critical hit!  After four games my Beastmen finally managed ot get in a decent scrap and are now looking to spend their ill gotten gains.

Equipment is fairly limited for Beastment so I may have to finally expand my numbers. Only problem with that is I am going to have to go and get some more painted........

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.

The Force is Strong With this One!

I have been eyeing up the Star Wars X-Wing game from Fantasy Flight Games (FFG) for a while, but never actually taken the plunge, mostly due to forking out for other things like new boilers for the house and a new roadbike.  The game has appealed to me for some time though, for a couple of reasons:

• No painting required. A zero effort game from this regard is a big bonus as the main thing that keeps me from starting a new period is the amount of work involved in getting to a point where you can have a decent game.
•  It's Star Wars!!!
• Virtually no terrain required. See the first bullet point above.
• Very simple to set up and play, for those Monday nights when you just want a quick easy game and then the opportunity to have a wander round, be sociable and see what other people are playing.
• It's Star Wars!!!

It turns out that Ian had already got the basic set and suggested a few weeks ago that we try it out, which I was very keen to do.

We just used the basic set of 2 Tie fighters vs Luke Skywalker in his X-Wing and managed to get 2 games in pretty quickly  and still be finished for just after 9pm. A pretty good result.

The game itself plays very well and we had a pretty good grasp of the rules by game two, which took twice as long to play as the first due to us making more use of movement and trying to get into good positions.

I will probably invest in a basic set and a couple of extra ships at some point.  I have a real soft spot for the Y-Wing and B-Wing, but it will probably wait until after my summer hols at the end of June. One thing I did notice when I went and visited the FFG forums to have a nose around most of the discussion seemed to be around how to build the most efficient build and promoting tournaments. I think this is a bit sad, to turn a great setting into an attempt to squeeze as much efficiency out of your list.

I also forgot my phone so no pictures, not that there was much to take a picture of.  So instead there are a few pictures of a flying Nazgul. This is the first of two that I bought in the Wayland Games sale just before Christmas.

Apologies for the terrible quality of the pictures, but they were taken with my phone and I also have virtually no understanding of photography.  The other thing I have to work on is my spelling, as some of my previous posts have had atrocious spelling!

Field of Glory...or perhaps not.

My game on Monday night was a six player games of Field of Glory Renaissance (FOGR).

The game was 1500 points which I was led to believe was at the upper limit of what teh army lists were allowing.  It was a French vs German bash, 30 Years War.

The French Army

The German Army

I have played a little bit of FOGR in the past and quite enjoyed it. The rules are quite intuitive and make a cerrtain amount of sense, although they can be a little bit slow.

I opted to join teh French side, and ended up commanding several large formations of Pike and Shotte in teh centre, while to my right was a very large amount of cavaley, and on my left was more inaftry and a few cavalry units. The French deployment on the other side of teh table pretty much mirrorred our own, as the cavalry all faced off aganist each other on one flank, leaving the infantry to duke it out on the rest of the battlfefield.  

As it it turned out I was a victim of the size of the game and the fact that I had a purely infantry segment on the army.  On my righ the cavalry advanvde quickly and there was soon an almighty cavalry battle going on while the infantry tried to close with each other.

The large Cavalry tussle, pretty much the only serious action all night.

The left flank, some action developing, but not much!

Due to the cavalry getting stuck in so quickly and the sheer volume of them in this very large game the turns slowed down to a crawl, as it took a long time for all the cavalry fights to be resolved. This meant that I did not actually manage to get anywhere near my opponent on the other side of the table and my troops never saw combat beyond one exchange of fire just before we had to stop for the night. So a lot of time watching other people roll dice, while moving my own troops toward a distant enemy.

The Long March in the Centre, but mostly to no avail.

It was amusing to watch John basically win every fight on the night, with him always seeming to be able to roll the required number of hits to win every fight, regardless of how well his opponents rolled.  The downside of this was that his opponents were pretty dismayed by the end of the night.  

My oponion of FOGR has not really changed, it just needs to be played at a points match suitable for a Monday night game, probably about 650 points.  My first foray into painting 15mm is an ongoing Byzantine Army for FOGA, but this will probably take a while to get painted.

Scouring of the Westfold

I blame it all on the drugs.

Rory, Ian and I had originally intended to do a large Lord of the Rings game using my altered version of the Impetus rules.  However, I have developed a rather bad case of toothache over the weekend and was seriously distracted by the pain in my gums.

The scenario I was going to run was the relief of Helms Deep, which has a nice mix of heroes and lots of troops, so would have been a good way of testing how my altered rules work (more on that later). Unfortunately I completely forgot to lift the case that contains all the heroes and characters for my LOTR collection.  All of my rank and file troops are based up for War of the Ring or Impetus and are stored in A4 file boxes, whereas all the character models, standard bearers and other stuff that wont fit in an A4 file box like Siege Ballista etc are kept in a carrying case full of foam trays from Miniatures in Comfort.  I completely forgot to lift this case and as it is pretty difficult to fight anything from Helms deep without the King of Rohan or Gandalf the White being present I had to quickly find something else to do.

I felt pretty bad but Ian and Rory were OK about it and in the end I managed to find a scenario for the LOTR Strategy Battle Game that did not require any of the named heroes from the books.

In this scenario a small force of Rohan are defending a small village from some marauding Uruk Hai and Dunlendings, who are hell bent on burning down the village.  

 

The village, with its small band of defenders about to be set upon.

Rohan warriors prepare for the onslaught.

Basically there were three building and the bad guys had to try and set fire to them, and then stop the Rohan from putting the fires out. Every turn after the building was set alight you rolled a die and on a 4 or more you added one more to the score for the fire. When it reached 6 the building was destroyed.  The Rohan had to destroy the Isengard forces before this happened, and could attempt to put the fires out if they could find any spare manpower. The Rohan also had some reinforcements on the way and they had a chance to turn on up from turn one.  Ian elected to play the forces of Rohan, with Rory taking the Isengarders (a pattern is emerging in our LOTR games here).

The game got of to a quick start and there were a fair few casualties from missile fire, which should have sent alarm bells ringing as missile fire in LOTR is pretty unimpressive.  Then the Rohan reinforcements managed to arrive on turn two as well!

The Cavalry have arrived (literally)!

That was about the only luck Ian had in the whole game though, as his Rohan just could not get a break and made a pretty poor showing. They managed to win a fair proportion of the fights but could not seem to actually finish his opponents of.  Only when the cavalry entered the fight did things start to look up, but in the final half of the game Ian could not get the Initiative and with no Might points left he could not take advantage of his cavalry charges.

Fighting in the streets.

The cavalry get stuck in, but Rohan are looking a bit thin in the ground by now!

Only a few cavalry left.

Eventually all three of the buildings were ablaze and there were just not enough Rohan left to do anything about it. The last turn of the game saw a lone Rohan captain, his horse killed under him facing down a dozen or so Uruk Hai.  Very Heroic but ultimately futile.

The lonely captain prepares to fight to the last.

The Uruk Hai will dine on manflesh tonight.

Rory  had an excellent evening and his troops performed admirably, pretty much walking over the Rohan with only a few casualties, and used a few sneaky tactics to keep Ian's cavalry busy. Ian had a pretty rough time of it, with his Rohan preforming very under par.

It was an interesting game to watch as I have played this game a half dozen times against Kenny, another club member and I have used the uruk Hai every time.  The best I have ever managed is a draw, and then only once. Every other game has been a resounding success for the Rohan. Perhaps it is always raining when my Uruk Hai are trying to burn down the village?  That is my usual excuse anyway.

Both the guys seem to enjoy the game, even though it was not what was originally offered, for which I must apologise.  In the end though Lord of the Rings is an excellent set of skirmish rules that I doubt I will get tired of using for a long time.

For LoTR mass battles Games Workshops War of the Ring looks great because of the numbers of models but feels pretty flawed, probably due t the fact that they were trying to use the profiles from the skirmish rules and turn them into a mass battle game, instead of just writing a new set of rules.  That is why I started playing about with the Impetus rules for my mass battles.  I basically use the Impetus combat and shooting mechanics, but use the War of the Ring turn sequence, along with the inclusion of Might points to represent the powerful heroes that are the staple of a good fantasy story.  I hope to have another try at these in July, and will no doubt post a report then.

No firm game arranged for next week, so will just turn up and either try joining one of the wide selection of games available on a club night at Falkirk District Wargames club, or just hang about and be sociable.

Fog on the Barrow Downs

Game three of the clubs ongoing Mordheim campaign involved a bit of grave digging.

The setting was a large barrow site, shrouded in fog where the objective was to discover an amulet buried somewhere in one of the grave barrows.  To complicate matters there was a thick fog which gave anyone wondering off by themselves a chance of getting lost and stumbling about in a random direction.

There were five players this time:

• My Beastmen
• Dave's Kislevites
• Rory's Kislevites
• Ian's Reiklanders
• Andy's Sigmarite Sisters

Table Overview

Smelly Beastmen

Kislevite Warband 1

Sigmarite Sisters

Reiklanders

Kislevite Warband 2

 The Fog meant that at the start of the turn 4D6 were rolled, with the total score being the distance anyone could see in inches, thus limiting missile fire (not to much bother for the Beastmen, not having any).

Early game saw the other four players creeping about and taking some potshots at each other when the mists parted long enough to see something, while my Beastmen crept from cover to cover taking great care to stay out of site of the large amount of missile armed humans on the board.   Everyone paired of pretty quickly with Ian's Reiklanders getting stuck into Dave's Kislevites pretty quickly and an almighty scrum breaking out between Rory's Kislevites and Andy's Sigmarites.

My Beastmen were left a bit stranded as all the action was taking place down the other end of the table but they targeted Ian's Reiklanders and moved up to try and get in on the action.

Ian also managed to unearth the Amulet in his first dig, so that pretty much put a stop to anyone else attempting to do any of that exploring nonsense.

Beastmen advance while the Reiklanders and Kislevites have it out.

Kislevites and Sigmarites have a bit of a disagreement.

Beastmen finally get to fight someone.

Sigmarites start to triumph over the Kislevites.

The ensuing combats were all pretty bloody, with Dave's Kislevites coming of quite badly against the Reiklanders, before fleeing the field.  Rory's Kislevites and Andy's Sigmarites got stuck into each with Rory losing 8 models before finally quiting the field, while Andy had lost 4 of his warband by then.

The Beastment managed to get into contact with the Reiklanders and pick of a few stragglers, at which point Ian decided to cut his losses and run. The Beastmen then turned their sites on the remains of the Sigmarite Sisters but upon seeing that the Beastment had not yet suffered a casualty they decided to also quit the field, leaving the Beastment victorious!

I would like to say that it was a hard fought and thoroughly deserved victory but in truth I was very much left on the periphery of the action and by the time I was in a position to take part everyone had a very bloody nose. The highlight of the game was when the Sisters of Sigmar Augur, who is blind as she has second site which allows her to see things that others cannot  was the only model in the entire game to get lost in the fog, and then managed to stumble straight into one of Rory's Kislevites, and managed to take him out of action.

A very bloody and quick game, with the other four warbands all taking quite a beating.  Ian managed to get his warband leader killed, while Andy and Rory both lost several men to their wounds.  

My Beastmen suffered no casualties and so managed to do some serious shopping and get some more decent gear.   I managed to get some more helmets and a few other nifty bits and pieces. Almost time to start saving for a Minotaur!

Beastment enjoying the spoils of victory

There were a few conclusions from this game:

• We need another player. When you have 5 players inevitable 4 players pair off and fight each other and then the fifth player gets to skirt around the board and then pick off any survivors at the end.
• It was decided by everyone involved that in future we would select the deplyoment randomly, to help mix up the potential matchup in future games.

The monthly Mordheim campaign is turning into a real highlight of my games at the club, despite the relatively poor showing of my Beastmen so far, and I am  looking forward to next months instalment

Warhammer FB

Last Monday night I had a game of Warhammer 8th edition scheduled with Dave.

Dave was bringing his Chaos Warriors and I decided to use my Orcs and Goblins, as I have not had them on the table for a while. We decided on 2500 points, which is the largest game of warhammer I have played in a long time, but allowed me to bring lots of toys.

 

My army consisted of three large units of Orcs, a large unit of Night Goblins and a generous helping of the random nonsense that makes using Orcs and goblins so entertaining, if at time frustrating.  Dave brought a large unit of Marauders, several units of chaos warriors, some Chaos Knights and some units of disposable Chaff in the form of Chaos Hounds and Marauder Horse.  

Early game my units of troops proved quite reliable, with no animosity, but everything else proved to be very random, with a Doom Diver managing to kill off a Goblin Chariot with a misfire, and my warmachines and magic proving to be fairly inneffective.  This meant it was down to the lads to get stuck in and they did with gusto, and large amounts of models were removed from both sides. The higher numbers of the orcs were telling in the end though.  My warmachines came good on the last turn of the game, with the Rock Lobber finishing of a chariot, the Doom Diver nailing a unit of Chaos Knights and the Bolt Shooters skewereing the Chaos Sorceror.

The game had to end at turn 3 as we ran out of time, but the it was beginning to look like the writing was on the wall for the Chaos army.  

It was good to get the Orcs back on the table, as I had forgotten the potential they have to be very effective in every phase of WHFB, while also having the potential to be truly awful.  The trick is to not rely on any one phase of the game and to have a balanced approach, which also happen to be the most entertaining.

Two things to come from this were the abandoning of the terrain rules from 8th, especially the "if you can see it you can shhot it," and instead declaring that basically all woods and hills block line of site. The other thing we decided was thet 2500 points was perhaps a little to large for a Monday night game, especially as Dave is realtively new to the wonderful world of Warhammer.

It was still a very enjoyable evening as I had the most important component of any ruleset, a good opponent who always takes everything in good spirirt (something I sometimes forget to do, I must admit).

Next Monday is game three of our Mordheim campaign, with my Beastmen so far having put in a fairly poor showing.  I am playing the long game and concentrating on minimising losses at the moment, so that I can hopefully have more success later on in the campaign. We shall see.