Gromril, You Say? - Mordheim AAR

With the start of the new year comes, apparently, the start of a tradition with some players at Aetherstorm Games - a Mordheim campaign. 

I was intrigued when I first heard about it since Mordheim is one of those old Specialist rulesets that Games Workshop abandoned, but still has a dedicated following. And unlike Blood Bowl, Necromunda, and Epic (sort of), there hasn't been much in the way of reviving Mordheim since the Old World was blown up. 

I decided to go with the Outlaws of Stirwood Forest warband featured in one of the later Town Criers. It's a primarily ranged focused warband of humans, relies only on bows, and can have a Warrior Priest in support. 

This test game was against Bruce and his Dwarves. It wasn't a great matchup for my Outlaws, since I have to roll 5+ to wound (after rolling to hit) and then roll 6+ to actually remove a dwarf from the table. But since this was just a pre-campaign skirmish game, I'd take this as a test.

The table, by the way, is a massive 16'x4' area with a variety of terrain, held at the store and placed by Bruce. It's very thematic and looks great!

For the first few turns, it seems like things might actually go my way. I managed to take out two dwarves after stunning them and charging with other members of the warband. But then Bruce's Noble got stuck in. Between his 3+ armor save, Toughness 4, and an insane amount of criticals, he cut a swathe through my fighters. Even though he was rolling morale checks each turn, the Dwarves' high Leadership meant that they were likely to stick around for awhile (although I now realize he should have also been taking All Alone tests on his Noble as well. Something to remember!).

I eventually decided to retreat rather than allow a single dwarf to take out my entire warband, or just rout from a failed leadershop roll. I won't go into all the details about after game events since this was a one-off, but I did decide to drop two Henchmen and instead give my leader light armor and hunting arrows. My Warrior Priest also recived light armor, which will give him a 5+ armor save with his shield. So while my warband will only have eight members, I'll have a little more survivability and lethality from the get go.

My plan when playing dwarves in the future? Run around them and shoot a lot! Hopefully I'll be able to complete objectives without having to engage Bruce's warband. Otherwise, I'll just have to cause as much damage as possible from a distance.

That Sinking Feeling - Cruel Seas AAR

The second game from the January South Jersey Gamers Association was Warlord Games' newest offering, Cruel Seas. I hadn't paid much attention to the release, for several reasons. The scale of the miniatures and actual conflict (basically patrol boat skirmishes) and the period didn't grab me. Also, since this is another of Warlord's offshoot games, they rules weren't likely to be all that good.  

Ted set up a five player game using one of the scenarios in the book. Three German E-Boats needed to rescue the crew from a stricken compatriot in the center of the table. Four British Vosper Motor Torpedo Boats would oppose the German flotilla, aiming to capture the E-Boat's crew.

The German's game plan was to fight against the odds and send two of the three E-Boats to peel off and attack the Vospers, while the third E-Boats moved to rescue the waterlogged crew.

Unfortunately, that plan didn't pan out. The smaller Vospers proved annoying difficult to hit, and when the E-Boats slowed to try and get a better shot, the Vospers lit them up. One E-Boat took a hit to one of its stowed torpedoes, which detonated and caused massive damage.

The stricken E-Boat decided to open fire as a Vosper approached (it wasn't a legal target to the British until it chose to fire), but instead sank below the choppy surface of the English Channel.

My E-Boat managed to secure the German sailors, but since I had to slow down to do so, three of the four Vospers trained their guns on me and opened up. In a single turn I went from having 55 Hull Points to 4!

In the next couple turns I managed to slip away thanks to some bad dice rolling, and moved up to full speed. The British players paled, realizing that their chance of victory was slipping away.

Sam, of course, wasn't going to have any of that, and made up for his dismal luck in the To The Strongest! game by dealing enough damage to my E-Boat to sink it.

Ted did run a fun game, and while my overall impression of Cruel Seas hasn't changed, it won't be a game that I actively choose to avoid for group events like SJGA meetups.

Danube Blues - To The Strongest! AAR

This past weekend was the monthly South Jersey Gamers Assocation meetup. Having no game to run myself, I took part in two games. The first was run by Bill, and was a good old Romans v. Germans bashing using the To The Strongest! ruleset.

While I have a copy of To The Strongest! as a pdf, I picked it up on a whim and never did much with it, mostly because the Ancients/Medieval game of choice in the local area has been ADLG. I decided to use this game as an opportunity to see how the rules worked. 

The commands deployed around their camps, with the Roman and German forces looking exactly like you'd expect - Legionaries on one side, Warbands on the other, with a smattering of cavalry and skirmishes to taste.

A large hill and a stream helped to separate the battlefield into three sections, meaning each command was going to remain unsupported as long as there were enemies to the front.

Thanks to some poor command chit draws on the German side, the Romans had the initiative for most of the game, quickly moving across the table and looking to engage.

As the only Roman commander with cavalry units, I decided to move even faster, getting around the flank of the opposing German forces and pinning them down.

While disorder tokens were being exchanged back and forth, my cavalry were the first to rout an enemy warband, putting the German's rightmost command into peril with Roman cavalry in their rear.

It seemed as though fortune favored the Romans as the German commands kept drawing low on their chits and cards, failing activations and losing combats.

Ultimately, the almost-complete loss of the German right command, along with casualties from their center and left, was enough to break their resolve. The barbarians fled, leaving the Romans in command of the field and with a solid victory.

It turns out I'm a big fan of how To The Strongest! plays. One of the biggest complaints I have about ADLG and other games like it is how fiddly movement is, and how players can get away with some pretty heinous looking shenanigans if they muddle their commands and start sliding units left and right. TTS! does away with this completely using its grid-based movement. And as you can see from the pictures, the game still looks like an Ancients battles, with lines of infantry clashing, light troops skirmishing, and cavalry flanking.

It would likely be a longer term project, but I may be a convert...

A Year in Gaming - 2018

As is now tradition at the end of the year, here's a look back at all the games I played and featured on the blog in 2018.

So what games did I end up playing this year?

• ADLG - 4
• Arena Rex - 1
• Blood Bowl - 11
• DBA - 8
• Empire of the Dead - 2
• Fistful of Lead - 1
• Gangs of Rome - 5
• Gaslands - 1
• Gates of Antares - 2
• Kill Team - 12
• Konflikt 47 - 13
• Mordheim - 1
• Muskets & Tomahawks - 1
• Red Book of the Elf King - 2
• Rumbleslam - 1
• Saga - 2
• Shatterlands - 2
• Test of Honour - 12
• Triumph! - 6
• Warhammer Underworlds - 9
• Warmaster Revolution - 3
• What a Tanker! - 1

100 games in total, and that's not counting the board games that I played over the course of the year. Maybe that's something to track in 2019?

I also decided to keep track of what I painted during the year:

• 10mm Artillery - 1
• 10mm Infantry - 158
• 10mm Monster - 1
• 15mm Artillery - 1
• 15mm Cavalry - 33
• 15mm Chariots - 4
• 15mm Elephants - 7
• 15mm Infantry - 186
• 15mm Misc - 2
• 28mm Artillery - 1
• 28mm Infantry - 211
• 28mm Monster - 2
• 28mm Vehicles - 3

Not a bad tally, I think!

Here's a look at all the games featured on the blog in the past year.

L'Art de la Guerre

Arena Rex

Blood Bowl

De Bellis Antiquitatis 3.0

Empire of the Dead

Fistful of Lead

Gangs of Rome

Gaslands

Beyond the Gates of Antares

Konflikt 47

Muskets & Tomahawks

Red Book of the Elf King

Rumbleslam

Saga

Shatterlands

Test of Honour

Triumph!

Warhammer Underworlds

Warmaster Revolution

What a Tanker!

Here's to another year of gaming in 2019!

Painting Update - Warmaster, Gangs of Rome, Konflikt 47, Test of Honour, Kill Team

Let's take a look at the last bunch of painted minaitures I've finished during the year. 

First off is a big project that I've been working on for some time now - a 10mm Ogres Kingdom army for Warmaster Revolution.

These miniatures come from Black Gate Miniatures, which I got over the course of two kickstarters.

The bulk of the army consists of a mass of Bull Ogres and Ironguts. They're the workhorses of the Ogre Kingdoms; no fancy rules, but good stats for relatively decent points cost.

The second kickstarter helped flesh out the range. While the Leadbelchers in the back were from the first crowdfunder, the Yhetees, Gorgers, Gnoblars, Rhinox Riders, Scrap Launcher, and Giant were all produced from the second. The same goes for most of the commanders.

I also finished a bunch of extra miniatures from a few games that had been sitting on my table while I worked on other projects. This includes two more fighters and two Incola for Gangs of Rome, a German Heavy Infantry command squad for Konflikt 47, and the last of the ninjas for Test of Honour.

(I realized after taking the picture that I hadn't shown the other ninjas, but they're pretty easy to imagine - a bunch of guys in black clothing with various sneaky-looking weapons.)

Continuing with Test of Honour, I painted up the Bandits and Brigands boxset.

These are pretty well made miniatures, but they're huge in comparision to Warlords other Test of Honour miniatures, and the Perry miniatures I use. Not to the point of being unusable in the game, but it looks odd if I want them alongside other miniatures in the same warband.

One game that never got included in the blog this year, but that I've been playing, has been Kill Team. It's fun enough - although I think I enjoyed Shadow War more as it's campaign system was more detailed - and I got roped into buying some Thousand Sons. However, I looked at the miniatures and though, There's no way I'm going to take the time to paint all these details.

The solution was to take the "Ghosts of the Warp" squad quirk to the logical extreme and paint all the miniatures as ghosts! And I just so happened to have a bottle of Hexwraith Flame sitting there...

Since Games Workshop doesn't like to give options that aren't in their plastic boxes, the Thousand Sons and Tzaangor boxes were enough to make a full killteam.

And that's it for 2018. Luckily I've got plenty more to paint next year.