Tag: victory – massacre

Second Games Night of 2013

We recently hosted our second games night of the year. Unlike the last one, where we started early and crammed in many many short games throughout the day, this games night was mostly taken up with long games.

The day began with a long game of Warhammer for Jen’s Vampire Counts against Dan’s Warriors of Chaos. She did relatively well, although I believe her spell choices were poor (despite having two doubles, she did not choose Hellish Vigour or Vanhel’s Danse Macabre!). The Terrorgheist at least survived the battle, and was last seen chomping through the back of a unit of Chaos Knights. Although we couldn’t work out victory points due to time, we eyeballed it and decided it was probably a minor victory for the Warriors of Chaos.

Once that was finished, I pounced on some of our new players (while the turnout was still fairly low) to teach DreadBall. That game was cut short by departures, but more players arrived at the same time so we reset the board and played again. This is the first time I think someone I’ve shown DreadBall would not play again, probably because the rules were not grasped as quickly as people usually do. It was an exciting game though, with the Corporation player scoring 5 points throughout the game despite the Forge Fathers keeping at least two of them injured at any time and, by the end of the game, killing three! In the final two turns, the Forge Fathers scored a 4-pointer and a 2-pointer to bring it back to 1 point in their favour. The Corporation player got the ball to the 2-pointer spot, and the whole game essentially came down to the final roll – two dice, requiring at least one 4+. And they flubbed it, the Forge Fathers win!

I love exciting games like that, and we had everyone present hanging on the outcome of that final roll. One old friend noticed that DreadBall is very much like ice hockey, which is interesting considering the game mechanics were originally designed for hockey or a hockey-like game. It’s a good way to get her into it again some time!

Once that long game of DreadBall was out of the way, we brought out Kill Doctor Lucky as a nice, simple, uncomplicated game for two rounds. The first was over quickly as over-ruthless bluffing let a murder attempt through without challenge (Tight Hat killer!), and the second was surrendered to the victor as she had 24 spite tokens to a combined total of 1 spite token across 5 other players and she had a car waiting for her outside for 20 minutes while she tried to turn that into a win! We gave her the win, and retired for the night.

It’s a shame we didn’t get to play so much, I think that was my fault for pushing a 2-player game onto people who weren’t quite used to tactical/strategic games, and I was going slowly myself because of the huge amounts of overtime I’ve been doing in work recently. I was exhausted way before the end of the night!

I’m not sure when the next games night will be – we’ve got a busy calendar ahead of us with DreadBall tournaments and the like, and I’d like to squeeze in a movie night at some point. The top candidate for that one would be the blu-ray box set of Resident Evil or new Batman trilogy that I picked up for Jen’s birthday/Christmas last year.

(Oh yeah, and we all lost the game)

Defence of the Northern Watchtowers

I’ve been itching to get back to regular Warhammer games for a while now, spurred on by listening to podcasts like Bad Dice and Garagehammer, and by some of the awesome new plastic kits that have been produced for the recently updated armies.

Luckily, I have a good friend in the same boat who just bought the new Warriors of Chaos book and wanted to take it for a test drive! I asked for a 2000pt game so that I could get a feel for the rules again, since it’s been at least a year since my last 8th edition game, but I was convinced into going for 3000pts. I’m glad that I did, I got to put in all the toys I wanted short of a dragon!

For my army list, I took heavy inspiration from the advice of Ben Curry on Garagehammer. Units of 30 in horde formation, Death Hag with a Cauldron of Blood and Battle Standard Bearer, and Shadow magic on a level 4 Sorceress. I also took a level 2 Sorceress with Metal magic, just in case I encountered Chaos knights.

The scenario was a Pitched Battle, and we had an Altar of Khaine on the table – it was very quickly decided that Chaos Warriors were invading Naggaroth from the North, and the Dark Elves were defending. We don’t go in for complex stories for our games, but a bit of context rather than ‘we wanted a rumble’ or ‘I’ve got all these toy soldiers’ improves the game quite a bit.

I was pleasantly surprised at just how well it turned out. Whenever I eschewed the Cauldron’s 5+ ward save in favour of an extra attack, I wish I had taken the ward save instead. I also completely forgot the Banner of Murder on the Black Guard, and they were wiped out. Overall though, the game went tremendously well and despite the high armour and Mark of Nurgle making it incredibly difficult to wound the Chaos Warriors, I scored almost double the victory points. At the end of the game, there was only one Chaos Warrior unit still on the table and going toe-to-toe with 30 Dark Elf Spearmen and a single Chaos Knight musician running off the table (one more turn would get him off the board).

The game started poorly for Chaos, with Warhounds using the Vanguard rule to get closer to my lines, then failing their Terror test when my Hydra declared a charge. And fleeing through a Chimera, causing a Panic test, and sending that running off too. Neither unit would play a part in the game.

The Forsaken rolled poorly for mutations, getting two turns of Always Strikes Last. This gave my 30-strong Corsair unit a chance to kill them off. The Chaos Giant was taken down by the sheer number of Poisoned Attacks that my Witch Elves had, but on the plus side he fell on top of them and killed another nine.

The Black Guard performed alright, but I forgot that they had the Banner of Murder entirely. This would probably have helped a little bit. Luckily, before they were destroyed another Hydra assisted with a flank attack and the Witch Elves got into the front with Okkam’s Mindrazor cast on them – this was one of my aims of the game, to try and get their massive volume of attacks boosted with the Mindrazor. Although the Black Guard were wiped out (they only had a Standard Bearer left at that point), the Chaos Warrior unit was completely devastated.

That was the only way I could have got rid of the Nurgle Wizard General, who had managed to cast a few spells successfully and thus had a boost to Toughness and Wounds of 3 or 4 – even with Mindrazor, that would be a difficult prospect. Running him down after a failed Break test was much easier.

I also faced a Slaughterbrute (proxied with a Great Unclean One, for the Nurgle theme). This got into combat with my Cold One Knights, who failed every Stupidity test they had to take. The Knights managed to knock at least a wound off each turn, and the Slaughterbrute thankfully directed it’s attacks against my general two turns in a row. Since he had the Pendant of Khaeleth (roll under the attack’s Strength and you get to ignore it) and the attacks were Strength 7, nothing got through to him. It kept the Cold Ones out of the game, but it could still have been more effective if it had been supported more by the nearby Forsaken or if it was paired with a larger, tougher combat unit to push a probable win into an absolute win. I think that next time, I may be facing a Mutalith Vortex Beast.

All in all, I was really pleased with my new army list and I’ll definitely take it again. It may even give me a chance against the Empire gunline that has plagued me for so long…