Hello
and welcome to a long-overdue edition of Monday Morning Gamer! As per usual on
a blog, real life events have kept me from updating the blog regularly. Still,
here’s an update for you now! As luck would have it, there hasn’t been much to
report on the campaign front this past month either. I’ll give you a recap of
the final turn of Spring and talk about the Battle for Mount Bloodhorn we
played yesterday. Also, as sort of a new attempt to paint a few models,
Balephon, Bra’tac and myself have joined in a little Farewell to 5th
painting challenge. Lastly, I promised a few weeks back that I’d talk a bit
about how my Ogres are doing at tournaments. I’ve had a bit of think and
decided to change a thing or two in an effort to actually improve my tournament
record (which, to be honest, is just a notch above abysmal the last few years).
Farewell
to 5th: Painting Challenge
Still
nothing is official, but word on the street is that we’re only a couple of
months away from the next 40k Edition. Now, I’ve been fed up and done with 5th
for about a year now, so you’ll hear nothing but good from me whatever changes
GW brings to the game.
However,
knowing myself and my gaming habits, I will be having a renewed interest in 40k
from about a week before I can get my grubby little fingers on the new book and
I’ll be writing armylist after armylist trying to see what cool stuff I can do
with the new rules.All of which will leave me precious little time to actually paint anything. To be honest, actually painting stuff is always a problem for me, so any excuse I can find to paint something new I try and grab. Sure, I failed miserably at the Warseer painting challenge (what, didn’t think I’d come back to that?), but I did paint a fair bit of my skaven and some miscellaneous units from other armies as well. So all is not lost.
Anyway!
So, here’s
the “ rules”. We each agree to paint
1000 points worth of any given 40k army in the next 6 weeks. We can paint
whatever we want, be it Troops, HQ or whatever. It doesn’t have to be a legal
army because, let’s be honest, 6th might go back to percentages and
we won’t know what makes an army legal until we see the rules!
That
leaves us with about 166 points to paint every week, which might not seem like
a lot, but trust me when I say we’ll all three of us be proud if we manage to
complete it!
The only
reason Bra’tac joined was because I promised him to update this blog more
frequently and show our progress on here. So here’s a first update.
These
are his Rebel Grot Imperial Guard. Cool huh? You can check out more here. Leave
a comment if you can, since it’ll motivate him to finish the army and we’ve all
been wanting him to finish for over a year now.
Balephon
(or “daddy” as he is known as by his little baby girl) will paint Grey Knights.
And I
will, after much deliberating, also be painting Imperial Guard. But I will do
some more Redemptionists Tanks and some Adeptus Arbites infantry (ie. Veterans with
carapace armour). I’d show you pics, but I haven’t done anything yet, so you’ll
have to wait for next week!
Anyway,
check back here next week, same time (ish), for pics on where we all are with
our armies.
Wish us
luck!
Ps. If you
want to join us in painting stuff (doesn’t even have to be 40K; it can be High
Elves too, Apophis), just drop me a line!
Ogres @
Tournaments: Thoughts.
As I
mentioned in my tournament updates a few weeks back, I had some trouble
actually winning games with my Ogres. I´ve talked about my Ogres on here before
and it just so happens they were my army of choice for the past two tournaments
I´ve been to. I think I like having a break from the armies I´ve been using in
the campaigns (Skaven and Warriors of Chaos respectively). Or maybe I’m just a
glutton (…sorry…) for punishment.
The main
problem I have found the past few tournaments is that my ogres have trouble
dealing with chaff units as well as with finishing off units. Case in point: Last
tournament I played a game vs High Elves. I’ve played Helves a bunch and this
wasn’t a particularly good army. A big block of spearmen and two small archers
units for core, one unit each of Lions and Swordmasters, a lvl 4 life and a
lvl2 Idon’tremember were the important things. I got off a Comet in my first
magic phase, which landed and did a heap of damage to his units. A miscast in
his magic phase later and his lvl 2 had one wound left, the white lions were
reduced to 4 models and the Swordmasters were still 9 strong. And that’s how
many there were left at the end of the game. I had no means to finish off the
lvl 2 (which had actually left her unit to stand on her own), nor the lions,
let alone the swordmasters! Very frustrating.
So,
after I got home from the tournament I started thinking about my ogre army.
What did I like and what didn’t I like?
So,
after a bit of a think, this is the list I’ve come up with.
To solve
my problem of finishing off units I will use Gorgers. Ambush means they won’t
enter the table till about turn 2-3, which is fine by me as I probably won’t
have stragglers for them to finish off before that.
I’m
taking more units of trappers and no sabretusks.I’ll try Lore of Beasts on my slaughtermaster and see how that works.
Here’s
the list:
SM <Beast>
Butcher
<Maw>BSB
4*10
Trappers
12 Bulls
2*3
Leadbelchers
2
Gorgers4 Maneaters <Scout, Poison>
Stonehorn
Ironblaster. |
| These have nothing to do with the campaign. I just think they´re great! |
End of
Spring: First Campaign Season comes to an end.
Spring
is in the books! We’ve finished with our first campaign season, and so far we’re
having a blast. Not everything is going as planned (more on that later), but
all in all the campaign is progressing nicely. We’ve been having a bit of slow
month as we were waiting for a good time for all of us to come together and
play the end of season battle, but we’ve done that yesterday and it was great!
First, a
small recap of turn 3. It’s been a while, and all I remember is playing a big
battle vs Bra’tac’s Ogres. 4000 pts each and it was a blast. I have pictures
and I promised to do a proper battle report, so I’ll save those, as well as the
actual outcome, for later.
Next, I
played a battle vs Jerroii in an attempt to free my general from his decaying
clutches. He of course tried to do the same to me, since I had his general. We
made up some rules to represent our units trying to hold on to the opposing general
while trying to free our own and it was tense until the final turn. Jerroi
tried desperately to free his general, who was held by a unit of Tzeentchian
Warriors but couldn’t set him free. On the other side of the battle my Chaos
Knights had freed my General from a giant unit zombies, only to lose him again
in the final turn of the game by a pesky Wraith I failed to snipe with a magic
missile earlier. Doh! The battle ended in a draw, both our Generals were
sacrificed and Jerroii now has a Wight King Hero of Legend by the name of
Thalenchar… This is not over, Jerroii!
I also
played a Storm of Magic battle vs Apophis and his High Elves, more as a
practice game to get us acquainted with the SoM rules than anything else. It
was fun trying those rules out and I have a better understanding of what to
expect when next I play a SoM battle.
What?
Oh, yes,
Apophis might have won. I don’t really remember. Honest.
Now, you
might think I was the only one playing last turn. I wasn’t, I just don’t
remember right now what the others did! Here’s the map of turn 3.
On to the
final battle of the season!
First
off I want to thank Bra’tac for opening his house to us and setting up the
tables we needed. Here’s some pics of the tables. Remember he just moved into
his new house and one of the first things he did was preparing the game room!
All the terrain and tables are still a work in progress, but so far everything
looks stunning. Thanks again, sir!
On to
the battle itself. For those who don’t know, for the final battle of the spring
season players are divided into two teams of three (in our case). We divided
along a geographical line, with Team South consisting of Jerroii, Bra’tac, and
Apophis, while Team North consisted of Balephon, Shalen, and myself.
Team
North would be the Defenders.
Next was
deciding who would play which battle. There’s three battles to be played: a
Siege on table 1, a Battle For the Pass on table 2, and a Watchtower on Table 3.
Whoever wins the Siege on table 1 wins the entire thing. The surviving troops
of the winning players on tables 2 and 3 can come on as reserves on table 1 to
help swing the tide there.
To keep
things close and give the other tables a chance to finish before the Siege did,
we didn’t start deploying for the Siege until the other tables had both begun
their turn 2.
Now,
part of the fun was deciding who would play where and trying to figure out
which army we’d play against. As it turned out this is how we ended up fighting
the games:
Table 1
Thalenchar v Jerroii
Table 2
Bra’tac v Balephon
Table 3
Shalen v Apophis
Now, to
start with the lower tables, Team North was dominating. Shalen won the
Watchtower thanks to 3 sturdy Dwarven allies and prevented Apophis’ army entering
Table 1. Great job!
On Table
2 Balephon made short work of Bra’tac’s Gutstar and entered Table 1 with about
85% of his army still intact.
Unfortunately,
the results of the other two tables didn’t matter in the end. By the time
Balephon and Shalen (with his three dwarfs; that was all he had left, bless
him) entered Table 1, we only had 2 turns left to play and I was well on my way
to getting totally slaughtered. Great job by Jerroii in using his Vampire
Counts to such effect. Honestly, I didn’t stand a chance. 2 Terrorgheists with
Siege Clubs decimated my army (with shrieks) and my castle (with the clubs) and
I just didn’t have any answers.
So in
the end, Team South won the game, even though they lost 2 of 3 battles. I hang
my head in shame in having cost my team the overall victory. I thought I was
better prepared!
After
the game, we started on the first turn of Summer and here’s the map as it looks
now:
That’s
it for now. Thanks for reading and remember, if you want to join in our Farewell
to 5th painting challenge, just let me know!
