Game Night!

*EDIT - and once again the blogger app ate my lay-out. Fixed now, with apologies*

Hello and welcome to the first ever edition of Game Night! where I'll talk about any specific gameplay bits  that I have participated in over the week. I'm still getting to grips with the new blog format but these post should be arriving more regarly :p

For this week's installment, I have three different items for you. First up will be a Thunderstomp Battle Review of a multiplayer battle we did in the final turn of our Fantasy Campaign, using the scenario from the rulebook. So for everyone who's wondered if that's a fun and fair way to do a three-player battle, this one will be for you!

Second, for a little dose of 40k, I'll do my initial thoughts on the new Necron Codex. I've been pouring over my copy since Thursday (I do enjoy usually being able getting my hands on a new book a couple of days before the official release!) and I have a few ideas to share with you. Nothing too serious, go to 3++ for that!

Finally, I have three army ideas to discuss with you, all possibilities for me to use for my half of a Fantasy doubles tournament in December. So, let's get to it!

Painting Madness - Shalen's Greenskins

From now on I'll stop calling my little brother my little brother and will refer to him with the much manlier name: Shalen!
There should be an accent on there somewhere, I'm sure, and I promise to occasionally try and remember to put it on properly!

Now, as you might know, Shalen has joined me in my painting challenge, pledging to paint 100 points of Orcs each  month for a year. Here are his batches for september and october!

More Greenskin Painting!

Quick post today. Working on a large post on combat character viability for tomorrow, so stay tuned for that!

I have another person joining me in my quest to paint a monthly total: my brother! Pledging a hundred points per month, this should be good! Keep your eyes tuned here for pics :)

Fantasy Campaign - Turn 4 movement

Today we played the fourth turn in our 8 turn Fantasy Campaign. For those people who don't know, it's a map based campaign with a secret mission to capture certain territories for each player. It's all about attrition as we play battles every turn and lose units that die/flee, but we can only "buy back" units up to 500 pts or
so each turn. With each player's total army worth 6500 pts 500 isn't that many!

I can explain in more detail what happened where but after moving our Army Banners on the map we ended up with three battles. 3500 pts OnG vs 3000 HE was the big one. Would this be the battle where the greenskins got their revenge for the beating they received in T2?

The second battle was part II of the battle HE and Skaven fought last turn, 2000 vs 2000. Last turn ended in a draw which meant we would have to refight, but only with the troops left/bought back. Could the Skavrn finally dislodge the Elves from their hold on the Skaven flank?

And the final battle is between two 500 pts scout forces, HE vs Skaven. Nothing too important now, but the way our campaign is set up, Scout forces can play an important role later since they can provide an easy 500 pts boost to another army. Trying to do what damage you can to enemy Scout forces can only help later, since no player is likely to spend his precious 500 replenishment points on a lowly Scout Force!

So plenty of action going on and with plenty more to come. For instance, there is a 1000 pts HE banner making it's way to the Skaven Capitol...

And also, being at the Campaign's midway point, the time to start moving to claim those Objectives is very near!

More later!

Battle Report - Ogres vs Orcs n Goblins, attempt two

Alright, let's try this again, shall we?

As I was trying to tell you yesterday, I played another playtest battle with my Ogres tuesday. This time I played vs Greenskins, captained by my little brother. He's the one who made that giant, and I think it's awesome. Seeing it always make me crack a smile.

My brother started playing Fantasy over a decade ago, his main army being Orcs and Goblins, and over the years he accumulated quite a collection. He hasn't been playing Fantasy exclusively in those years, sometimes favouring Mordheim or sometimes just no tabletop games at all. Recently his interest in the game has been rekindled, mostly due to 8th edition being more fun and, to a lesser extent, an ever-nagging sibling (that would be me) badgering him to play more.
So, he and I both have signed up for the same tournament and we would be trying out our tournament armies against each other.

This is probably a good time to mention that I have never lost a game of warhammer to my brother. Plenty of draws, but never a loss. You can imagine how much it means to both of us to break the streak / keep the streak intact, respectively. Honour was at stake!

Ok, on to the armies!

Fantasy Campaign - Turn 3 Moves

And here we have the updated map for Turn 3 of our campaign. There is a fair bit of repositioning going on and not so many outright battles. Apparently we are all getting ready for a bigger push in T4. It's not all moving and no action though!

Let's look at what's happening:

After winning big in the North, the High Elves are looking to push the Orcs and Goblins further south while simultaneously trying to get closer to where more of the action is happening (territories 25-28).
The High Elf Banner 5 tried to drag Orcs and Goblins Banner 4 in a battle in Territory 21, while HE banners 1 and 6 try to do the same to OnG banner 2. If you remember, these OnG banners were both soundly beating the previous turn where he was already severly outnumbered (2500 vs 3500), so the last thing the OnG player wants is to have to fight those same HE again while he still isn't back up to full strenght!

Fantasy Campaign -Turn 2

Yes, that is a Fantasy battle about to commence. Yes, those are bits of paper in the middle representing terrain. Yes, most models are unpainted. And yes, there was even a small bit of proxying going on.

(see that plastic dragon in the middle of the Orc line there? That's really a cleverly disguised pump wagon...)

This might be a good time to mention that we are also using this campaign as an excuse to get our armies ready and painted, and make sure we have some nice terrain to play over. Since this is only turn two, we're still very much in the 'assemble and undercoat' phase of our painting plan. But, not to worry, as the campaign progresses you will see more and more painted Skaven and Greenskins. Hell, you might even see the occasional High Elf done and finished on the table. If we can get the HE player to stop messing about and get his ass in gear, that is!

(I wonder if he'll read this and take the hint ;) )

Anyway! Last weekend we wrapped up turn 2 of our campaign. As you could see on the map we had three battles to fight. One between High Elves and Orcs n Goblins in territory 19, and two between O&G and Skaven, in territories 25 and 27.

Fantasy Campaign - Map

And here it is, in all its full-coloured glory. Don't have too much time now so I will explain what is what later, but most things should be pretty selfexplanotory. Arrows indicate which banners are moving where. If opposing banners end up in the same Territory, battle will ensue.

Greenskins = Green
High Elves = Blue
Skaven = Red

Fantasy Campaign - Turn 1

I just remembered I had said I would explain some more about the Fantasy map campaign I'm in. Whoops, got distracted writing other stuff!

A little bit of background info first. Myself and two mates meet up one evening every two weeks and play games. We started doing this almost a year ago to sort of try and see if we could maintain a regular gaming evening, since we all love games. We started with just playing a board game of one type or another, but pretty soon one of us suggested we try our hands at a GW campaign. Since all three of us have been loyal GW games players for over a decade (including the occasional hiatus), we soon caught the gaming bug again and before we knew it, we were knee deep in our first Necromunda campaign since the early 2000s. What a fun game that is..!

Anyway! We actually played two consecutive Necromunda campaigns which in total lasted until about May or June of this year. Assembling and painting our gangs and then going out and playing games of Necromunda with them was just great fun.

(as an aside, I can wholeheartedly recommend playing a campaign of Necromunda to those who feel they need a break from 40k. It is just great and by far my favourite GW subgame)

After the second campaign, now fully convinced we would be able to keep our biweekly meetings going, we decided to try our hand at something a bit more... Well, just something a bit more!

Start of our Fantasy Campaign

Apparently today was the day me and 2 mates were going to start with our very own Map-based Fantasy campaign. We decided we were going to do one of those just prior to the summer and had set the starting date to 'sometime after the summer'. Well, today was that day! Luckily for me I had already planned my different armies and I was ready to go! I just need to remember what the fluff was for my army...

Anyway, in short the campaign works as follows: we made a map, consisting of 60 territories. Of these, 5 were marked as Primary Objectives, and another 5 were Secondary Objectives. Next, we created about eight-ten Risk style mission cards, each listing two Primary Objectives and two Secondary Objectives. Each player was dealt a mission card before the start of the campaign.
To win the campaign a player receives points for controlling Objective territories at the end of the Campaign. The Objectives on his mission card are worth the most points, but you can gain points for controlling other Objectives as well. And of course, whoever has the most points wins. Our campaign will last for 8 campsign turns.
To capture territories players needed to make one large army and then divide it up into smaller battlegroups. We decided on using a fixed number of these battlegroups, each with a fixed number of points. This because playing in a map campaign can be tricky and we wanted to not complicate things too much by using a random number of Battlegroups.

The different battlegroups we use are:
One 2500 points army
Three 1000 points armies, one of which has to be Quick or Fast (I'll go into detail what that means in another post)
Two 500 pts Scout armies (again, I'll fully explain later)

So that's a grand total of 6500 pts. Both the total army and each of the smaller forces should be legal armies. So yes, that means a maximum of 1 BSB in total, no more than 3 of any given rare choice, etc. We did not allow special characters. Magic Items were severly limited. No player is allowed to use magic items unless he controls one or more of a few territories that allow him to take, for instance, a magic weapon.

The armies participating are High Elves, Orcs & Goblins, and Skaven. I'm playing the ratkin!

Tomorrow I'll write about how the first turn went and how things stand now.