Author: littlemute

Goal failure! sort of…

10 miniatures a month complete.  Seems easy? Doable?  Yes and yes.  How could I have failed?  I blame the weather and Rackham!  The first week of the month started off awesome: I finished 6 Beastmen Gor and was poised to meet the goal by mid month– if I had had any more primed Gor or Ungor.  Then the weather turned from bitter cold to the drizzlin shits of rain, where priming was impossible.   So I grabbed one of my bigger models, the hound of scathach from Confrontation 3, as a stand in for a Razorgor and that took two weeks.   Eventually the weather cleared and was able to get a mess of stuff primed and I tried to pull it out and get to 10 in the last couple days, but I just couldn’t pull it off.  Still it’s only 103 points…

April has to be 14 or I’m no brushman.

Wow that's a messy table.
probably just mad because that corpse stinks something awful

WFB 8 Battle Report: Beastmen vs Goblins (or– Thank you Anvil of Vaul!)

Cain indulged the current obsession for the fourth time this weekend hauling his Night Goblin swarm over to pit them against the primal fury of the beastmen in Warhammer Fantasy Battle.   We rolled ‘battle for the pass’ for the scenario,  which means the armies fight it out starting on the short ends of the 6′ X 4′ table rather than the long ones as normal.  This gave a very compact center with little room on the flanks for maneuver or trickery.   At 1500 points per side, that made for quite the crowded table with few places to escape the big blocks of rank n file.  A tough fight for the goblins to start with as the table set up neutralized the Gobbo advantages on the flanks (there weren’t any!) was exacerbated by a bit of terrain that worked just a wee too well in the beastmen’s favor: the Anvil of Vaul (oh and his fanatics).

The fanatic didn’t go exactly the right way shortly after this shot

Under normal circumstances, the Anvil of Vaul, which gives Flaming and Magical attack augmentation to all units within 6″, would be a pretty even bonus for both sides in a fight, but I just happened to choose Blackened Plate as my only magic item for the army (man was 1500 points a squeeze).  Blackened Plate gives a 2 up ward save to the wearer against flaming attacks AND a 4 up ward save for any unit he is with.  In the clutch block on block fights during the battle, all within 6″ of the Anvil of Vaul, this gave my main Gor unit, who usually go skin with no save at all, a horrific advantage over the Goblins leading to their decimation, flight and subsequently ending up inside a stomach for their pains.  Still it was a great game and we’re finally getting down the rules.  It’s been tough to remember the fiddly bits here and there and to remember that Charges are resolved before compulsory movement (a big change from almost every Warhammer ruleset I’ve ever played) but we’re getting closer.  One makes a big investment getting into a game like Warhammer, and committing to an edition and so far I couldn’t be more pleased with the games played– all just a total blast that makes 4 hours go by in a wink.

My list was finally legal after struggling to reconcile the 7th edition book with the 8th edition rules (sorry Cain) but was not fully painted, which is my personal shame as I really dislike hitting the table with unpainted stuff:

Gorbull (General)
Blackened Plate*

Wargor (Battle Standard Bearer)

Bray Shaman Level 1 (Lore of Beasts)

Core:

38 Gor with additional hand weapons, standard, musician and champion (both the Gorebull and Wargor joined this unit)

10 Gor with additional hand weapons, musician (in ambush)

29 Ungor with spears and shields, standard, musician (the Bray Shaman joined the ungor)

2 Tuskagor Chariots

5 Chaos Hounds

Special:

Razorgor (played by a Hound of Scathach from Confrontation)

Rare:

A big fat Giant!

What to play on the Win2K box?

With my gaming rig down for the count and Bulletstorm, Singularity, BFBC2 and Shogun Total War 2 are a distant dream so I’ve spanned some time on my Windows 2000  box that is going on 11 years old now and still cranking!  Typically I use it for Close Combat almost exclusively as I have most of the series installed (though I have to dig around for the cd’s–how antiquated…).  Yesterday I found a gem installed right on the C: drive:  CHAOS OVERLORDS published by New World Computing back in the elder times — also responsible for HOMM and Hammer of the Gods.  It’s a CCG-like game of area control and gang warfare that allows you to research tech, hire gangs that randomly come up in a queue and extort protection money for the businesses and buildings in your regions.  Like Imperialism from back in the day, Chaos Overlords is notable because I have NEVER won a game.  Even without victory, it’s quite fun to play until you get simultaneously attacked by all the other gangs at once.

Secondly, one of my favorite games from the 90’s– King of Dragon Pass is still hanging out on my win2K’s hard drive awaiting invocation.  While it requires the disk during play, this is a game that I cannot believe hasn’t come out on Steam or GOG, though it looks like it’s being developed for the iPad.  It’s difficult to describe as it’s a little like a Koei strategy title but also a bit of an adventure game with a series of random events obviously very keyed to your current situation in the game.  These random events path, so if your clan adopts a certain red-headed girl when prompted, later random events will be keyed to the fact that she is part of your clan.  If you never accepted her, another set of events are keyed.  Since this happens across a myriad of events, it’s never the same game twice, though you will see the beginnings of event-trees over and over.    My initial games were extremely blood thirsty, choosing to fill my Elder Circle with followers of Humakt (the god of war) and go forth and kick ass on my rival clans.  It turns out the balanced path is the one that wins the game as it’s not about conquest, but forming a tribe of other clans, and then a kingdom through a series of rituals where a member of your Elder circle enters into the lands of the gods.  A brilliantly unique experience.

I can abide 2 weeks or so of this… maybe…