What I Did On My Summer Holidays...

It's been a LONG time since I updated this blog, which is really quite inexcusable even with how much I've had to do from both a gaming and real life viewpoint. However, I seem to have a relatively quiet week ahead of me so I guess I've got time to touch on some of the highlights from the last few months.

Star Wars - The Card Game

July saw me heading down to Exeter for the regional championship for the Star Wars LCG. I'm a huge fan of the game but as with anything CCG/LCG related I really struggle to find opponents locally for either casual gaming or tournaments so I decided to combine catching up with family (my brother lives in Exeter, as does my 18 month old nephew) with another crack at a regional championship (I came 2nd in the event held in Sheffield on May 4th).

The tournament consisted of 4 rounds of swiss, in which I managed to win all 4 (a couple by tiebreaker and a couple by luck) which meant I finished in 2nd place at this stage. We then went to a top 4 knockout stage. My opponent in the semi-final turned out to be the guy I'd just beat in the final round of swiss and our rematch went much the same way which put me into the final. At which point my Sith deck decided it had had enough and didn't want to play any more - I saw none of the cards I needed and was beaten in fairly short order. I managed to win the second game with my Jedi deck (each round consists of 2 games, light side vs dark) but my opponent got the tiebreaker and the win. Second place again. Still, I'm starting to believe I may actually know what I'm doing with this game.

I can thoroughly recommend Clifton Road Games in Exeter, where the tournament was held. Great shop with a wide range and a huge gaming hall out back, the staff and regulars were all very welcoming and I wound up hanging around after the tournament to play Mansions of madness until past midnight. Great start to a holiday.

Judge Dredd Miniatures - Heroes of Mega City One

This was the second ever JDMG tournament held at Mongoose HQ in Swindon, I went to the first one as well and had a blast despite finishing somewhere mid-table. This one was a slightly different format, you had the option to field higher level heroes this time round (up to level 5) which opened up some options, or you could field mobs of minions. This made it hard to predict which way the meta would go and I had to hedge my bets a little, I wound up settling on a squad of 3 Judges, all boosted to level 5 and with a range of talents to take on heroes or mobs as necessary.

Adrian from PWC and I left Peterborough at silly-o-clock in the morning, making it to Swindon just in time for the start. I'll admit that I've not retained a great deal of detail from this event. I remember a battle against a robot force, all armed with sniper rifles and lined up against the back of their deployment zone an a massive table with a nice killing field in front of them; I lost that one. I wound up playing against Ady's renegade robots (naturally, you always wind up playing against the chauffeur) and won that one largely due to the fact that I knew exactly what he was going to be taking and had tweaked my force to take it into account. Otherwise I had a number of games against other Justice Department forces, all of which had more models than me but were lower level so I was able to take them apart bit-by-bit. When the dust settled, I'd wound up in 2nd place overall which was frankly astonishing. Looking forward to the next event Mongoose put on, there's no way I'll be missing it if I get any say in the matter.

Warhammer 40K - Club Campaign

I'll be brutally honest, this campaign has done more to send me into a general wargaming funk than anything else that's happened recently. I'm doing well (6 wins out of 6 games, some more by luck than judgement) and no disrespect meant to Dan (the campaign organiser) or any of my opponents but I'm really getting fed up of the mess that is the current 40K ruleset. Some of the new stuff they've put in there is great, some of it needed a lot more playtesting/rewriting before it was fit for release, and some of it is blatantly just there to sell new models (they're not even trying to hide it any more).

But what's really got my back up (and this may sound petty) is the new Space Marine codex, specifically the Centurions. Can somebody please explain to me what GW were thinking with these? Why bother with veteran company terminators when all the regular companies have access to these which are just better? Just retcon them into the background material and throw most of the existing stuff out at the same time. Plus they just look stupid. Prime example of rules being driven by the need to sell models (they're damned expensive as well). [/rant]

Anyway, the end result is that I've sworn off 40K for a bit. I've dropped out of the campaign, which thankfully is structured to allow people to do this with minimal problems, and won't be playing again for the foreseeable future. Which of course means that my Grey Knights have been put on the back burner indefinitely as well.

Judge Dredd Minatures - Club Campaign

This continues to bumble along, we're all having a lot of fun and eventually somebody's going to win it. In the meantime we all get to play some games and not take much of it too seriously. My Judgement League are now getting to a scarily high level without actually becoming all that competent in game, which makes things interesting to say the least. We haven't yet quite decided what to do about the imminent release of the new edition of the rules.

Bolt Action

I've been playing a lot of this recently, if anything it's taken over and filled the hole that 40K left behind. Great ruleset, much less fiddly than some other WWII rules I could mention and makes a lot more sense in game as well. It's a ruleset where you can just worry about tactics and let the rules pretty much take care of themselves, which is probably why I like it so much.

I went to my first BA tournament at Rushden a couple of weeks ago and will be posting a full tournament report in the next couple of days.

Judge Dredd - Necropolis 2 Tournament/Campaign Day

Somewhat scarily, this was the first time I have ever organised a tournament of any kind. Again, I'll be posting a full report soon but in short it all went surprisingly well. And while I didn't get all of the zombies painted in time, I did get more than enough done.

So anyway, that's what's been occupying my attention over the last few months. I'll try to keep this more up-to-date from now on.

Apocalypse Just Now - Battle report

Today was probably my final game of Warhammer 40K - Apocalypse using the current rules, given that there's a new edition being launched next month. Our club had hired the hall where we meet for all day rather than our usual Monday evening sessions, which allows us to play the kind of game we just don't normally have time for. In this case, a game of Apocalypse on a 6'x12' table with 5,000 points per side.

My opponent was Mark, who I've known and been playing 40K against since we were both teenagers (more than 20 years for those who are keeping track). We've played countless games against each other and recently I've been coming out on top, our last Apocalypse game was a bit of a whitewash in my favour. This time however I was using a combination of Daemons (only my second game with the new codex) and my corrupted Grey Knights (first game ever) while Mark was using his trusty Imperial Guard and Marines so this was going to be interesting.

I went into this with a cunning plan; start most of my daemons in reserve, make sure I take the second turn to give me a full turn with most of my army off-table where it can't be shot, use the careful planning stratagem and a healthy dose of instruments of chaos to deep strike everything on turn 1. Unfortunately that plan started to go wrong right from the start when I lost my Bloodthirster to a deep strike mishap, which took some of the teeth from my attack on one flank.

Commisar Yarrick leads the Imperial Guard against a large
force of Khornate daemons on the left flank. In the background,
Txeentch horrors lead the assault led by a Prince of Tzeentch.

On the other side of the table I started in a good position; my Grey Knight Terminators, led by the Grand Master and a Librarian, were holding 2 of the objectives, supported by the possessed Dreadknight and a Warhound Titan. The bulk of the Pink Horrors landed on this flank as well, contesting one of the remaining objectives in the centre of the table.

Terminators hold the objectives in the ruins as the Horrors lead the attack.
Those are the titan's feet at the top of the picture.

Back on the left flank, the Baneblade opened fire and obliterated an entire unit of Bloodletters in one round of shooting. Any hope of reinforcing the combat against Yarrick and his fearless retinue was gone, the Khornate daemon prince would have to stand alone.

The prince of Khorne surrounded by Yarrick's entourage. This combat
would continue until the end of the game.

All things considered, things could have gone better in the first couple of turns but they could also have gone a lot worse. We were using the alternative scoring method from Apocalypse Reload rather than the "all or nothing" system from the main rules. At the end of turn 2, it was all tied at 5 victory points apiece. Then the rest of Marks reserves turned up. Pitching in several terminator squads and a dreadnought right where they were needed, Mark was able to turn the tide decisively against me. The left flank was lost, although the Tzeentchian daemon prince was able to destroy the Baneblade before he was incinerated in the resulting reactor meltdown and the Khornate prince was quite happy eviscerating guardsmen (though achieving nothing from a tactical point of view).

In the centre, the marine commander (and Mark's warlord for this game) finally turned up along with a pair of Chemdog tanks which wore down the daemons before the Warhound turned up, gunned down the surviving marines and trampled the marine commander underfoot. But in the meantime, a pair of Vendettas had managed to kill the Dreadknight, take the objective he was holding and shoot the Grey Knight Grand Master in the back. At this point my army was down to less than a dozen models (although admittedly one was a titan) and we'd hit our time limit. A convincing victory to the forces of the Imperium, but a thoroughly enjoyable game nonetheless.

Now I just need to get my mind out of Apocalypse and back into regular 40K mode, I've got a campaign game tomorrow, and I haven't even decided which army I'm fielding.

(Lack of) Progress Report

I said that my aim for the bank holiday weekend was to get enough models painted for my corrupted Grey Knights army that I would be able to field a legal allied contingent in a game of 40K. I'm ashamed to say that I failed in even this modest task.

It wasn't a complete failure. I did get my first HQ choice painted, a Librarian/Sorceror. I have a squad of 5 Terminators that's about 80% completed, but only one of those is in a state where I could call it complete. So success on the HQ, but a fail on the troops choice.

Plus I now have a much better idea of what the army will look like. I've posted pictures of the Librarian, and I'm happy with the colour scheme. There's certainly no danger of these being mistaken for regular Grey Knights anyway.

Close up of the Librarian/Sorceror - a mix of Grey Knight and Chaos Terminator parts

Detail of the model's cloak, I'm quite pleased with the flame patterns

So what's next? Well, obviously I'm going to finish the 5 Terminators I've got almost completed, plus I've got 5 more undercoated to take the squad up to full strength. After that, I want to concentrate on the possessed Nemesis Dreadknight (also undercoated and ready to start).

P.S. When I say the Librarian is finished, I'm not including the base in that. I like to base models in batches, otherwise I always wind up wasting glue. So what I'll do is wait until I've got the full squad of 10 Terminators done and base the Librarian at the same time.

P.P.S. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the prize draw that Mike from Peterborough Wargames is running on his blog in celebration of 100,000 page views.

So far, so good

I said I was starting this blog to write about the new armies I've just started working on, so I guess I'll start with my latest offering for Warhammer 40K.

First though, a bit of background. 40K is the game that got me into wargaming in the first place and, no matter what problems I might have with the rules (I have plenty) or the price of the figures, it's a game I just can't seem to give up on. A big chunk of the reason for that is the depth of the background material, particularly the forces of Chaos. Which is why I've always had a problem with one particular omission from the Chaos Marine codex.

The thing is, each of the four Chaos powers has its own elite Chaos Marine unit, troops that best exemplify the tactical style of that particular god. Khorne has Bezerkers, Nurgle has Plague Marines and Slaanesh has Noise Marines. And Tzeentch; Tzeentch has the Thousand Sons. Which is where it all falls down , because the Thousand Sons aren't really in the same category as the others. They're a single chapter of Chaos Marines and their in-game abilities are directly linked to that fact. Which means that if you want a Tzeentch-themed army (like I do) you have to either take an army from one specific chapter or accept that it will be less themed than an army for one of the other powers.

So this was my quest to come up with a better option for a themed Tzeentchian army. What I came up with was an complete army of psykers, using the Grey Knights codex. Which I guess is playing even more fast and loose with the background material but it works for me.

So what do I have to show for this big plan so far? The short answer is a lot of grey plastic. Largely because I haven't decided on a colour scheme yet. Right now, the only candidate I have is one survivor from a previous army I put together 20 years ago (the rest of the Tzeentch troops from this army were unfortunately lost when one of my figure cases got stolen). At the time, I really liked this colour scheme. Now I'm not so sure...

Anyway, more to follow. Possibly before I come up with a workable colour scheme, possibly after.