Been a while

 Been a busy December so far with not a lot of time or energy for painting but I have finally got there! 

My second unit of Imperial Navy Breachers is done: 

This means that in a couple of weeks, I'll be playing some boarding action with blogger Scotty and running an Imperial Agents patrol of: 

• Inquisitor Kyria Draxus 
• Rogue Trader Entourage with Voidsmen
• Imperial Navy Breachers
• Imperial Navy Breachers
• Inquisitorial Acolytes
  

for a pleasing 480 points. Is it good? Oh, hell no. Will it be awesome? Yes. 

It also means I have cleared the way for some summer projects. One will be resurrecting my Deathwatch with the new Index and the other....wait and see!

Remember December

Wanze approach the objective

A solid 2-1 record for the day (and third equal) with a solid lack of photos. The last game was a bit lunatic but I won a game of Valley of Death with three Kleinpanzer Wanze taking an objective and surviving a couple of rounds of shooting from Hans Rudel and a Last Man test to win the game. 

The rules for the event were:

• 70 points Late War
• No Top Armour 2
• Only one unarmoured unit

And it brought out a bunch of medium tank lists - Cromwells, Comets, Jagdpanzers, Panzer IVs, Turans, Shermans, Chaffees, T34.85s - pretty much everything. It was brilliant.  Glorious victory on the day went to clubmate Richard running Hero Sherman 76s. It was a cool list and he played it well (I know, he beat me 8-1!) 

Next Time

Starting on my summer projects. Expect some workbenches...

Eine kleinepanzer nachtmusik?

 Turns out panzer wanze is German for armoured bug. Who knew? i mean, people who speak German, sure, but not me! 

It's bearing down on that time of year again when I reveal my secret tech for our club's annual Flames of War event in memory of clubmate Nick. This year, I'm taking my favourite LW German archetype - turrets are for chumps and adding to this year's stupidity are three Kleinpanzer Wanze:

 

Is bug. Is so cute! I'm sure this will be terrible, like all my Remember December lists, but meh. They're fun.

Tune in in a couple of weeks time to see how we go! 

Next Time

Whatever happens between now and RD!  

Short and sweet

 Not much this week. 

I played in a one-day Kings of War event at the club yesterday and won three games out of three, part of the epic victory for Team Good. There's part of me that thinks the combo of ogres and light infantry and cavalry was the genius list build that got me over the line. I suspect however it was my opponents rolling dice like this that also had something to do with it in almost ever game:

Shoutout to blogger Pelarel for the last game of the day and that, while explicitly the worst of his die rolls, is also an adequate illustration of his dice in that game more generally. My shooting against the slow undead definitely came to the party for the first time in the day too which certainly helped!

Workbench

I finished up the backlog of Mehadistes for Silver Bayonet Egypt as well: 

Another Grenadier on the left, the Occultist (because no one else would be so gauche as to wear orange) and then a light cavalryman and his dismounted version. I have a couple more civilians that I could paint up for this unit but we'll see how we go.

Blogger Tank has been tinkering with his table setups and has come up with a new one he wants to try out so the timing is great!

Next Time

I have one more squad of Imperial Navy Breachers on my desk that I want to finish and a quick project for our annual club memorial event in December so probably those!

Big guns on big tables

There's been a bit of a renaissance of Team Yankee at the club summed up somewhat by clubmate Paul who exclaimed "why didn't you tell me you were playing this?!" 

Bloggers Tank, Pelarel, McBeth and I played a 140 point doubles game of Team Yankee in advance of next year's Panzerschreck event in Palmerston North. "Practicing is cheating" has been a catchcry for the last few years but given we've not played a game of TY in a while, playing some practice games seemed like a good idea. 

So Tank and my M1A1 Armoured Combat Team & Marine LAV company took on Pel and McBeth's Challenger Armoured Squadron & Queens Dragoon Guards.

Phase One: Handbags 

The Challengers attacked up the American right flank, straight into an M1A1 platoon in ambush. The two Bradley IFVs and M1A1s did a sum total of nothing to the Challengers. An effective start.  From here we withdrew around the walled farm and repositioned to draw the British forward. See how that manoeuvre turned out later on...

Meanwhile, the two recce screens met around the town and some Scorpions tried some cheeky shots at an oncoming LAV platoon who promptly opened up with their 25mm Bushmasters and set the Scorpions packing. The second Scorpion platoon hiding behind the houses met the exact same fate at the hands of the Marine gunners:

Around the nearby airport, a sum total of not much was happening other than some recce Bradleys taking position near the taxiway and then spending the subsequent five turns exchanging ATGWs with some British Swingfires for a sum total of one bailed out vehicle. Ever. The middle of the board really didn't much enter into the game in the end.

Phase Two: More Handbags

In an effort to limit the amount of handbaggery, the second British Challenger platoon arrived from reserve and bravely attacked the flank of our second M1A1 platoon (which had arrived the turn prior) before we could overrun the objective. Turns out the whole RoF1 and no Advanced Stabilisers kind of really sucks super hard as they promptly missed.

Meanwhile, on our right flank, our opponents pulled this incredible shenanigan to stop our M1A1s taking an aggressive flanking charge on the Challengers:

This unsporting manoeuvre will live on in infamy! Especially as what followed was a sequence of poor armour saves, remounts and last stands that lead to the total loss of the M1A1 platoon after a sequence of handbags. Turns out that there's a point where rolling 1s does hit hard. When the British infantry and Challengers rolled towards the objective that's just out of shot behind the walled farm there, I took great pleasure in putting some HMMWV Stingers into a stupid wall too. Just to make a point.

However, on our left, everything came up roses. The M1A1s survived the flanking manoeuvre and, with the arrival of the last of the LAVs and the M1A1 company commander, overwhelmed the British Swingfires and Scimitars protecting the objective to score a  win for the Americans.

 Thoughts? 

Challengers are HARD. No RoF2 on the move is painful. We also developed some good ideas about how to commit shenanigans with helicopters and came to the collective view that in a world with Rapiers and Chaparrals and Geckos that fixed wing aircraft that aren't A10s might be a bit garbage. 

But playing large games of Team Yankee on 8' x 6' tables is the best way to play it. It lets NATO and WARPAC play doctrinally correct games and while it requires some scenario specific tweaks to make sure that the extra depth and breadth doesn't break the game, they're pretty straight forward. 

Will be playing more! 

Next Time

Good question. Something basic I suspect! 

So I took a week off...

 ...and achieved nothing much substantive! I managed to have a great game of 40K at the club and took one photo before we started and then forgot to keep going (!) and then had a very salutary lesson in Kings of War from clubmate Ryan who learned me that my all-Paladin Basilean list might be a bit rubbish. 

 I was trying to get this done for my 40K game last weekend and fell short by what I thought would be a couple of hours. It was closer to another solid day's work to get it done after finding some casting issues with the shoulderpads and a lot of patience with the putty to fix them well enough:

 This is a Knight Moirax, a Mechanicum version of the Armiger chassis. It's an interesting combo of tools that should go nicely alongside my two Warglaives and Helverin - the main gun is for popping Marines and the claw will rip vehicles a new one.  I wanted to add the small Mechanicum knight to the list before I add a Cerastus Knight Castigator to the list to have a nice mix of both kinds of knights.

Once that Castigator is done I'll be able to put a Knight army on the park. I've got a build with two large knights and four small ones that still leaves room for about 350 points of various Imperial Agents which I think should make for a lot of fun builds and also shore up some of the weaknesses of a list with lots of very big guns. 

More DnD hilarity

Our next DnD campaign is going to be a run through the Vecna: Eve of Ruin and our DM and I had a lot of very silly conversations about running a 'Suicide Squad' type party - I went as far as building Captain Boomerang as a Drow Ranger (because obviously Drow are Aussies - they come from the down the under(dark) place that's full of spiders!)  - but given the campaign hook it seemed an opportunity to go a bit mad. So I went off to Spelljammer: 

I give you Commodore Everett Storm, Giff Privateer. Commodore at least in his own head. A master of blade and pistol, he's been running cargo, legit and not-so-legit, from the back room of Clive's Den on Garden (that's a deep cut for the TSR Spelljammer game fans from the 90s) all over Realmspace. He's slain more Neogi than you've had hot dinners. He wears a cape made from the shells of Umber Hulks. He once escaped an Elven naval vessel hiding his faithful Hammerhead, Realmspace Dancer, in the landing bay of an abandoned Dwarven Citadel. 

Some of those stories are true. These days he's mostly retired, spending his days regaling travelers with tales of derring-do on the decks of all mannder of void-faring ships and hopefully getting them to pay for the drinks.

Character-wise, he's a Giff Rogue with the Swashbuckler archetype. The species / skill combos will make him a crack shot with his pistol and then a Zorro-like figure with his very worn cutlass at close quarters. He's surprisingly agile for an old Giff despite being an absolute unit. Personality-wise, I'll play him as a mix of the Han-Solo-esque lovable rogue (who definitely doesn't drop his cargo and run at the first sight of a Neogi Mindspider) and a gruff old soldier off on one last big adventure to save the multiverse. 

Next Time

Club day and more hilarity will ensue! 

Earthquake workbench

Stupid earthquake waking me up at 0508 in the morning. It was a biggie and a damned inconsiderate start to the day.Put a bit of a dent in the productivity plan for the day too which was entirely vexing as I've got a wee project I'm working on for club day next weekend! 

More Menite Basileans

First? a set of ridiculous wings applied to the back of my Exemplar Bastions to make them into Elohi. I went for something slightly absurd to make the "this can fly" vibe super clear:  

Secondly, the thing I really didn't want to do and a random day off gave me the nudge to get it done. The Exemplar cavalry has all been rebased into Paladin cavalry: 

 

They've come up well and were, even compared to some of the smaller models, easier to get off their bases but SO much more of a pain to mount. There's a bit of cleanup on some fill to do on the feet but that's a tomorrow problem.

One base to finish - just waiting on four more pairs of wings from my friendly neighbourhood 3D printer and the army and project will be done, never to be thought about again, just played with and enjoyed. We've got a 1750 point one-day Good vs Evil narrative day coming up in November and I've got a couple of lists for Basileans I want to try, one of which needs all those cavalry! 

And then?

 

This is a lovely 3D print done by my friendly neighbourhood 3D printer Che, over at Potbelly Miniatures, and will be coming out to play in an upcoming Shadowrun campaign as streetsam Zoya Viktorivka Markovna, one of a pair of bountyhunters, alongside her baby sister Yevah Oleksandrivka who's a talented witch and will be played by Blogger Pooch. 

I went for the white cyberware off the back of using a bit of contrast paint for the fine details on the skin and I kind of love how it came out (given my initial plan was for bone) and it's been great fun to try and bend the character creation to fit the model (and I've made some very suboptimal build choices but I don't care.)

Next Time

I've got another game of 10e against Blogger Pel's Blood Angels (which I expect will go VERY badly) and getting the Basileans out too. 

In the grim darkness of the far future....

There is only a very silly game. 

 So I was going to write up my whole game with Blogger Scotty and, as per usual, I stopped taking photos about 40% of the way through the game. 

This, however, is the highlight: 

 

 I'd been dinging up Bel'akor with Thermal Spears, Hunter Killers, Krak Missiles and a Culexus Assassin and left him on 1 wound so the brave Commissar, leading the last remaining parts of my Penal Legion squad charged the Daemon Prince. I rolled two hits, two 6s to wound and the whole game held it's breath as Scotty needed 2 4+s to not die and promptly rolled two more sixes! It was EPIC. He then promptly ended the Penal Legion squad, cut up my artillery and finally found himself very dead as an Armiger Helverin took the centre objective and noted the large wings and promptly Anti-Flyer 2+'ed Bel'akor back to the warp. 

So first real game of 10e was a good success. The rules feel mostly pretty good and I like how much it's slimmed down from the 8e / 9e bloat. There's not *too* much to remember and once I get weapon stats down and things like that, I'll be much happier.

Scotty admitted he didn't bring the Soul Grinder since it would probably have chewed me up pretty badly but I had plenty of anti-armour stuff on the board and reckon I could have given it the beans. I also need to tinker with the list a little bit - the tank commander definitely needs to be giving out 2 orders a turn and the Imperial Agents contingent needs a second look. This one worked, but only because I was playing against daemons. I reckon it'd give Tyranids a good go too but probably a bit middling against a more general list.

Anything I don't like? The stupid 60x44 table just vexes me for no real reason. I understand exactly *why* it's like this but come on. Otherwise, while I remain unconvinced I'll ever play in a comp (unless it's big enough to have a real drinkers bracket for me!), I'll be happy to play it casually and use all the nice models that I have! 

The long dark night time of aggressive troops...

I played a game of Late War Flames of War against clubmate Chris, breaking out my Volksgrenadiers and their new 12cm mortars against his Brigade Panzergrenadiers. I wanted to try this list out as I think it has game in both attack and defend missions (but never maneuver!) and elected to defend against the Panzergrenadiers. Who also defended. Uh oh. D/D missions.

We wound up rolling up Night Patrol, and given that neither of us had ever played it,  we thought it was worth a blat. It was a slowish setup as we worked through the completely different game setup and we were both a bit baffled about what correct decision making looked like but I think both of us could play it again. Chris reckoned playing it in a tournament would be a tough ask to finish the game and I am inclined to agree. It definitely feels like if you're going to defend you need to know how to play, and how to win, these missions.

Here we are at the end of my first turn:

  

On turn two, almost nothing happened as we both kept our heads down.  Chris and I had occupied these two houses below - me defending my objective and him waiting for enough of his half-tracks to remount to come up and try and shove me out. We spent most of the game pounding the other players building and Chris came off second best in the end. But not well enough for me to assault him out and finish the platoon the quick way.

Turn three and I got no reserves so spent a relatively quiet turn shuffling things around and lining up my SdKfz 250 Recce tracks to go after Chris' Stummels because this happened:

 

In an absurd turn of events, the King Tigers were basically stuck between my minefields and Chris' and their main contribution to the game was rolling 6s and absolutely ruining the recce tracks you can see below! Chris said later on that he should have brought them on later and instead brought on his second platoon of Jagdpanzer IV/70s on his right to stop my Recce making a cheeky run for the back objective (which I was totally trying to do!)

Chris rolled up on my fortress with his SdKfz 251/16 Flamm tracks and did some great unpleasantness for a couple of turns but I kept up a respectable return fire with panzerfausts (I lost the shrecks early) for, in the end, a whole lot of nothing!

We reached a stalemate on the right where those flak hlaf-tracks in the top of the photo pushed my remnant assault platoon back to the bulletproof cover of the craters while three Jagdpanzer IV/70s sat off to the right electing not to cross the hedge given the additional +1 to cross checks at night. I managed to range in both my 8cm and 12 cm mortars on the remnant of his infantry platoon and eventually thrashed them into next week over nearly six turns...

And this is where the game finished up:

Unpictured were my Brigade Panzer IVs cleaning up the second platoon of Jagdpanzer IV/70s while my Brigade Panthers finished off the work started by the Assault platoon and killed Chris' first Jagdpanzer VI/70 platoon. They went on in the following turn to bail out all of the half tracks on the objective to emerge victorious. 

So this was both of our first time playing the Defend / Defend Night Patrol game. Possibly not a great choice for Chris with his Brigade Panzergrenadiers but I think he managed a cunning middle ground to keep all his half-tracks on table. He said afterward that his big mistake was putting that objective in the open where he had to be on it and there was some proposition I got the first turn. Shuffling it just up the street so he could be in the church and defend it would have made this a very different game. 

Night was hard work for two armies who are mostly Trained at best - my artillery was next to useless and most shooting at concealed, gone-to-ground infantry was on 6s with the extra +1 for night. So it was a grind but a really enjoyable one, just because it was such an unusual mission. If you've never played it, read through the game setup VERY carefully when you do because it has a completely different order of operations. Also, minefield placement really matters. 9/10, would play again. 

Next Time

Bit of a workbench. I'm working on a character model for an upcoming game of Shadowrun then another one for the game that follows that (Vecna, Eve of Ruin for DnD5e) and trying to finish up the last of the KoW conversion - I've had some wings 3D printed for the 'Elohi' proxies and while they're a bit silly, they should do the job of clearly denoting that these things fly!