It's a long long post....

Long post ahead covering a couple of great games from the club yesterday. Many pictures and still too many words.

Game One: Warmachine

I packed my alt-list (Feora1) from the last meeting but knowing Tom wanted to run his Cephalyx, I packed a second list which would be a better game (because insta-killing all your opponents infantry in one turn isn't really fun for either player) which meant bringing Reznik1 out to play.

Reznik was the second caster I bought in Warmachine and honestly, he's never been as successful for me as he should have been so I was keen to give him a run in Mark 3 and see how it went.

TL:DR? Badly. But it was all my fault. He's got some sweet abilities and was just too focus starved to really get what I wanted out of him. Some judicious changes and this will be eminently playable.

I ran Reznik1, Scourge of Heresy, Guardian, Reckoner, Revenger, Choir, Rhoven & Co, Orin and Wracks. Tank ran Exulon, one each of the monstrosities, a full Slaver and Drudges, 3 minimum Bender and Drudges, some overlords and a couple of Fisher and Paykel's finest (In joke. Sorry!)

So, a bit of bad news. A whole lot of my photos were super fuzzy, including the one where Tank killed me, but we shall press on:

Tank filled most of his deployment zone, basically from the outside edge of one zone to the other and in some depth.

By contrast, my thin red line covered the same width, but was gappy as heck! We both advanced to the edges of the zones in the first turn. I threw my Revenger hard out on my right, aiming to Hex Blast Tank's Overlords out of existence. I didn't, and instead remembered how hard it is to hit unboosted 14s with FOC 6.

Brave Revenger!

Having a full Choir and gaining Reposition [3"] with the theme force meant that I could actually manage him all the way out there! Orin went along to help. Actually, "help" is a better description. He did...nothing.

Freaky monstrosity is freaky! 

AMBUSH! 

Tank got to bring on one of his Bender units in ambush on my left flank, aiming to support his monstrosity in the zone against Scourge and Rhoven & Co. The Fisher and Paykel there is grossly out of position. Shortly after this pic, Tank read the back of the card to see how it would help those Drudges and we both found out that Agitators only work on Monstrosities in Mark 3. Oops.

My left flank was largely held by the Scourge and Rhoven alone after the Drudges chomped Gius and Cassian. Rhoven responded by blowing two of them up and setting the rest of fire. And they all died. HA! I did make one epic misplay here though (although we didn't spot it till the end of the game.) In an effort to protect myself from the Drudges, I ignored the Agitator.

My right / Tank's left, largely bogged down for the rest of the game as a bunch of adrenal-flooded drudges charged a Revenger and promptly all rolled 3, 2, 1 for damage. Tank was unimpressed. We did both get to enjoy his three Overlords all trying to Mind Blast Orin Midwinter and the Rogue Inquisitor quietly Arcane Vortexed all of the Mind Blasts away to nothing!

Right before it all went wrong. Or right. It's all a matter of perspective. 

Reznik feated, stripped a whole swag of focus and stopped allocation to the remaining monstrosity. I reckoned I was pretty safe. You can see Reznik right at the top of the rough ground next to my Reckoner. I sent an Ignited, Choired Guardian into the Warden and Wrecker. The Wrecker got ended reasonably easily and I put a fair whack of damage on the Warden. What I missed (and was looking for) was the Crit Pitch to fling the Warden away.

This is where I stopped taking photos as we both stopped to work out if Tank could assassinate Reznik and if so, how. He could. :) Exulon feated and moved a bunch of stuff out of the way. He pulled the Reckoner in front of Reznik to set up a slam target and then charged the Warden with two of his Cephalyx to do some Anatomical Precision damage to grant it enough focus. He came dangerously close to rolling enough damage to take out critical systems but came up ONE BOX short. The Warden slammed the Reckoner, followed up with Grand Slam and smashed Reznik into the dirt. It was a cracking game and a good learning game for both of us to work through that assassination run. He won't get me like that again.

Game Two: Dracula's America

Scotty joined us for this one and, having set up Claremont and drawn up new gang rosters, we rolled up the Shootout scenario. This meant having the boss and two buddies set up in the middle of the table and missing the first turn.

I thought I was being clever setting the boss up in the alley, until Tank's thralls set up in the bleeding church. Honestly, how are vampire thralls able to be in a church? Scotty set up his Paladins in the hotel across the road. A couple of turns later, this is how that looked:

I mean honestly, how does a demon fight a vampire thrall in a church?! This game is silly! (it's why we love it!!) The downed thrall there had been a shotgun firefight with one of my peon cultists. Annoyingly, he got up before the minor greebly could put down the first thrall and put him out of his misery. Tank managed to chalk up a couple of VPs knocking my greeblies over. This is the first game where I wasn't rolling well enough to keep re-summoning them out of existence.

 Tanks vampires used the civilians as cover very effectively - either as human shields or as food should the vampires have got into a bit of trouble. Their move of 6" (2" faster than a regular human) meant he could cover a lot of ground a lot more quickly than Scotty or I were used to.

The Paladin's occupation of the hotel meant that they had a great vantage point to shoot safely from cover at both Tank and me! Scotty was also doing really well despite not pulling a picture card till about turn 5 and there was only one and it was red!

What makes better cover? A civilian or a wagon? Both! 

 This Peon bravely (?) took cover in the middle of the street and tried to shoot into combats where he wasn't involved (also brave?). This entirely amoral behaviour led to his being smacked repeatedly about the head by a Seraphim that had arrived on the park when Scotty managed 3 successes on a 3 dice test to summon.

Boss vampire abandons the lady and hides from the Paladins!

Again, I forgot to take pictures about here. I was pretty well out of the game by this point (and failing summoning rolls had not helped this!) but Scotty and Tank were still battling it out. Tank's thralls in Rogan's Bar were in a firefight with the Paladins in the hotel and finally the Vampire boss came out and dished out the kind of kicking you'd expect. Tank scored a couple more VPs than Scotty and they both outscored me.

We did the post game, as it's lots of fun. I have discovered I can buy swords in this game which means the Peon army is back. I'm sure the lads will be thrilled. My key takeaway from this game was that I think for my gang to get the most out of it's special abilities, I really need to have the boss and the summoner together at the beginning of the game and I need to waste a couple of bad activation cards getting my demon summons done. I think I also need to paint up a medium entity - I think Tank has something in his old Malifaux collection that will go well.

Painting

And I know that last week I said I'd paint something from my Inquisition collection and it was with all the best will in the world that I started on an Eversor Assassin. But I didn't get there. Instead, I discovered a primed and unpainted Pyrrhus, Flameguard Hero, in my Warmachine box and painted him instead:

This model is amazing. It's one of the best sculpts in the PP Menoth range and I love it.

It was an interesting exercise to paint something to match the style of the rest of the army. Most (all?) of my Menoth was repainted from a poorly thought out Teutonic-order style scheme that took too long to paint and didn't look all that good (because painting white is hard and I am bad at it) to the red, black and metal scheme you can see on Pyrrhus.

That repainting exercise was what started me on my play-it-painted kick (despite WM/H not really ever having a painting requirement, something which vexed me no end) and the net result was a lot of models painted before club days and events. So it was definitely a scheme designed to be done in a hurry and, amazingly, all that hurry came back to me as I smashed this one out on Friday night.

And then played my other list.

Next time
Again, a good question. The LAVs are almost done (just a wash and topcoats to go on the second 10 vehicles) and so I'm not sure what I'll focus on for the next week. But those are for a fortnight's time. I'll finish the Eversor Assassin that I've started. At least.

Bonus pictures! 
Did you read this far? Well done.

As a reward, here's a bonus photo from Scotty's TY game against one of our other club members in practice for Remember December in a month's time. Leo 2s vs T64s...

Check out that sweet 4Ground terrain. Scotty's table is coming along nicely.