Let Battle Be Joined!

It was a quiet club meeting this week, post-Nationals, so Scotty and I booked in a couple of light skirmish games to while away the day.

We started with Scotty's first, and my second, game of Kings of War Vanguard. I brought out my Elves and Scotty brought the Kingdoms of Men. We just played the basic scenario from the quickstart rules - a meeting engagement.

It's all on!

The game mostly started simply as we advanced towards each other, although I pulled some shenanigans to plink off a couple of early shots at Scotty. These resulted in him returning fire with his arquebusiers and shooting my Gladestaker off the board. 

Human Spearmen advance to protect their general

 The Human Spearmen advanced and bunched up around the Leader of Men. The Elven Mage, sensing an opportunity burned all of my power points to boost a lightning bolt into the bunch. Two of the Spearmen were killed and the Leader of Men wounded.

 We maneuvered our forces around a bit for the next couple of turns, plinking off shots and spells before we all finally got stuck in.

The Knight Charges the Prince and is charged by Tallspears in response

 The Knight, who had rapidly redeployed, charged the Prince and took him down to 1 wound remaning.  He was unhorsed by the Tallspears and while the Foot Knights continued to batter the Prince, he was healed by the Elven mage and fought on to victory over the Foot Knights.

Scotty got some revenge for the lightning bolt at this point with a boosted fireball into my bunched up Tallspears, wounding a couple and damanging the Prince. Again.

WIZZARD! 

In an effort to stop these shenanigans, the respective generals charged the opposing Wizards and promptly dispatched both of them. Scotty had his Leader and an Arquebusier left on the table and I had my Prince and two Tallspears when the game ended.

It was a fun game - the power mechanics gave us some entertaining options (even though we mostly used them for extra dice) and it was a pretty even match in terms of capability.

Warmachine! 
So this one didn't start all that well. Scotty pulled MacBain and Pirates out of his bag and I pulled out Feora1 and all her setting infantry on fire nonsense. The game definitely turned out to be much more evenly matched than we thought it would be.

Turn one went as Warmachine first turns tend to. We both ran up the board, Scotty rapidly repositioning his Pirates to fight my Warjacks, not my Flameguard.

Protectorate Turn 2 - shenanigans! 

 Turn 2 saw the Daughters arrive from ambush on the table edge and Feora getting into position to feat on the Pirates. The Daughters sacked First Mate Hawk (because she scares me!) and Feora feated on the front rank of Pirates.

The Flameguard attempted to sack the Freebooter. Badly. Scotty's turn didn't start well, as none of the fire went out and he passed one tough roll on his burning pirates. However, he promptly used his munted but Failsafed Freebooter to trample over my Flameguard and attempt to batter Pyrrus. Pyrrus proved his worth as he rolled insane damage with his spear and shield and battered the Freebooter out of existence...

... leaving him open to being charged by everyone's favourite electro-sword wielding Italian, Savio Montero Acosta who gave him quite a lot of what-for. I sent Feora out from her hiding place to get Savio, which she royally did, but it left Scotty a lane to send in the Vanguard to take revenge!

Squeaky Bum Time

Both of us had been steadily accumulating points and so on my left, the Vanquisher was actively trying to remove the three pirates that were occupying his zone. Man, I miss the +2 to hit off Choirs. Although, I didn't have a choir at this point as they'd been well pirated. 

The Vanguard went into Feora and smacked her repeatedly. I'd forgotten that she was a beefcake and just took it. In her turn she powered up the Hand of Judgement to end MacBain! Which he promptly didn't. So Grogspar ran in to give MacBain Gang Fighter and he had a jolly good crack at wrecking Feora's favourite warjack. He put a LOT of dents in it, but not enough to put him out of action.

Its over! 

Feora tried to pull some shenanigans, and fired a boosted flamethrower shot around and across the Hand of Judgement and tried to end MacBain by styling on him. Disappointingly (?) she flubbed the boosted damage roll. So, to avoid MacBain trying on some dodging nonsense, the Hand of Judgement decided to club him with a P+S 20 flaming club.

35 point Warmachine armies are great fun. There's not a lot of room for jank, nor is there a lot of room for mucking around. We had some boss solos and some useful units and a couple of warjacks. Hopefully we'll get some more games in. Warmachine is a cool universe with some great models and

And more! 

We also played a game of Keyforge, by MTG designer Richard Garfield. It was a lot of fun. Scotty's evil combination of Brobnar, Shadows and Dis beat out my intellectual combo of Logos, Mars and Shadows. It was Scotty's first and my third games of Keyforge and it's a lot of fun. We both enjoyed the challenge - me to remember back three months to when I first learned and Scotty to learn with my fairly sketchy teaching! We'll definitely play it more as a late in the day club game.

Next Time
The first part of May's special project....