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.