Malifaux - finally starting to get there

Played a game last night which it finally started to feel like a proper game as understood the scenarios and a bit about my opponents crew and starting to play a bit more tactically.

Game was 25SS Lady J vs Collette
My Crew
Lady J
Executioner (7 SS)
Austringer (5 SS)
3 Death Marshals (12 SS)
+1SS in my pool

Arcanists
Collette
Cassandra
2 Corphy
Dove
Think he might have miscounted as pretty sure started with more than 3 stones but hardly matters.

Diagonal deployment and the strategies were:
Guild - Plant Evidence
Arcanists - Claim Jump

So quite a good objective as it forced his crew to get to one area meaning if I could boss that area I was likely to win.  Planting evidence is tricky with a rather slow crew but I thought it was achievable.

Schemes
Guild - Bodyguard (Lady J) and Hold Out
Arcanists - Bodyguard (Collette) and Sabotage
I revealed bodyguard but not hold out and he revealed both. 

Against Collette I really didn't expect to be able to prevent him from doing either of the schemes so knew I was pretty much starting vs 4pts and my only option was to try and prevent him from achieving his strategy.  Because of my speed I didn't think I was likely to achieve all 3 of my objectives and because I wanted to run down his crew to make it harder for him on the claim jump I couldn't just run everyone accross the board or I'd just end up losing 8-7 as I didn't declare the hold out.

T1 He pushed Cassandra right forwards towards his sabotage objective but hid her from LoS.  I was tempted to have a go with the Austringer just to start chiping wounds but thought it was just out the 18" so basically everything just moved up.  Collette did her soul stone routine and started to create doves.

T2 Cassandra completed the sabotage mission and I ran towards my objective markers again, I then set about trying to get some wounds on cassandra but the combination of light cover and her innate abilities meant everything missed.  he pushed up his cophyry to block me getttng to my objective and then joined them together.  My eyes somewhat lit up at this as it was in range of lady J.  Over she charged after activating her sword style with onslaught as I had some high masks in my hand.  Couple of strikes later with no cheating required I had one dead duet, clearly a massive advantage this early in the game. 

T3 Cassandra took revenge for the corphy as I'd forgotten she had blast attacks in her flame breath and she toasted a couple of marshalls I'd left close together, managed to kill one and badly wound another.  We hit a rules query here that I'd not come across before as the fire blast activated her push trigger to put her out of LoS and I wasn't sure which happened first, the trigger or my slow to die, resolved it by flipping cards and she hid before getting shot.  Austringer then put a heap of wounds on her and he was forced to burn a stone to reduce the damage.  Exec onto the other objective, unfortunately it was the last thing he did as he then got turned into a manequin by Collette who hit books everywhere!

T4 initiative agian and tried to kill cassandra with the Austringer before her defenses went up.  Nearly got her but with a stone she was left on 1 wound.  Doves bombed a marshall eventually taking him out and Lady J smashed up the remaining doves and went for an objective, collette created doves and moved onto his objective. Cassandra then activated her sword strike mid move and took down my last marshal.  He went to strike back with his slow to die with a good chance of getting the kill with a decent damage flip.  Unforunately I hit the black joker on the strike and it failed so she got away with it and went into the Austriner.

T5 austringer & J only ones left, I won the initiative and tried to break combat with cassandra, unforunately flipped badly and he burnt a stone to stop me breaking free on my cheat.  He then went for a bash but flipped low damage for zero wounds with a single neg flip. finally he activated J.  It was a toss up, I could have tried to shoot cassandra but instead focussed on my stragety burning one marker and then moving back to the next one.  Cassandara killed the austringer and moved back towards his strategy.

T6 J kills stuff on route to marker and takes it (think I'm a bit mixed up in turns here as she had to blat a few doves and the manequin but still did them and took the marker in T6 then with final move went down to contest the claim jump. Flip gave a T7.

Killed off dove and was forced to charge collette for only chance to win by killing her.  Tried for onslaught as it's my only hope but no masks in my hand meant it was unlikely.  Flipped, cheated, stoned and didn't hit one and collette burnt stones and flipped to end up preventing the strike I think.  Game ends, cassandra moves into contest the objective and he has 2 to my 1 for the max 4 pts.

Game ends 8-5
I got - 2 for plant evidence, 2 for bodyguard, 1 for Hold out
He got 4 for stake clame, 2 for bodyguard, 2 for sabotage

Painting slowdown

Having blazed through 100 models in the early part of this month I've now settled into a week of non completeion.  Admittedly it's largely driven by the fact I'm having to build models now.  The next lot of Skaven were all still on the sprue so I spent a fruitful couple of hours clipping all the bits off and segregating the spear arms from the HW&S ones and removing all the excess bits that I won't use.  I've now got a massive bag of 80 IoB clanrats and 80 of the older monkey like models which are slowly being cleaned of all mould lines.

Because of the break in the mass painting I took the time to also clean up my last couple of terradons so they are now fully built, greenstuffed and magnetised.  Unfortuantely I ran out of primer so a slight stumbling block on progress but should get that cleared up tomorrow night.

And finally I spotted a model I'd picked up a while back but then burnt out on my Malifaux stuff before getting to this one.  I promised myself I'd only play with painted models and I'd not buy any further crews until the ones I owned were complete.  But also something about the model just grabbed me.  I knew I was changing paint schemes and I'd not sat down and worked out how I'd do the Guild Guards but I knew I wanted them to look more normal than the specialist crews, less of a bespoke uniform and more like the everyday people.

This weekend sees the 6 nations event in Edinburgh, the cream of the teams from throughout the UK (and France) are coming together to contest the 6 Nations (and really just to practice for the ETC).  Last year this was one of the most enjoyable events on the calender, really chilled out yet competitive gaming.  So good luck to Scotland (who I'm playing for) and the other ragtag contenders (England, France, Ireland, Northern Ireland and Wales).  I'll be running my dwarfs and trying to bore 6 opponents into accepting 10-10 draws, fingers crossed my back board edge tactics do me proud.

Lizards - An end in sight

So this week saw some more lizards hit the painting table.  What should have been 32 Saurus ended up being 31 as I misplaced one prior to undercoating but has since turned up again!

Done in the same quick format as the rest of my army but still a pleasure to paint as it gets so much done so soon.  That leaves me with the following outstanding for the complete army: 12 chameleon skins, 2 salamanders & crew, 3 Kroxigor, 2 Terradons, 1 stegs crew and 2 more mounted scar vet models because I want to do them a bit better than my saurus cav.  Probably want to add 20+ temple guard at some point but don't own the models at present.

Also got a game in at 2000pts, no lords vs Pash's High Elves.  Ended up he was trying something new, a horrible gunline army 80 archers, 4 bolt throwers, 2 eagles and 2 x lvl 2's plus a mounted BSB.  I had wanted to take the lizards but just lacked time to write a list due to work so ended up pulling out an old dwarf list that was compliant with the no lords restrictions.

Unforunately that made it elf gunline vs dwarf army with warmachines.  Basically it's hard not to make a dwarf army a gunline but my two blocks of 35 strong troops tried their hardest!  In short however I proved that templates > arrows.  blew some gaping holes in his army early on and then started to chew up bolt throwers once I took the eagles out.  My combat stuff had mix fortunes.  Unit with BSB in it failled a LD9 with reroll panic test and put themselves out the game but were never going to surrender their points.  Other unit chewed up 2 archer blocks and 2 bolt throwers. 

Pretty straightforward game with a fun opponent but nothing really learned.

Dip dip dip dip

So the high quality Eldar project has hit my usual stumbling block, I got most of the way through a second vehicle and first squad and lost all interest.  Just goes to show how results focused I am.  I hate not having something to show for it after a few hours work so have set them to one side for the moment and I'm working on various other figs I've got stacking up uncompleted.

Addition 1 - 47 Skaven Slaves, these were done to add to the 40 Island of Blood Clanrats I did last year.
They were bought second hand so came pre assembled and all I had to do was fix up some damage recieved in transit, a few broken tails and arms but nothing to significant.

Quite happy with how they came out, the scheme was designed for the IoB style rats so wasn't sure how it would transfer, thankfully it works ok and they don't look too bland.  Not using brown on the bases is one of the key visual elements of the dipped army.  So I now have something like 300pts worth of painted skave, all that in 90ish models, yikes!

Addition 2 - 31 Saurus
The lizardmen have been languising for quite some time now, but I lent some terradons out over the tempest weekend and got the comment that they were the best painted part of his army! well that was such a nice complement it made me actually want to finish off the army off.  What I'd been putting off was the last bulk painting requirement.  Currently I have 20 saurus with spears and knew HW&S was the way to go these days so decided I'd best knuckle down and build a unit.  I finished cleaning them up last week and then set about getting them painted over the weekend.  Slow progress but I eventually got them all dipped.  Bases have been started for them and some remaining skinks I'd not gotten round to basing up yet.

After that I've just got some metals to finish off:
2 x terradons
3 x kroxigor
12 chameleon skinks
2 x salamanders
and the crew for a stegadon plus the howdah weapons (which will be magnetised to allow all options.

That'll take me up to 3 complete Fantasy armies with the skaven being a mere 200+ models to go!

Tempest 3

Tempest 3

After those practice games I ended up making a couple more tweaks to the list and had a final warm up the night before.

My list:

Lvl 4 Beasts, fireball ring, wand of wych elm

Lord, Bodkins, Bow of Loren, Stone of rebirth, GW

BSB, Hail of doom, 2+ ward vs flaming

12 Archers, FC, flaming banner

12 Archers, FC

12 Archers, FC

12 Dryads - champion

8 Dryads

8 Dryads

4 Treekin – champion

4 Treekin – champion

7 Wardancers

6 Waywatchers

Eagle

Treeman

45 shots

45 combat troops

1 flier, no war machines

Basically fully compliant with the comp restrictions despite not needing to be because it’s wood elves!

Warm up game was vs Kevin Gillett and his Bretonians. In short he ran across the board at me with all his lances and did horrible things to me!  My treeman was heroic killing blowed and lances bust up my units pretty badly.  I killed a load of stuff back, but didn’t get any of his big points in lances.  Big win to Kev making us all square over the last couple of years.

Tournament was all 6 missions out the rulebook played on w/d/l 30/10/1 with vps as a tiebreak.

Round 1 – diagonal deploy

Round 2 – Battle for the pass

Round 3 – Watchtower

Round 4 – Random Deployment

Round 5 – Blood and Glory

Round 6 – Battleline

Special rules meant I got to pick the type of woods all weekend and magic levels weren’t added to casting attempts, plus some other pretty standard stuff.

Round 1 I had grudged an opponent.  Bernard Lewis is one of the most enjoyable opponents and friendliest guys on the tournament scene.  And thankfully we generally play at about the same level too.  He’d beaten me last time out to go 2-1 up so I grudged him for the chance to pull even.  Unfortunately it didn’t work out!

The other good thing about playing him is he brings the most interesting lists you’ll see pretty much anywhere, in this instance:

2 x 15 marauder horse of slannesh with exhalted champions on steeds of slannesh (quite scary when in your face T1)

5 Dragon Ogres

6 Chaos Ogres (Khorne maybe?)

5 Chaos Trolls

20 Marauders (who sat in the back corner)

Lord on Jugger

warshrine

Think that was about it, lightning fast and quite scary in combat, so not really what my army wants to face.

Usual fun game with loads dying on both sides and combat from T1, unfortunately I blew up my mage on my first spell of the day so no magic on either side! Ended up coming down to a single dice roll at the end. I had my treeman fighting his lord on jugger and a single dragon ogre.  He took 4 wounds but had a 6+ save due to the warshrine, I kill him and it’s the best part of 500 more vps to me and possibly breaking the lord too.  Unfortunately 1 dice comes down a 6 and he wins the game by ~350vps.  Awesome way to start the tournament.

Game 2 and I face... Warriors of chaos (Tris), much more standard list with 2 x blocks, 2 x knight and various chaff.  Lots of magic. Early he pounds me with magic till I suicide in the treekin to try and take the mages out.  Get one and wound another other.  My shooting hammers his chaff and then his knights.  Basically that’s about it.  He kills treekin and dryads, I kill knights and mages.  I just get enough to win.  I was a bit lucky on the dice but was a fun game.

Game 3 Warriors of... Really! Watchtower 18 khorne warriors halberds and as my treeman discovered flaming banner.  Non game, opponent still whined for 2 turns when his hellcannon rolled a 1 to wound my treeman T1.  My shooting did nothing all game and he rolled me up.  Was pleased to have it done quickly.  Also had his GF at the table, which is weird, I can’t see why she had come along, looked bored and made him ignore me because of talking to her.

Game 4.... Yup you guessed it, warriors of chaos.

Pete Bradley, who I last played at Sheffield in 2010.  He was rising off the bottom tables in game 3 to face me as I sunk down.  Another fun game where we both smashed up each others armies. I thought I was in trouble when a unit of treekin decided to leg it away from a marauder block with HW&S when they fluffed their attacks.  They were run down and the pursuit put him into my archer block that was shooting his rampaging hellcannon. Not good, but then my treeman decided he’d solo a chariot then a block of warriors with halberds and the flaming banner that I’d shot up badly, I survived the attacks and a 6 for the thunderstomp meant they all decided to go bye bye.  A bit lucky and it gave me the win by 350ish points

Game 5 Nick Price and Oh thank god, not warriors! High Elves

All I can say is that curse of Aranrahir and lots of terrain was brutal to his combat units.  I also outdeployed him quite well and was able to take off all his shooting in 2-3 turns.  In the end it was 1 sword master with a lord and mage and 8 phoneix guard was all he had left.  Pretty brutal fight and one I didn’t think I was losing from early on.  I was a bit scared he might get my breakpoint though as archers were getting chopped up late in the game.

Game 6

Woodelves.  Only he had 80 archers!  But to be honest we didn’t really play much I ran down flanks in cover, he shot me.  We chatted and only got 3 turns done in the round time.  Points dead was a draw and we both just accepted it.  Good fun to chat and pretty sure he’d have had me if we’d played all 6 turns.

Fun tournament and I came 31^st of 84.  Unfortunately that was still bottom wood elf!  Mark (game 6) was 1 place above me, Ben around 20^th and Paul in 4^th had all played their socks off and gad winning records leaving me with a positive result but sadly nothing to show for it.

Still the rankings points put me back into the top 200. I now have 4 scores again, 2 in the very low ~10 region, 2 at 30ish but unlikely to score many more until 2 results drop off so will just have to accept that as my normal teriotory (as it has been in the past anyway).