This was the first run out of my O&G army at an event, I’d not had a great deal of practice and the army was pretty much designed based off a combination of netlist, models that I like and what I thought looked good on the table.  Going into it I thought it would be quite a fun army to play but also hoped to get a best painted nomination.



Game 1: Dale – Tomb Kings (Battleline)
Dale is a clubmate of mine so slightly frustrating to draw him but I didn’t think it was worth swapping as the field had a fair few ELG players there.  Dale runs a pretty solid TK list and had used the special characters slot as an excuse to get the grand hierophant into his list.  He was backed up by a couple of light mages 3 sphinx and a heap of infantry plus a tomb king.  It’s an interesting list and having seen it on the table I’m now dying to paint up some more bits for my TK to allow me to play with something similar!  No chariots and no snakes was the big difference plus a skelly deathstar.  Overall it looks like it would struggle in the current game with very little to punch through armour but that largely doesn’t matter against me. 

We’d played a month or so back as one of my practice games but at 1999pts where the Orcs ran over the top of his TK with little effort, so I was hopeful going into it.  Unfortunately I made the mistake of letting him get his necrosphinx into by savage orcs T1, he promptly beat them in combat by landing 4 killing blows on the lord (I stopped the WS10 but not the killing blow on a 5+ spell).  With my general dead the trolls went stupid the rest of the game and after killing the necrosphinx my savage orcs spectacularly failed a terror test from another sphinx charge and ran away... Oh dear.  All the time the casket was killing my artillery  and the wolf riders failed to take it out, I should have sent the wyvern in instead but he was off hunting the heirotitan, which he killed but got stuck on a sphinx after than and eventually died.  I was down about 500-600pts T6 so just threw everything into combat in the hope of getting lucky.  I didn’t and the savage orcs died horribly and got run down making it a 1-20 loss.

Game 2: Paul – Ogres (meeting engagement)
Paul hadn’t played warhammer for a year or so and let me know he was a bit rusty.  That said he was playing ogres so I still had to be a bit careful.  Army was a big unit of ironguts, big unit of bulls, 8 leadbelchers and a thundertusk (ice one if that’s the right name) and an ironblaster.  There was a tyrant, slaughtermaster and bsb who because the bulls didn’t turn up all ended up in the ironguts.  This lead to a game of his deathstar killing my army, my deathstar killing his!  It ended up my night gobbos, savage orcs and the wyvern (less rider) on his side of the board and his ironguts & characters on my side each having butchered everyting else.  Because of the wyvern not giving up it’s points I got an 11-9 win.  Skills!  Great fun game of just mashing everyting into each other, not very cerebral but jolly good fun.

Game 3 Calum – Vampires (Blood & Glory but keep playing once broken)
O&G don’t like ethereal very much and Calum had 3 spirit hosts.  This is partly what did me in, I forgot they were move 6 and let him get what I thought was a very long charge but turned out to be not that far into my trolls.  In addition I’d positioned my wyvern badly so it couldn’t fly in to help out with one of my rare magic weapons.  As a result the trolls did nothing all game, though they did eventually crumble the host through static res once I remembered 3 wide gave me 2 ranks. The wyvern did do miracles in surviving till T6 fighting black knights and warding up lots of killing blows but got screamed to death by the terrorgeist which despite the base size my artillery didn’t ever hit.  Other than that everything got into big fights and had fun but the vampire lord was basically a 1 man wrecking crew vs my savage orcs when he pulled out his sword of anti heroes and went 8S8 attacks with red fury for another 8 more or there abouts.  Combined with 3 vargheists and a varghulf that did a lot of wounds and I needed snake eyes to survive, I didn’t.  But I did butcher the vargheists and vargulf so not all bad.  Orc magic was doing nasty things sniping out all his necromancers with ‘eadbutt so I had some fun with that but knew it was never going to be enough. Overall though once the Vamp killed the savage orcs it was game over and I went down 1-20 again.

 

So overall how did my list perform?  Well the trolls were a massive liability, in 2 games my general died so they wandered about doing nothing the rest of the game.  In the other they got hit by a gutstar so didn’t stand a chance anyway! The wyvern was equally awful, largely he got thrown into monsters or cav units and eventually got ground out. It was slightly disappointing but I don’t blame him for any of my losses, I didn’t play all that well with it because of lack of experience. Savage Orcs, in 2 games got out deathstarred, the problem being I’m so character reliant and if they die then that’s basically game over for the whole army.  Perhaps I had too many eggs in 1 basket but I don’t really want to run a bunker unit just for my lord and bsb to hide in, but perhaps that’s what I should do...

I really enjoyed playing with the army, it was massively frustrating at times but still enjoyable.  Playing Dale did make me realise how much I miss my TK and I think there are some other builds out there to be found for them but the O&G are also up there as a really fun army to play.  Particularly enjoyed not being very magic reliant, often I was casting spells ‘just because’ but didn’t rely upon them at all which felt good for the army design.  I have no idea what place I came in the end, I didn’t bother checking but with 13/60bps it wasn’t going to be very high!

On the painting side I wasn’t in the top 2 for best army, those going to Neil Peckett’s Skaven (2^nd place) and Richard Payne’s Ogres (1^st).  This was Richard’s first tournament and he was a well deserved winner, I’d seen the army developing on Twitter and knew it was going to be really well received, technically I think his skin was the weakest part of the paintjob but he’d done enough with the rest of it to make the overall look carry it off regardless.

As a side note the tourney was a great success raising £1700 for charity from the 48 gamers & sundry watchers who were present, which nicely average out at about £35 a head, who says the Scottish are stingy? It’s likely that this will be my last tournament in Scotland as I’m hopeful that I’ll be moving down to Bath relatively early next year and with Ruari now a couple of months old it’s unlikely I’ll be going to any events down there in the near future, so I’ve bowed out of the tourney scene pretty much replicating my early results, but as much as I may feel like a total chump there were a few highlights to be found in the middle of that period.

What’s next for me?  Well with a fair win I’m hoping to be moved house early next year and that should allow me to get settled back into painting in my spare time around playing with my son, so the Eldar project which has kicked off should continue and after that we’ll see what most takes my fancy from the many options I’ve been working on.  I’m up against it a little in terms of achieving my 366 models in 366 days this year but I’m hoping I can put in a burst at some point to get me over the hump, currently I’m 9 models behind the run rate so need to pull my finger out as December is seldom a good month to get much done.