Madness and mayhem: The conclusion of Bilbo's Birthday Bash

Oh my... with all the craziness of the last 24 hours, I completely forgot to post this!  My apologies, folks.

This is Game Six of the tournament.  It is my Knights of the Blood Rose once again, gearing up to face some elite orcs, Marghul Knights, the Shadow Lord and Grishnakh

The scenario was Recon once again.  After the debacle of the previous game, I made a decision.  The was not even going to try to get anyone off the board.  With so few of the enemy (I think we might have had the same number of troops) and terrain that was ideal for my twin stormcaller list, I wanted to go for breaking the bad guys and killing as many as I could.

You can see my deployments in or near the buildings.  I wanted to make the orcs come to me.

This started to work right away, and I spent my first few turns positioning myself in the buildings.  I wanted to make sure that Delilah on the right would not have will sapped away...

Speaking of the Morghul knights and the Shadow Lord, aren't those amazing paint jobs?  Incredible!!!!  Pity they all had to die. :-)

More positioning, waiting for the bad guys...

I was hoping to see a commitment by the orcs and knights so that the traps could be set.

Now the traps are set on both the right and the left.  Gwaihir and the cavalry will try to take advantage of the Nature's wrath spell aftermath on the left.

Gotta love random elf bow shots!

Now the trap is sprung!  Out comes Sam on the left, and down go the orcs!  I made sure to avoid Grishnakh, so there was no way for the spell to be resisted.  I also rolled a '6', so all my will came back!

Same for Delilah on the right.  The knights had stalled in their advance.  If I could hit them and avoid the Shadow Lord, they would be tossed from the horses.  If anything else, they would lose the movement and the cavalry charge bonus.

You can see that the eagle and cavalry were able to trap the downed orcs this time, unlike the previous attempt in Game Two to pull off this maneuver.  By getting back the will, and walling off the downed orcs, I could move Sam over a bit to KO the other advancing orc unit!  And down they went!  yea!

Gwaihir flew away from that combat after chewing on an orc in a heroic fight.  I was going to go for broke, and have Gwaihir land on the Shadow Lord himself.  I had to take him out as soon as possible.

It was a big risk, but it was the last game, and I said what the heck.  He is fight skill 8 after all!  Check out those talons...

Amazingly enough, the Great Eagle dispatched the foul servant of the Dark Lord with a single blow!

Delilah, who had spent the last bit of her will to knock down the knights a second time, now led the charge against what remained.  Terror would prove to be useless, as it almost always seems to these days.  I had plenty of spears to charge in to join the fight skill 5 party.

The orcs by Grishakh are taken down in bunches.  With each loss, I was able to outnumber and surround them, causing more deaths.

The orcs in the center make a mad dash for the goal line.  If they get away, I would end up losing.  Fortunately, I had the 2 elf archers on either side of that road, and an eagle with a giant base to get in their way.

More orcs die to repeated elven assaults

It would not be long before Grishnakh himself would be surrounded and killed.

Same for the last of the dismounted Morghul Knights.  I really want to make these part of my army, but they will be going along with my chariots and Easterlings.  This terror causing power could make a big difference in my games.  The Shadow Lord can keep down the shooting, which already has a tough time getting past the chariots as it is.  If I can intersperse the terror knights in key places, I can keep my own cav from being charged.

Anyway, with the orcs broken, and all their leaders defeated and dead, they start running away.  Most importantly, the orcs trying to get to my deployment zone are the first to go.  I am able to kill off almost all the remaining orcs, for my most convincing victory of the tournament.

I learned a ton over the weekend.  If I were to be able to do it all over this next weekend, I think I could have a lot of success.  Unfortunately, next time might be a year away.  Bummer!

Thanks again to Brent and Chris, and everyone who helped make it a great weekend!

Mi Vida Loca: The Dark Eldar journey begins

Well, folks, sorry for the disruption in posting.  Another major vehicle crisis pretty much nuked everything I was going to be doing for the next week at least.  Before the vehicle quit on us, we did go to the Dragon Shoppe one more time.

In setting up everything else I was going to be working on at Windycon (sorry guys, won't be able to go there now!), I needed to get as many of the bases constructed for the Dark Eldar as possible.

You can see a handful of those items here.  I need 5 grotesques, 18 jetbikes, and 3 Venoms.  I forgot some of the un-assembled jetbikes at home, so there were only 13 for me to work on yesterday.

The Reaver jetbikes are in various stages of assembly/conversion.

Well, I never really thought those things could fly anyway!  I modeled this after the "crashed airplane" sculpture that the city ingeniously placed by the parking lots at Midway Airport.

This was a bit of vengeance on a very pesky section of the FW Storm Eagle conversion kit.  Note: never EVER use this piece.  You will never get the thing put together.

The #1 rule of hobbying is to have a neat and tidy work area.

Bases for the Grotesques...

Flying jetbikes!  There is going to be a space marine getting whacked under the I-beam.  That will be very fun!

I tried to match some of the Wyche bases as well.

More bikes!

Even more bikes!

Well, I will have some stuff for you guys later today.  Sorry if I am in a bit of a terse and disagreeable mood!

Up on the soapbox. Time to rant!

Notice this rather unique "battle" image from my 5th game of the tournament.  

Yes, you see that correctly.  Jamie has narry a figure on the table, and the game is about to begin.  That is not by choice, that is just the pure playtesting genius that is GW.

We were playing the dreaded Recon scenario, which made everyone's lives much more difficult.  It should be a fun scenario, but it is poorly designed, to say the least.  The FAQ that came out just before the tournament only made things worse.

Speaking of worse, this matchup (and the resulting reinforcement rolls), was the worse case scenario for this scenario.  You had arguably the fastet army in the tournament... my Easterling Alliance, vs dwarves.  Ouch.  My infantry was moving more than double the speed of the stunties, thanks to the war drum.

What made things a disaster was the bad reinforcement rolls of the dwarves.  As you can tell, they did not show up.

To make matters worse, you have to deploy off a specific point of the board, which creates a very small area in which to deploy.  There was barely enough room for the 4 chariots and for the 6 cav.  Anything bigger... who knows what happens.

That lead to this situation.  I am almost half way across the board, and there are no dwarves!

The objective is to get as many of your troops off the board via the opponents deployment zone as possible. Great for me, right?  Not so!

Since none of the guys I would run off the board would count as casualties,  I would never reach my 25% break point (when the game is supposed to end).  So, if I ran off all my guys early, Jamie would simply move all of his dwarves (slowly, of course) off the board unopposed.

Sounds like a fun 2 hours, doesn't it?

Jamie even had to use a point of might to get the archers on the table (the figures in the right hand corner).

Basically, this is where I lost the game.  I was already feeling very bad about the situation.  All I had to do was weave back and forth with all my fast stuff, and just run by the dwarves.  If they spread out to stop me, they would get pummeled, creating a gap, through which the rest of my cav would run through.

I went off to the left to deny the archers any shots,and started marching my infantry forward as well.

I fake to the left, with the intention of hitting the weaker dwarf warriors in the center.  My original intent was go go all the way over to the right, hitting the archers, who had already spent a point of might.  The infantry would trade places, and form a wall against the dwarves hustling on over to join that fight.

However, I felt really guilty about this, and I decided against that dance move.  That is where the game would go from a prefect storm for me to a complete disaster.

I was able to make a decent charge at the warriors, but flubbed all the rolls.  Yes, I survived all the throwing axes and such, but now I would be really stuck there if I lost priority.  If I won it, I could escape...

I think you already know how that turned out.  Lose priority, get stuck, etc.  Spend might, lose roll off, etc.  Getting my foot troops all the way down there helped to even things out a bit, while the terrain did keep the Iron Guard and Khazag guys away from me for the time being.

I do manage to get some kills, but I cannot extract myself.  This is bad.  On the far right, my infantry engages the archers as much as possible to prevent shots at the pikemen, and to keep those archers from marching off the board themselves!

I did have a chance, however, to rescue the situation.  Jamie called a heroic combat with Balin and buddies on the chariot you see surrounded.  I knew that he wanted to kill that to get to the king.  Since he had priority, there was no way to avoid it.  However, both characters were fight skill 6.

In the inevitable combat, I managed to roll a 6.  I think he used a point of might to make his a 6 as well, which lead to the most important roll off of the game.

If I won that roll, I would probably not do any damage to him, but I would be pushing away all his best combat units well away from the fight, into terrain, etc.  That would be just enough to let me kill off the weaker warriors and get to the finish line, using the war drum.

So, it was all going to some down to a 50/50 roll, which I really hate.   Sadly, it went for the dwarves, and that ended the game.  Neither of us would get anyone off the board, so that +3 for killing the general would be the difference in the game.

I had killed twice as many dwarves as I had lost, but they were nowhere near their break point.  Time expired, and that was it.

As I have said, this scenario is pretty badly designed.  I would have to play it again with the elves, and I was going to take a very different approach.. Stay tuned!

What happens when everything goes right: Revenge of the Elves!

Well, day two of Bilbo's Bash would see me playing 2 games with my Knights of the Blood Rose.  The first match would be against some orcs, lead by Gothmog and sporting the new "mini Mumak" as I call it.

Many things would go the way of the elves here, beginning with the terrain.  It was a reversal of the terrain issues I had the previous two games.  This allowed me to hide both of the stormcallers to protect them from the inevitable sap will spell from the ringwraith.

The orcs moved forward, as they often do.  At this stage of the tourney, I was not in a mood to dance around an enemy army.  There is very little defence for sap will, so I was going to use the will while it was there.  If I was fortunate enough to get wild channelling (which had not happened during the first game), then all the better.

As you can see in the image, that is exactly what happened.  I was able to knock down both groups of orcs with Nature's Wrath, which would turn out to set up some serious carnage.

The was the same Lords of Battle scenario from the previous game, which meant that it was all about killing stuff.  Even spent fate points counted towards the overall total.

Once I had them on the ground, my biggest priority was to get that ringwraith.  If I didn't kill it outright, I had to keep it occupied, absorbing will just to stay in combat.

Not only was I fortunate to get the wild channelling, the ringwraith did not resist the spell.  With him on the ground, it would be that much easier to wipe him out.  I was also lucky enough to get priority, which meant that I did not have to spend might near Gothmog.  The last thing I wanted to do was give him free heroic actions!

I didn't want to deal with him on the warg, so once I had bashed the downed orcs and killed the ringwraith (way to go Seregond!), I needed to get Delilah near enough to him to knock him off that critter!

Since I had gotten my will back from the first spell, Delilah had plenty to spend to go after Gothmog.  Once more, she bravely stood out in front of the foul host to issue the Warth of the forest.  Down went Gothmog, and Gwaihir immediately jumped on him.

It was looking very bad for the orcs in that center group.  The orcs on the right were a bit stuck on the terrain, as I was.  We mostly traded back and forth lost fights and non kills, with the elves taking down one every so often.

Only 2 or 3 orcs could get up the hill at any one point, so they were always outnumbered at least 2 to 1.  Eventually the fight skill 5 began to take its toll.

The baby Mumak's orc archers had been shooting at me like crazy, and missing like crazy.  It was rather shocking how bad the dice rolls went for them.  Once particularly brave (or foolish) elf stood in front of that to prevent it from charging into my troops in the center!  Several bow shots from the howdah orcs failed to wound him.

That made a bad situation for the orcs even worse, since the beast would never really get to charge into the elves with any sort of support from the original batch of orcs in the center.

One by one, the orcs by Weathertop are cut down.

The orcs in the center of the board are nearly wiped out.  All that remains is the taskmaster and one other orc.  The beast does manage to kill off the two elves that had sacrificed themselves to protect their brothers.

I had hoped to get at the drummer, since the break point had been reached for the orcs.  However, leaving him free to make his courage roll meant that I could rack up some more victory points!  This is where things continued to go my way.

Once an army is broken in this scenario, you roll a D6.  If it is a 1 or 2 , the game ends immediately.  We rolled at least 4 straight sixes, keeping the game going unbelievably long!  This would let me press every advantage which I had with my numbers and positioning.

I am still trying to kill off the last remaining orc infantry.  If I can do this, I can go after the beast, which had been wounded a few times by lucky bow shots.

Eventually I do charge the beast, making all the courage rolls needed to surround it with everything I had.  The fight skill 8 of Gwaihir (and his strength), would spell the death of the beast.

In the end, it was 32 to 10 in the casualty count for the elves!  Wow.  I had even been able to get one Knight all the way to the orc side of the board for the five bonus points, thanks to the 4-5 extra turns.

Again, everything possible went my way here.  A welcome change from the previous day.  Would this use up all my good luck?  We shall see as the worshipers of Sauron face stubby legged dwarves.  Again.

Stay tuned!