Age of Sigmar – this time High Elf Alliance

August 29, 2016 Simon Clarke Leave a comment

Today we played round two our Age of Sigmar competition. As we found out we were 1 week later for the summer campaign , so the results would just be for our own fun. Today I gave a run out for my High Elves.

I took Althran Stormrider Host war scroll battalion . Which consisted of

Hero on Griffon
Elf Mage
5 Swordmasters
10 Lothern Sea Guard
5 Ellyrian Reavers

Actually the contents of the Battle for Blood Island- which I have – and 600pts exactly. Looking like karma…

Logans Seraphon remained the same

Skink Starpriest
20 Saurus warriors
10 Skinks with javelin
10 Skinks with blowpipe
3 Ripperdactyls

The elves looked very outgunned. After reading the warscrolls then it seemed like the older models didn’t have such an oomph as the later releases. We played take and hold again, with slightly less terrain (doing away with the nonsense polystyrene tiles!). The game has a string narrative. Serpahon starting – with Ripperdactyls off table, ready for their swooping attack. There was a general advance The Saurus drummers allowing them to march – but then not to charge. In the subsequent Elf turn Althran on his Griffon showed was a monster can do. With Hand of Glory cast (re-roll hits and wounds) with a massive 16” one – he is flying – then rolling a double 6 for the charge allowed him to charge whoever he wished. The target was the big block of 20 Saurus warriors.

He did great dispatch, inflicting 10 casualties on the unit. The Saurus had already taken 2 casualties from an Arcane bolt earlier in the turn. in the Battleshock phase Logan threw a 6 , adding 12 … even with a bravery of 10 that meant another 8 lizardmen fled the field. The mistake was not to have given them inspiring presence that turn ( given to some Skinks who were skirmishing ahead of the lines). So it was looking good for the Elves from the get-go. However, in the next turn the Ripperdactyls cinematically swooped down to wreak revenge! this they did.

With their initial boosted attacks from the warscroll battalion they took Althran down to 2 wounds with their clawing attacks to start. The beak attacks are only 1 dice attack, but each time they are successful they get to roll another attack. These exploded attacked finished off the brave elf nobleman. The following turns saw the elves turing their attention to the Ripperdactyls and pepper with arrows and a few arcane bolts saw them off. With all the big beasts gone, it was down the infantry. The Ellyrian reavers had also been picked off by the Rilpperdactyls. The sword masters had some success , but with only a low model count they suffer from mortal wound spells (arcane bolt ect), as soon as they are less than 5 their usefulness to capture objectives is diminished. Finally the skinks ran out of room. As ‘wary fighters’ they can break off from combat , being safe to shoot next turn. However against the elves who shoot back …and with elf shields 4+ save (re-rolling 1s & 2s in shooting) they were getting the worse of the deal.

The final nail came with a the Elf mage longbombing a charge to attack the Skink Starpriest. With ‘Arcane bolt’ followed up with ‘hand of gloried’ sword and the tiny lizard was dispatched.

So victory for the elves, only minor as they didn’t have enough troops to hold both objectives!

Great game. I’m really enjoying these Age of Sigmar games. They have a real simplicity, but with some clever decision making. No monsters are too powerful as they can be ground down by infantry. Infantry are vulnerable to high losses due to battleshock, so nothing is massively survivable. Its hard to make anything approximating a deathstar! no 2++ re-rollables here

Fantasy

Age of Sigmar

August 28, 2016 Simon Clarke 2 Comments

Today we played a game of the much maligned Age of Sigmar. Logan has been collecting Seraphon, and with the release of the Generals handbook if was a breeze to get a ‘pick up’ game organised. He had just finished painting up his models, to get a game in for the Summer campaign , with a week to got before ‘back to school’. We used the first scenario – take and hold, which is a typical capture the flag game. We only used 600pts to try and get a game that we could setup, play and get to a conclusion, in the time we had available.

Logan’s Seraphon was a Shadowstrike Starhost warscroll battalion (2 units of Skinks, Skink priest and Ripperdactyls), and a unit of 20 Saurus.

I dug out some some Nurgle, 5 Blightkings, 20 Plaguebearers, 2 units of 3 Nurglings and a Herald as leader. As I had the keyword Nurgle in my army selection Blightkings counted as battleline.

The terrain was rather crowded (too much so was the view afterwards), and we fought over a ruined village next to a river- in reality I found some old terrain tile that hadn’t been used in 20 years, so needed a trot out

The Seraphon were rather devastating. They have rather a lot of anti Chaos buffs (as the Seraphon manifest from the blazing light of Azyr – new fluff)

The game started very quickly the Saurus marched (with drummer), and threw high on the charge fighting the Plaguebearers on the riverbank. This was to be the chunky combat of the game. The Saurus , being given inspiring presence were immune to battle shock. The Plaguebearers as now even more of a tarpit, they get a 5+ save , with a subsequent 5+ save – Disgustingly Resilient ( I will not call it Feel no Pain 😉 ) They during battle shock if they throw a 1 they get 1d6 plague bearers back. This fight ground out.

My Blightkings were lead a merry dance with by the Skinks, the Starpriest hitting them with 2 spells each turn – typically done d3 Mortal wounds each time. Not something that a 5 model unit wants. The Skinks poor out a lot of shooting and when I did close to contact , as wary fighters the skinks can break off during their ‘activation’ in the combat phase. With the Plaguebearer/Saurus combat being the main focus, that meant that quite often they would activate first and break off with no loss.

The Ripperdactyls start off table as part of the battalion rules, arriving when needed. They come with a Bloat toad model, who as a non-combatant moves around the table giving away their arrival point. When fighting within 2” of the toad the Ripperdactyls go into a frenzy. Combining the ‘Swooping Dive’ rule with the ‘Strike from the Skies’, they come down with a vengeance. In this case some unsuspecting Nurselings camped on the objective felt their wrath. Normally these little spuds just shrug off hits. 5 wounds per base, remove all excess hits at the end of the phase. But the toad has shuffled next to them and the reptilian Stukas obliterated them in 1 attack.

The jig was up for Nurgle, the plaguebearers stuck in a long running combat (killing 20 Sauruses takes a while!), Nurglings wiped out, and the Blightkings less that 5 models so could not control any objective.

I have to admit I really enjoyed this game. It was ‘lite’ for sure, but needed thought and gave some interesting decisions in the game. It was a bit like Warmachine, but without the terminally fiddly bits that that comes with. The generals handbook was excellant for making the game quick to set up, and the force selection was a breeze with all the ‘upgrade’ minutiae from WFB gone. The app was excellent too. Add your troops to ‘my battle’ and you can keep a track of all your units quickly without constantly having the ‘book lookup’ – Free too!

Recommended

Ancients

MeG – Spartacus Campaign

August 19, 2016 Simon Clarke Leave a comment

Last night we played a game that was a combination of introduction and campaign game. Dino, Paul and Peter played for the first time. I picked a game from the 3rd Servile war – Spartacus campaign. To make it a closer run thing , I picked the Romans to be led by Crassus – where the Slaves finally get beaten.

One way to play this campaign is a single game pickup. You can select lists from the campaign pack, select a date. Substitute the campaign maps for the one in the rules and away you go.

Just to talk about the lists for a moment (they are a bit fast and loose, close to 12K points).

The Spartacus list is

There are couple of campaign rules in play.

Spartacus gets a 40% bonus to scouting is he chooses to ‘invade’ (Night Attack)
The Slaves can also substitute the Apennine backdrop as their secure flank option ( Impassable mountain range)

The Roman list is

There are couple of campaign rules in play for Crassus

Homeland Muster, not allies allowed
Garrison troops, at least 25% of TuGs must be poor
Seasons tactician, the C-in-C must be at least talented.

During the PBS stage, Spartacus and his slaves dominated. As a legendary leader they beat Crassus (red vs yellow – close thing though). They picked to defend selecting the most central location in Italy. Peter as the Roman had some decent cards, but it seemed that neither side was worried about moving from this location. The Slaves has 9 cards (3 scouting) to the Romans 7 (4 Scouting). The Slaves held on to their best 3 cards for scouting, and the Romans 2. The desultory movement was back and forth to the adjacent square, ending up with initial location

The terrain was dense with secure flank. The slaves picked the Apennine mountain, alongside some large compulsory rough hills. At this point they didn’t realise that the Romans were flexible so could switch between close and loose order. However, it was probably a good plan to at least avoid the potential ‘shove’ that close vs loose would get in the open.

A few more optional, smaller hills were placed and that concluded the battlefield. The hills were scattered evenly across the table, but it did give the slaves a good defensive position

Both sides had held onto their best scouting cards, from the prior stage – But they neutralised each other both sides having 1 red, 2 yellows. The Romans had an extra green, but not enough to give them a discernible advantage.

The armies deployed 4 groups at a time. The slaves just having a slab of ‘imitation’ legionaries, sandwiched between the ‘mob’. Crassus’s army seemed small by comparison, with just 8 TuG of Legionaries (2 of which were poor)

The plan was simple, as a test of the rule mechanisms and introduction to the game, both armies would butt each other, neither side demonstrating any tactical finesse.

The Roman army chose to float Crassus and let his subordinates take the strain. With hindsight Pete thought that this was not such a good idea, but I’m not so sure. Certainly it demonstrated the difference in the command structure.

In the fighting the Slaves held their own. The Roman equipped slaves being average impact weapon matching the Roman. The legionaries has a bit of bad luch by losing a couple of bases to skirmishing shephards ( 2 wounds on 3 black dice!) , but as the fight settled down the Roman quality started to show. Being melee expert, and average gave them a 2 dice colour advantage against the regular slaves. Combined with the ability to shove loose order (vs close) the poor slaves started to take a lot of damage. However, this was mitigated by the fact that the slaves had cunningly arranges that each legion was fighting at least 2 TuGs. So from an attrition perspective a legion could only take 3 losses, vs the Slave 4.5 per tug ( so actually against 2 TuG, the romans need to inflict 9 kills). As long as they kept throwing a white dice the Slaves can attrit their way to victory.

When we called time , the Romans looks shakey, most legions had taken a couple of casualties and were looking like they would be swamped by Spartacus and his followers.