Last Friday's Battle - 2nd Variable Mission game

As you may or may not know, our group has been running a couple of games with variable missions. We are currently running with a single deck of 6 cards that each represent one of the 6 basic missions from the Core Rulebook. Last Friday night we played our second game using this system and it seems to work great, or well it did for Scott and myself.

So a run down of how this works, you get 6 cue cards or similar sized item and put the names of each of the missions on a card, shuffle them and put them to the side. Set up the table in what ever manner you see fit, we usually just have someone do the whole thing up in as even a manner as possible. Place a marker for the Relic and then 6 markers (with the variable point values for the Scouring) as evenly around the table as possible. Determine all the normal stuff such as Warlord Traits, Deployment, etc. and then each side chooses a card.

Now we talk a lot while we are playing so in order to not give away our mission we tend to talk objectives in a way that it can be any mission. Oh I forgot to say this but, DON'T SHOW YOUR OPPONENT YOUR MISSION CARD! What fun would it be if he/she knew what it was. Also we have always played where in the Scouring you don't flip the Objective Marks to determine their value until the end of the game. I guess we are just weird like that.

So how did our game play out, Scott and I played Blood Angels and Dark Angels against George and Austin who were playing Eldar and Tau. Austin and myself were the Warlords with Austin drawing the Relic mission and myself drawing Purge the Alien (I had to refrain from doing the Happy Dance). Deployment saw Scott and myself just outside of range for two objectives and our opponents a little further back. We blocked Infiltration by getting first deployment for them and I set up a group of scouts on the Relic (remember we didn't know they had the mission). Our battle plan was rather simple, march straight across the board and hold as many objectives as possible while attempting to eliminate what ever presented itself. Austin and George were going to flank to our rear, slay the warlord and retrieve the relic from there. Well that was a great plan except my Librarian decided that he was going to Perils of the Warp himself to death in turn two (2 turns of double 6s). This kind of broke their battle plans and they never did recover from it. Mean while my Scouts sat on the Relic for 5 turns and in the end we walked away with more than their 3 VP for First Blood, Slay the Warlord, and Line Breaker. I didn't think it was necessary to do the math once we counted 4 kills.

So if you want to change up your game a bit I definitely suggest giving the mission cards a try.

I Found my Stuff

So last week saw the conclusion of a long time attempt to find several boxes of very old 40k figures. In this massive pile of boxes I found some of the following

1x Armorcast Reaver Titan
2x Armorcast Warhound Titans
3x Armorcast Baneblades
1x Armorcast Shadowsword
Several Imperial Guard Tanks (both LMR and Chimera chassis)
Several Space Marine Rhino Chassis Tanks
Box full of Old Eldar and Chaos Space Marine figs
Box of Old Tyranid models (including 59 Genestealers)

and most importantly

My Old Dark Angel Army!

Which with the IG Tanks is what I was really looking for. The old Eldar and CSM stuff is most likely going to get sold as fast as I can in order to make some room. Actually the Eldar and some Ork stuff I found will be sold as soon as George comes by with the money. The CSM stuff I am still going to have to sort through though and on first glance it appears that I had one of the old Skull Faced Chaos Dreadnaughts.

The only problem I have now is the box of tyranids. After looking through it I wasn't able to find a single HQ option so either my Hive tyrant, warriors and carnifex are in another box or they are lost to the warp and while I wouldn't mind fielding the swarm again, I am not sure I want to buy another hive tyrant.

Scenery

So I am back to working on scenery again, sat down yesterday while my daughter was doing her homework and did a little of my own. Designed the templates for my catwalk towers as well as the walkway to join them. Need to make the templates for the part that will hold the walkway itself up but I wanted to see how sturdy it was before I got to that. Unfortunately I probably wont get back to working on this again until the weekend but hopefully I can get at least one of the tower put together and grab a picture or two.

Kill Team

So we played two games of Kill Team last Friday. I took notes and pictures fully expecting to do a battle report for at the least my battle against Austin, but..... as much as I wanted to enjoy the game and as much as I tried to bring my self to write up the report I just couldn't do it. My game against Austin turned out to be an easy game well in my favor. IG versus Tau with Tau as an Attacker, yeah I won that with absolutely no issues. The next game was Austin against his dad, Scott (Tau vs. Blood Angels) and Scott was destroyed in turn 3. Now we have played a lot of 500 point battles and even then the 6e rules are rather balanced, so if you play well and the Dice Gods don't hate you any army can win but at 200 points just one bad roll can completely destroy you. I DON'T LIKE THAT!

That got me thinking though, can I do something to fix this. OH YEAH! Necromunda! yep that's the ticket I can update Necromunda to fit 6e and give it a test drive. So there we have it, I am working on a conversion of Necromunda to allow for a true skirmish based 40k game using a merger of the rules. Yeah it may be a bit more complicated than a normal 40k but not so horribly simple as a game of Kill Team. If I get it right then I should be able to balance the system to allow a nice 90 minute game of 40k using approximately 100 points.

Our New Gaming Table

Just wanted to take a moment to show off our new gaming table. This is just a hold over until the Ping Pong Table gets freed up and at this rate it may still be a while.

We took a 4x8 piece of ply wood, cut it in half and slap a piano henge in the middle.We kind of needed the henge for ease of storage since the wife wouldn't let me keep it as the new kitchen table (in truth I didn't even ask, sometimes it is safe to assume)

Variable Missions and last Friday's Game

Firstly let me start off with saying that the game took forever. I am not sure if that was due to the Variable Mission selection or if we were just slow. I know I had to step back a second and give the game a thought or two on occasion since I wasn't sure how I was going to counter a mission from my opponents I didn't have knowledge of. I guess that is were the challenge comes from though. Not knowing what mission your opponent has forces you to counter every mission in the deck and I must say it was an ugly game with units scattered everywhere. I think we are going to have to try this format out a couple more times before I can say whether or not I like it or if the format caused the slow down that we faced during the game. I would definitely not suggest this if you are on a time limit for your game unless you are none for speed playing.

So in a week or two, we will hopefully get another game or so with the variable mission selection under our belts and I should have a better feel for the format.

Variable Missions and tonights Game

So I know we are having a game tonight but I did something scary, I had a thought. I try not to do such things if i don't have to but it happened anyhow. My group has been playing about once a week for a couple of months now and personally I am up for a bit more of a challenge. So I am going to write down each of the missions on a card and set them aside. We will then set up the table as usual but then we will place a center objective and five others to represent a Relic and well 5 other objectives. Once table edge is determined, each Warlord will draw a mission card and set it aside, yeah it is going to remain a secret until the end of the game. We are going to use tonight's game as a test to see how this works and if we like it then I will write up two cards per a mission (so it will be possible to get the same mission) and maybe come up with a standard for table and objective setup just so we can keep everything straight. I know there is at least one mission I would like to add beyond the standard missions in the rulebook but I think I will one thing at a time.

Day 1

So two things happened on the 1st of the year, I was able to play a very good game against Austin's Tau and Scott made some scenery. Yeah OK that doesn't sound all that exciting but since the game was against our youngest and least experienced player and he almost won as well as the fact that Scott has made the first bit of scenery that I didn't have to build I was pretty happy.

So first off, the almost loss to Austin's Tau. I screwed up and I did so bad, I deployed my Aegis horribly, I gave up turn 1 to Tau, I deployed the rest of my army in the most heinous way possible and then Austin exploited ever bit of my mistake. By the time my bit of turn 2 came around I had less than half my army and fortunately for me my Veterans and the Vendetta they were in made it to the board. I did get very lucky in that we were playing the Scouring and the two objectives I was sitting on were a 3 and 4 point objective while Austin was sitting on a 2 and 3 point objective.

So now for the scenery, Scott built one of these.

Ok so maybe not this exact one but it was a Print and Play building from http://40kaddict.blogspot.co.uk. Just print out the template, glue it to foam core, and then cut/glue it all together. It made a beautiful building. So if you are looking for easy to make building, definitely go check out the site and look through what is in the STC section. I believe we will be adding a couple more such buildings to our scenery box before to long.