A Reasonable Dream part I

In late 2010, the staff at Privateer Press (the makers of Warmachine and Hordes) had an in-house “Impossible Dream” challenge, in which they each attempted to paint a 100 point army within one month.

When I heard about that, I thought to myself: “Self, I think I’d like to try that.” I tossed the idea around amongst the regulars over at Vancouver Gamers and was ultimately convinced by them that it was a ridiculous idea, but changing the timeline to 3 months would make it a fun thing to attempt.

A few of us decided to take on this challenge, with the ultimate goal of having some sort of show-down at the end, where we would take our newly-painted 100 point armies and battle it out for bragging rights. Unfortunately, it looks like that grand finale probably won’t be happening, due to waning interest, one of the participants moving to another city, etc.

Anyway, for me the most important part of the challenge was always trying to get that army painted. I really enjoy painting, but for some reason I always have trouble getting myself motivated to actually do it. I tend to find that unless I’ve got some kind of deadline in which to get a certain number of models done, it just won’t happen. Because of that, I’ve got a firm rule that I’ll never take an unpainted model to a tournament (I will sometimes use unpainted models in casual play, but I greatly prefer not to). I also take on whatever painting challenges come my way. If I didn’t, I’d probably only have a half-dozen Cygnar models painted right now.

The first step for this particular challenge was to look through my depressingly large collection of unpainted miniatures, and decide what to include in this 100 point army. My primary focus was to include models that I’ve wanted to get painted for a long time, with a secondary focus on ending up with a playable 100 point force, and a tertiary (yes, that’s right, I just used the word tertiary in a sentence – thank you AD&D module D01-02 Descent Into the Depths of the Earth for teaching me a word that I could then insert into a blog entry many years later in an attempt to make people believe that I’m educated!) focus on making it somewhat reasonable from a painting standpoint. No massive infantry horde for me! (more…)

GottaCon 2011 – Steamroller Report from Subhedgehog

As mentioned previously, I have three casters in my Khador collection.  I knew I wanted to bring the Butcher of Khardov, as I have the makings of a tier 3 list with what I have assembled. I suppose I could have gone for a tier 4 list, but I wanted to have some ranged threats on the jacks, as the Butcher doesn’t really speed them up. Here is the list I put together for Axey McButcherAxe

• Butcher of Khardov (-6 pts)
• * Decimator 9 pts
• * Spriggan 10 pts
• * War Dog 1 pt
• Kossite Woodsmen, minimum, 4 pts
• Man-o-war Demolition Corps, full, 9 pts
• Man-o-war Shocktroopers, min, 6 pts -1 tier discount
• Man-o-war Kovnik 3 pts
• * Marauder 7 pts
• Widowmakers 4 pts
• Widowmaker Marksman 2 pts
• Manhunter 2 pts

As with any Butcher list, the whole idea is to make a Butcher Delivery System ™.  The Widowmakers are to help thin out any single-wound melee troops threatening objectives, with the Marksmen there to hunt opposing solos.  The Kovnik and his marshalled marauder are to make directly for a secondary objective target on the weak flank, hoping to knock, slam or kill anyone threatening a flag or some such point of interest.  The rest is a big brick up the middle.  Demo Corps to provide wide area threat, and the Shocktroops as an honour guard until Butcher does his thing.

• Zevanna Agha, the Old Witch (-3 pts)
• * Scrapjack 0 pts
• * Decimator 9 pts
• * Destroyer 9 pts
• Battle Mechanics, min 2 pts
• Doom Reavers 6 pts
• * Greylord Escort 2 pts
• Greylord Ternion 4pts
• Kossite Woodsmen, minimum 4 pts
• Winter Guard Rifle Corps, full 8 pts
• Kovnik Jozef 2 pts
• 2 x Manhunters, 2 x 2 = 4 pts
• Yuri the Axe 3 pts

This list I really threw things in without much thought.  I wanted to try out the Doom Reavers with the escort as the vanguard, and the rifle corps with Jozef is to provide anti-infantry fire around main objectives.  This list wasn’t as well thought out, nor really well understood how it should all work together.

Round 1 I played Phillipe and his Xerxis army of Ferox, Rhadeim and Arcuari.  A Bronzeback, Gladiator and Sentry were the heavy muscle to back up the cavalry.  I joked that I knew the Skorne army much better than I knew my own (hint: not actually a joke).  Even right after deploying, I knew I was in trouble as I didn’t really have a plan, but was very aware that I might not have the tools to take out the heavies.  We were playing Outfight, Outflank and Outlast.  His Sentry parked itself in the left objective across from my frightened rifle corp.  The Ferox and Rhadeim were all over the right objective.  A missed shot at Rhadeim caused him to move out of one of the scenario points  via evasion, and I actually managed to clear out the remaining ferox with the few doom reavers left, to score my only control point of the tournament.  I knew it was coming, but couldn’t do enough to prevent it:  Rhadeim ended up killing the Old Witch pretty easily.

The other rounds are all jumbled in my head at the moment so they are presented in no particular order:

Against Trent (aka Trent) and his epic Krueger list, I took the Butcher.  We had a big terrain feature, sort of a town square fountain with a big menofix in the middle of the board and were playing Sacrifice.  Tharn, Widowmakers, Kovnik, Lord of the Feast, Kossites and a Marauder were all at one point disputing the sacrifice patented explodo-flag, but the circle forces were getting the upper hand.  The rest of the army went to contest the objective zone, flowing around the big fountain.  Krueger and his druids advanced behind Cylena and the Nyss hunters, sending a warpwolf stalker and gorax as vanguard.  There were some constructs lumbering around.  Trent had Butcher hit with his sustained attack  lightning zap and a boatload of fury, but ran out of time on his second to last turn (that’s a hint at what’s coming up).  I had a chance to clear the zone and set off a blast-o-doom on my besieged marauder, so I put some focus on the Decimator and Spriggan, keeping 4 for Butcher himself.  The Marauder buzz-sawed his way through what was left of the Gorax and the Spriggan bulldozed his way into a couple of druids, pushing one out of the zone and leaving his charge target in…  Whiff, whiff and no points for me, so I decided to go for the assassination.  I use Obliteration to nuke a hole through a stonewarden and a couple of druids, leaving Krueger open for a charge.  The Butcher almost killed him, leaving him with a couple health, but no focus for a followup attack.  Three desperate shield-cannon shots from the Shock troops could not tag Krueger, and he quickly electro-fried the big psychopath for the win.  My main mistake was splitting my focus between scenario points and assassination.  Had Butcher had one more focus Krueger may have been ended.  Lesson learned about resource allocation and prioritization.

I played one of the chaotic order folks (I forget his real name, but on the internets they call him Azzurro) and his epic Hoarluk troll squad.  The scenario was Incursion.  Butcher and Hoarluk’s forces smashed together.  I weathered the storm of the feat pretty well and popped Butcher’s feat in return, but missed some key rolls from a demolition corpsman against Mulg.  Whelps actually made me miss three or four attacks, including one with the Butcher against a mauler!  Leaving Mulg near your caster and healthy is a bad plan:  Butcher was soon smashed in half.  Totally fun game though, just raw beating without much subtlety, though Azzurro did manage to get a control point from one of the flags.

My worst performance was against Neil from the Your Go Games crew in Whiterock.  I lost in the top of turn 2 against Neil’s Mage Hunter Strike Force sniper squad and Ravyn’s feat.  The Old Witch was the third least-advanced model in my army, but I was still too close.  I think it took about 12 minutes from the first model being moved to the crying and the gnashing of the teeth.  As we had so much time, however, Neil graciously accepted an immediate rematch (though not for tournament standings, obviously).  We  just set up again to play for fun.  Forewarned being forearmed, the result was different.  The scenario was gaining ground, though that didn’t end up affecting the results.  Kossites were actually the stars of the show in this match – they ambushed Narn (?) to death and tied up and eventually killed two or three members of the Stormfall archers, as well as prevented a couple of members of the Mage Hunters from getting shots away on multiple turns.  The Stormfall archers did manage to set the Old Witch on fire, which lasted some three turns before the end of the match.  Eventually, Ravyn moved up too far and ended up getting shot to death by the Destroyer and Kovnik Jozef from opposite flanks.  At least I was able to avenge my terrible gaffe from before.

My last match was against the snakebitten and voodoo-hexed Ryan and his Magnus the Warlord list.  We had played a game of Magnus vs Butcher (actually, my first with Khador) some time previously, so luckily I ended up with the Old Witch to oppose him this time, in a capture the flag scenario.  Croe’s cuthroats and some idrians advanced cagily against the rifle corp defending my flag, whilst Yuri and the Manhunters, the Doom Reavers, along with some Kossites (but I forgot about them the whole match…) harassed his long gunners and idrians defending his flag.  The jacks kind of met in the middle, with me managing to weather the two obliterator rockets without too much damage.  The game ended when Ryan ran out of time on one of his turns and forgot to pop Magnus’ feat, which left him vulnerable.  Though engaged by a Mangler, my Decimator got fully loaded with focus.  Greylords advanced into combat with the Mangler to have an easier time ice cageing it.  I managed to make the jack stationary, so the Decimator revved up the buzz-saw, broke away from its ice-encrusted adversary and went screaming after Magnus.  The results were not pretty.  And with that win, I took myself out of contention for the Whipping Boy trophy (see Ben’s post for more on the whipping boy scoring).

All in all, four great games, one confused loss against a well prepared opponent and one incredible face-palm (thankfully immediately followed by one of the great games).  My game against Trent could have easily gone either way, had he had more time or had I better managed my focus.  I learned a good deal about my Khador forces in a short period of time and even better, got to meet and play against some fantastic folks.

GottaCon 2011 – Steamroller Report from Bwafer

The intrepid Ben, aka bwafer, well known among the Vancouver scene for his affinity for speaking the unknowable (except to him) language of Swans, was among the attendees of GottaCon’s Steamroller event.  He originally posted his overview and summary in the forum at www.vancouvergamers.com, but I have stolen it from under his nose to repost here for those of you who might not frequent that particular part of the internet.  Without further introduction, I cede the floor.

Bwafer sez:

It was a very well-run tournament that went off without a hitch (at least, if there were any hitches or glitches, I was unaware of them), so I have to give props to Rida and Darren for ensuring that things went smoothly.

I only ended up facing one person who I’ve played before (Will), which was nice, because one of the reasons I wanted to go was to play against new people. The Vancouver crowd is great, but it’s always fun to play against fresh faces every now and then. I must say, I met some very friendly people who were lots of fun to play against.

When I arrived in Victoria on Friday evening, several things went wrong for me, including the fact that I realized that I had left a fairly important element of my Caine army at home – Caine himself. On Saturday morning I tried to buy a new Caine from a vendor there, in order to quickly glue him together so that I wouldn’t be stuck with just the one list. Unfortunately, it turned out that the vendor had already sold the only Caine that he had had in stock. Fortunately, he happened to have an already-assembled and undercoated Caine lying around that he was kind enough to let me borrow for the tournament. I was very impressed – this guy didn’t know me from Adam, and had no way of knowing whether I would walk off with the miniature, but he heard my plight and jumped in to rescue me. I made sure to give him my thanks and buy some stuff from him to reward his good karma before returning the mini.

The most tense and suspenseful moments for me came after the end of my last game. Going into that game, I knew that Paul (ed: that’s me!) had lost all of his previous games (ed: that’s not quite how I remember it…  who let this guy post this?), while there were four or five of us who had won only one game so far. If Paul lost his last game, he would take the coveted Whipping Boy title. If he won, there would be a number of us with the same win-loss record, and it would go to a tiebreaker. I lost my last game against an opponent who would have been in the running if he hadn’t beat me. Uehen had also lost his last game, giving him the same win-loss record as me. We both anxiously waited to see who would win between Paul and Ryan, to see if we still had a chance at the title and trophy. Paul won! We had a chance!

Uehen and I asked the others who had only won a single game whether they had won any control points – the first tiebreaker. It quickly became apparent that this was down to Uehen and myself, as we were the only ones who hadn’t won a single control point all tourney. It would be down to the second tiebreaker – points killed.

The scores were tallied, and it was announced that Uehen had taken it by a narrow margin. My heart fell, and I cursed him emphatically! In the heat of the moment, I might have even cast aspersions on his parentage – I was blinded by despair, so I can’t really be certain. Almost immediately, however, it was announced that a mistake had been made in the tally! Uehen’s total was actually higher than mine by a narrow margin, not lower! I leaped in the air in triumph, and gloated unrepentantly! Sorry for being such a poor sport about it Uehen, I got caught up in the moment. Maybe next year you’ll be able to take the title from me. Maybe next year.

It should be said that the local Vancouver Whipping Boy trophy is indeed coveted.  One of the fantastic local painters, Chad, did up a Skorne Paingiver Beasthandler plying his trade against an innocuous looking agonizer,  mounted on a base of a dark wood.  Take a look!

There are a couple more shots of the trophy here.  I wouldn’t have minded too much had I gotten to take that piece home.  Erh, I mean, lies!  Damn lies and falsehoods, I was never in the running for whipping boy!  I recall winning seven games out of the five played, and I rode across the water back to Vancouver on a unicorn, borne up by victory and the adulation of my peers.  cough.  I mean, thanks for the write-up, Ben!  Also, another round of thanks to the vendor who loaned the Caine model!  I would hazard a guess and say it was someone from Dice Bag Games, as they had HordesMachine stock at the convention.

If you are interested in seeing a small selection of Chad’s other work, check out his blog:  http://chadspaint.wordpress.com/ Therein you will find some shots of his work and information on how you too can commission something from him.  There are many instances of his work out in the wilds of Vancouver, as well as further afield.  I’m a big fan of his work, it is second to none.

GottaCon 2011 – Steamroller Gallery

These photos come courtesy of the dapper and dashing Uehen, who was Johnny-on-the-spot with the snappity-snap.

GottaCon 2011 – Friday Night Mega Battle

Over the weekend of February 4th to the 6th, GottaCon rocked out in Victoria.  Among the festivities, including PC LAN gaming, console gaming, RPGs, boardgames, Warhammer and 40k, Rida (aka: jack froide/frost, formerly of Connection Games) decided to put together a Steamroller event for us HordesMachiners.  The Steamroller was to run Saturday and Sunday, but there was gaming space and time on Friday!  In order to break the ice a Mega Battle was arranged.  The rules were pretty simple:

• 15+ point force for each player.
• You score points equal to the cost of a model you destroy/remove from play, etc.
• Warcasters are worth nothing.
• When your warcaster dies, all your remaining models are removed from the game and no one gets points for them.

We ended up with 8 players, so we got crammed all together on one large 8′ x 4′ table and randomly assigned positions and one of two sides.  No one was deployed on the short table edges.  There were some additional rules for this first big battle:

• You cannot target any model belonging to a player on the same table edge as you, but if you “accidentally” caused some casualties, you got the points.
• All players on the same table edge act simultaneously.
• In cases where attack / charge timing would come into question, the player with the closest model to the target would act first.

As my lists for the Steamroller event used Butcher and the Old Witch, I pulled out the following models:

• Kommander Strakhov (-6 pts)
• Torch 10 pts
• Decimator 9 pts
• Manhunter 2 pts

With Rida screaming at us that there is no thinking in HordesMachine (and other zen-like pronouncements), we all slapped our models down and got to it.  The whole thing turned into a giant awesome mess.  The far side of the table (my left to right) had legion (Thagrosh?), Menoth (Reznik), Legion (directly across from me) with eThagrosh and Menoth with the Harbinger.  On my side was (again my left to right) dwarven mercs (run by Ryan), Skorne (2x bronzebacks + Morghoul and paingivers), Khador (myself) and Retribution (Ravyn + MHSF and a Manticore, I believe).  As we were all activating at the same time, it was hard to keep track of what was going on.  The Thagrosh player and I basically ran screaming across the middle of the field and obliterated our armies against each other, leaving Strakhov running off behind Morghoul and Thagrosh hanging about mid-board blowing kisses at the oncoming Retribution Mage Hunter Strike Force.  The Retribution player never really moved fast enough to engage the Menoth player opposite him because he was afraid Harby would murder his single-wounders, allowing the Harbinger’s forces to flow into the void left by epic Thagrosh’s meat-brigade.  Morghoul managed to get way upfield to engage Reznik’s forces, but apparently whiffed with both bronzebacks a whole lot.  The Skorne were basically in the opposite deployment line when everything died.  Ryan and the Legion player across from him tied each other up in a heavy-metal slapfight until Reznik’s forces came in to clean up the dwarven stragglers.  The whole morass was wicked – not having a reason to go after casters was actually mind-bending, but it got worse in the one on ones.  I ended up having given up a whole lot of points, but I had also gotten a good boatload myself (19 I think), setting myself up for a good run in the one-v-one matchups.  Or so I thought.

After the mega battle (which took a surprisingly small amount of time), we split off into one on ones with our same lists.  My first game was against the Reznik force, composed (from memory and completely ignorant of Menoth tiers) of the following:

• Whatshisname Reznik (-6 pts)
• 2 x Reckoner (8 pts each)
• Vassal of Mentos Menoth (2 pts)
• Choir – max unit ??  (3 pts)

This is where the strangeness of not being able to go for casters became very apparent.  Reznik ran ahead (!) of his army.   The Menoth first turn was pretty standard run forward, as was mine.  After my first turn, Reznik loaded up Engine of Destructuion and flew in to kill my manhunter, getting 2 points. He was easily within my murder range (particularly considering Strakhov’s feat), but the jacks were protected from the Decimator’s Dozer gun by the Choir.  If I killed Rezzy right then and there, I got no points…  So I advanced and protected myself from the flame cannons with occultation on the Decimator – Torch and Strakhov being immune to fire meant the two Reckoners would not shoot them.  Reznik charged in and wrecked the Decimator, and the army stayed back…  Full focus on Torch and Strakhov’s feat later, and I …. hadn’t wrecked a jack because of stupid enliven moving his jack away from my Sustained Attack death-saw (of death!).  Damn. The flamethrower cooked the now exposed Vassal.  Torch then died to twin tetsubo-beatings by the Reckoners, leaving Strakhov alone against everything.  The only target I could reach worth points was the damaged jack, but Strakhov died to a free-strike by Reznik as he charged by.  2 points for the Vassal – though I’m pretty sure I wrote down 1 point, as I assumed that a solo as awesome as the Vassal would basically be free.

My second match was… ALSO AGAINST MENOTH!  Woo!  See if you can spot some similarities to the previous list here:

• Harbinger of Menoth (+5 pts)
• 2 x Reckoner (8 pts each)
• 2 x Vassals (2 pts each)

Two Vassals?  KHAN!  This match I was again snakebitten by Enliven, but there was now twice as much of it.  I would charge a rip-saw bearing Decimator or Torchie McFlameyPants in, then they would dance out of the reach of my sustained attacks.  And every time I killed a Vassal, Harby would martyr herself to save them.  My opponent even killed Harby with Martydom to stop me from getting a single point.  It was pretty hilarious, we were laughing the whole game.  I think he got the Decimator and the manhunter, but not Torch or Strakie.  At the end of the game I told my opponent that the Harbinger had convinced Strakhov to convert so he could at least get to kill something with fire.  The Kommander was sent off to break rocks with his head in the depths of my case.

The event on Friday night was a perfect way to break the ice and get everyone playing.  The atmosphere was friendly, and there was much head scratching and laughter about the inversion of the normal “gun for their caster at all costs” game play.  Thumbs up for a great ice breaker!  The overall winner of the introduction event was the Reznik player, whose name escapes me now (Brook?).  I believe he took home a box of Exemplar Cinerators, but I’m not sure which entity provided that specific prize, so I’ll plug the ones I know supported the Steamroller event:  Connection Games of Vancouver, Dice Bag Games of Duncan and GottaCon.