Thursday, September 15, 2016

Summer Heresy

As I mentioned last week, Age of Sigmar wasn't the only wargame I spent time on this summer...

The Horus Heresy campaign is still going strong! Despite neglecting to report it I did indeed play a 1250 points battle and the group also celebrated reaching the halfway point with a megabattle where everyone got to bring their 1500 points armies.

The 1250 points battle was against the dreaded Sons of Horus! It was two infiltrating drop pod assault armies against eachother and my opponent decided to rob me of my advantage and give me the first turn while he himself put everything in reserve.

Perhaps the most important piece of dark age thech in the Raven Guard's arsenal are the ever elusive 'phantom stairs'.
At the start of turn 2 things were finally kicking off and not knowing where Lupercal's lackeys were coming from I decided to hug that ruin terrain for all it was worth. Turn 1 only saw my plasma guys drop as well as an enemy contemptor.

 This walking coffin of a battle brother needs a name for the heroics he pulled in this game. "Brother Aybek" I dub thee.
The Sons' contemptor took down my plasma dudes, but they got a few shots off first and killed the kharybdis. Luckily they were avenged later by my own contemptor. The contemptor then proceeded to kick traitor ass and hold up/murder the better part of a marine squad. My other units took the fight to a particularly nasty squad of volkite dudes. In the end everyone was getting into slapfights and cuddle-combats and the game ended in a draw.

So, having skipped two months with the 30k reports this time there is also the Megabattle to talk about. Megabattles to me are one of the main reasons I'm in this hobby. It's an excuse to immerse myself in exactly the type of battles that I keep reading about in the fiction for an entire day. Fielding and using your army in allied combinations and large scale battle situations is also a really cool change from the smaller engagements you usually play.

This time, although I had a great time playing the game, the strategic element didn't quite come together. The loyalist side had some troubles with army selection (we were one person short, so the rest had to conjure up some extra points) as well as having almost none of the potential bonus rules that we could have won for ourselves in the previous rounds.

Nevertheless, it was nice to see everyone's mostly painted armies out on display and we had a good time rolling dice and taking models off the table. Below are some of the few pics I shot. There wasn't a lot of time for photo sessions.

My poor tactical squad. All those alpha legion dudes coming at you and you're surrounded by iron hands in boxes.
Brother Aybek leading from the front again. Thankfully he shouldn't have to walk far to get at those Night Lords.
Wore my 'straight outta deliverance' shirt for the occasion. Don't know if I want to go full emo-style for the next outing, but you never know.

Now. For one of the first times ever I did more painting these months than blogging about it, so here are some army shots for the Dust Vultures so far. And also something I just finished yesterday.

This is everything that is completely finished so far.
Master of Signal in the house!
I changed the spear into a sword after some thought on the matter. Playing wysiwyg is something I really care about and it caught me completely off guard that there are no power spears in 30k. Oh well.
Dark Furies bitches. Damn proud of this unit.
Victory or Death!

Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Season of War

Long time no post yet again!

Fret not though my dear imaginary readership: the lack in blog updates the past few months has only been surpassed by the incredible progress that has been made on all my projects.

There's so much to show that I'm going to spread this stuff out over two posts. This one is going to cover all the AoS games I've been playing over the summer. 

Despite a lot of anti-AoS sentiments at the local store, I got asked by the owner to run GW's Season of War campaign for whomever was interested. I got the campaign box and the generals handbook and basically spent five consecutive fridays focussed on promoting Age of Sigmar at the store.

All things considered, the campaign was actually a really fun experience! I'm impressed with how GW handled things, seeing as I had a somewhat sour after taste with Storm of Chaos and the Nemesis Crown. AoS also seems a lot more suited to global campaigning than the old world ever was. The campaign was also fun because it unexpectedly got some new people excited for AoS again. A long time friend of mine got back into things with the Death alliance, another local guy went along with Seraphon, another Skaven player joined in a couple of times and me and Joyce with our Skaven and Sylvaneth were there as well.

Here are some of the best pics we shot during the course of the campaign:

First battle of the campaign was between two of my friends who had only recently decided to give AoS a try. Lizardmen VS Empire took some getting used to with the new system, but both players ended up having a great time.
The Empire player from the first shot wanted to try out AoS against something else than Lizards, so I obliged by fielding my budding Skaven force.
My custom-made Hell Pit Abomination got stuck in pretty quick.
The next week we did a 2 VS 2 battle with Skaven + Sylvaneth VS Seraphon + Dark Elves.
The Dark Elf + Seraphon side looked nicely ranked.
This was one of the first battles Joyce (Sylvaneth) had ever fought with a treelord and perhaps teleported towards the opposing armies a bit too soon. All in all it was a fun battle and mainly served to show how deadly a shooty force could be.
Another week another battle. This one was a 4 player free for all and shows my rats marching towards Death, Seraphon and another Skaven army.



The Empire guy from the first pictures is actually the one who started up this new Death Alliance army during the course of the campaign. I played against him a bunch of times to get him started with the game.
He got started with the Get Started set for the deathrattle faction. I will say this: Neferata is so far the nastiest thing I have faced in Age of Sigmar.
We closed off the campaign with a 3 player free for all, which ended once again in favor of our local Death player, who wisely kept back while the Sylvaneth threw themselves against my rats en masse.
So, that's about it for this post. Next post I'll post up some reports of the matches I did for our ongoing Horus Heresy campaign this summer.

Glory to the Horned Rat!