WAAAGH! - Orks in the System

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Random – Hello with the recent Ork Codex release the green menance seems to be a pretty popular subject. I don't actually have any Ork commissions to share with, nor do I plan on starting my own Ork force.

Instead I'm shamelessly plugging some ebay auctions I have going on at the moment. A friend of mine has had a heck of an odd time last year he and his wife lost their first child while in the womb. A terrible thing to happen to anyone for certain. However shortly after they gave it a second try and have a healthy happy little boy. 

Of course as you know, a new child means less time for yourself and unexpected expenses. My friend has decided to slim down his various Warhammer armies and has asked me to help him out. 

If you check out this link you'll find all the current auctions I have up all the Ork models are being sold for my friend. You'll find some great deals on Deffkoptas, Warbikes, Storm Boyz, Dreadnoughts, Killa Kans and more.

Game On ... Relic Knights & 7th Edition 40K

Game Night – This week the stars aligned and four guys from my gaming group were all free on Sunday to play some games. With everyone busy with their families and various summer obligations its been hard to get together to play some mulitplayer games.

We started off the evening with a quick teaching game of Relic Knights. Everyone caught on to the core concepts really quickly and seemed to enjoy the game. for this game we used the starter boxes of Black Diamond, Noh Empire, Doctrine and for the Speed Circuit: (2) Belles, Marie Claude and Ryn.

The game scales really well to multiple players since the objectives are unique to each player. I also think that the card mechanic is done better than it is in Malifaux, particularly in mulitplayer. Anytime you're attacked or burn through cards you draw up to five during the clean-up step. This means you don't get those situations where a player runs out of cards in hand and gets ganged up on by everyone else because they don't have a had to defend with. 

We opted to just play to 5 VP to speed up the game and just get everyone to understand the core mechanics. Because of how fast this game plays and how well it scales, I think it may see plenty of rotation on Thursday nights.

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We then set-up to play a 2vs2 game of Warhammer 40K seventh edition. For this game each player brought 1500 points and was randomly assigned a partner. We set up a fairly sparse desert board with a few LOS blocking pieces in the center of the table and some smaller areas of cover scattered around the perimeter. My space marines were partnered up with a Chaos Space Marine force and we fought against two tank heavy guard forces.

The game was fun and honestly the changes to the rules didn't seem to impact the speed of play. Of course no one had a psyker so we ignored that phase completely which may have been the reason we didn't see that drug out into the mess I've read about online. The changes to the vehicle tables and D weapon tables were really nice, one of out players has a landraider that hasn't made it past the first turn in the last 15 or so games we've played actually got to use it and make an impact on the game. It did die around turn 3 or 4 but that was due to losing hull points and not a random Lascannon shot.

Having everything be able to score objectives was nice because most everything on the field was moving to try and capture them. Unlike the previous edition where your goal was to kill troops as fast as possible so your opponent couldn't score. No one opted to build an Unbound list so we all had the benefit of Objective Secured on our troops which also made for a more tactical game.

My first impression from my first game of seventh edition is pretty positive, they did a nice job tweaking the rules slightly to eliminate some of the more annoying aspects of sixth. The changes however are minor enough in practice to draw out the game or over complicate it. I may however need to build a different list to see if the psyker phase is worth caring about or not.

On the Painting Table ... The Tyrant's Legion Returns

Warhammer 40,000 – My client the previously had me paint up a Tyrant's Legion Army in his own custom color scheme has recently come across a great deal on a Catchatan Jungle Fighter army. This included not only a boatload of troops but several tanks, sentinels and a Baneblade. The amount he paid for them is pretty ridiculously low (let's just say only double digits).

So he has asked me to paint these up to match his existing force so he can mix and match the models creating a very ramshackle look and feel to his army when he needs to. It also will give his two unique forces that can be paired together for Apocalypse games.

The first batch he's given me is a unit of Ogrun and command elements. These are pretty fun models to paint. I'm happy with how I've worked his existing color scheme into the jungle fighter uniform. I think if he mixes these models in with the great coat models he'll have a force that looks uniform enough to be a cohesive force but varied enough to play up the chaotic bent that the Tyrants Legion has.

Once these are finished I have several tanks that need to get a fresh coat of paint.

On the painting table ... Stompy Robots

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Warhammer 40,000 – Thump, Thump, Thump stomping onto my painting table is a "standard" Dark Angel Dreadnought. This piece should be about the end of this commission as I believe my client has just about every option he may need built and painted for this force.

It looks like he built this using a few parts from various kits. Painting Dreadnoughts is always interesting because so much of the model is gunmetal. I like painting these parts as it's really easy and looks great when it's done. I've just started blocking in the colors on this and will follow the same process as I've done in the past with these Dark Angels models.

In other stompy robot news I did have a chance to pick up and assemble one of the Knight Titans. This is a very impressive kit, however I won't go on and one about it as every other blog on the internet has already beat this one to death. It's a shame there weren't more options in the kit but for what you get it is a pretty substantial model. (Although my Reaper Cthulu is the same size and signifcantly bulkier than this and it only cost me $15 ... so your mileage may vary)

I'm working on a base to match my space marines as this particular unit will join up with them more often than not when I need access to a Rapid Fire Battle Cannon and Strength-D Close Combat option. It fills a unique hole in my forces and I'm looking forward to trying it out first hand on the tabletop soon.

I'm not sure if I'm going to opt for one of the Studio Paint Schemes on this to match up with the decals included with the kit or if I'm going to develop my own Freeblade Knight with his own backstory. With all the other stuff I need to wrap up it might be a while before I can make a decision on the paint.

Building Droppods

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Warhammer 40,000 – So for Christmas I received six drop pods up until now they sat safely tucked away in their shrink-wrap. During a brief lull in my commission work (while waiting for the primer to dry) I sat down and tried to build one of these. 

Back when drop pods were first introduced as a transport option for marines I had built a bunch of paper models out of cardstock and foamcore. These have served me well up until this point as they serve their purpose and are about the same size as the plastic model. Of course the doors don't open and they don't look quite as nice but during games I was more concerned with function over form. 

Now that I'm slowly completing this army I decided I should have the real model. 

Assembly for these was pretty simple and the first one I built went together well. The doors do seem to be an issue so I'm going to look into how to make them stay shut and only open when I want them to.

I still need to add the Raven iconography to the exterior of the pod but over-all I really like how they look and can't wait to get the rest built up to use in my games.

It will be nice to have the official models on the tabletop finally. Although I will miss my fourth edition paper stand-ins.

My First Apocalypse Game

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Warhammer 40,000 – Over the weekend I was able to play in my first official apocalypse size game. Big games are nothing new to me as my group have always played massive multiplayer games of 40K with each player playing their own army by itself. These affairs would take forever to wrap up and inevitably players lose interest in the game when it's not their turn. Which meant we typically only played until we were tired and called it so it was rare to finish a game.

With the current set of apocalypse rules we decided to give a big game a shot. One of my buddies was itching to use his Baneblade in a real apocalypse game so we set it up for a Sunday. Not knowing exactly who would be able to make it (face it with kids plans are always tentative) we came up with a lose point value and teams. This would serve as a kick-off for our Badab Campaign. Each player would bring a 40k legal 2000 point list with several 500 point add on lists that did not have to follow the Force Organization Chart. We also set a hard start of 1:00 pm and a hard stop of 8:00 pm. However many turns we could play in that time period would be the game.

Upon arriving at my friends house I was surprised to see not only a Baneblade but also a Warhound Titan. My teammate did bring his Plastic Thunderhawk Conversion so we did have a superheavy to fight against the hoard but things looked grim. 

First turn, we managed to seize the initiative so we could go first. I dropped my Dreadnought at the feet of the titan and disembarked my grav cannon centurions as close as I could to the massive beast. Once it was all said and done we stripped it of 5 of its 9 hullpoints. We also killed a ton of troops but were unable to cause any to break and run. Unfortunately when the titan went it unleashed it's D-weapons and took out most of the things that could hurt it. 

Turn two, with things looking grim we brought in the second line of tank killing weapons to take out the titan unfortunately there was little we could do to it and when it unleashed its massive death rays on our field it took out the rest of the things that could hurt it.

Turn three we changed focus to taking out the troops and bringing moving our troops toward the objectives in an attempt to claim some type of victory out of the bloodbath. The Titan found a less target rich environment so not as many things died this turn and the Baneblade was still stuck behind a wall of slow moving friendly troops.

Turn four the Thunderhawk arrived and eliminated the titan. (Moral Victory) We had reached our hard stop and it looked like we'd win on objectives. However to be fair we let our opponent finish their turn and lost miserably.

The game was fun but it did take a very long time to play, with the apocalypse rules however it did move faster than the old big games of 40k we used to play.