Fantasy 8th ed is alright...

That's a bit of an understatement.

I went into the store today and got a game of the new edition in against one of my Dark Heresy colleagues and his Orcs and Goblins. We played a 1,500 point game with the mission to capture the watch tower in the centre of the board.

He had 3 big blocks of Orcs, one of which was Black Orcs, and a horde of Goblins, with a Rock Thrower (a nice custom build) and a Spear Chucka, with a couple of Mages and a Warboss on a boar. I took my WoC, taking 2 units of 15 Warriors with hand weapon and shield (one with mark of Nurgle, the other with Khorne), another unit of 10 with 2 hand weapons and mark of Nurgle, 3 trolls, my Warhounds and Hell Cannon, with a Sorceror (Nurgle) and Exalted Hero (Khorne with Axe of Khorne).

I never played enough of the 7th ed to really get my head around it, but I do know that I much prefer this version after only one game. You get the pre-measuring goodness of LotR, with the randomness of unknown charge results and magic, and massive combats. Like Jervis has been harping on about for a while now - the game has become cinematic.

Stef, my opponent, has the same game philosophy as me - its about the fluff and the fun of the game. We had a couple of the other lads watching the game, and the overall vibe and atmosphere was really good. As a learning game, we had to stop a couple of times to check things, but this didn't really disrupt the flow of the game, more let us take a break to relive a certain action etc while we found the answer.

Stef started and had some bad animosity/squabble roll, but got straight onto the board with his magic and artillery. The magic now is really cool. He killed my Sorceror with his first spell roll. Bam, just like that, and then did nothing else magic wise until the end of the game. His rock lobber squashed a couple of my Warriors and I started thinking this was going to be hard.

I pushed straight forward for the objective - the best place to be in the game for WoC is combat - and managed to fail a charge with my Hounds, but was lucky enough to leave them out of range for a counter charge. I entered a copse of trees with my Trolls and my Khorne Warriors which caused them to test for stupidity while in the trees. In the shooting phase my Hell Cannon only managed to squash one Orc.

Stef claimed the tower in the second turn with his Black Orcs in the second turn, and caused my 10 man Nurgle unit to flee after failing their leadership test when they lost more guys to his rock lobber.

I managed to rally the fleeing Warriors, and get a successful charge with my Hounds at his Goblin Horde, and again with my Trolls against one of his blocks of Orcs, and my Khorne Warriors at the Tower. My Hounds killed 2 Gobbos, but were wiped out (10 wounds) in return - the Gobbos dished out 30+ attacks being a Horde. My Trolls were also wiped out after being caught while fleeing following and unsuccessful combat. My Warriors fared much better though. My Hero was in this unit and easily trounced his Champion in a challenge, causing 4 overkills. When you assault a building you can only fight with 10 guys in total, and only kills count for combat res. My 9 Warriors (10 - the attacks from the Hero) knocked off 12 Orcs, reducing the unit to 9 capable of fighting back. They killed only 2 Warriors and promptly fled. I held the Watch Tower.

The remaining turns consisted of Stef charging the Tower with his remaining units (one unit at a time). I always struck first in each combat (due to higher initiative), aside from the last combat when he successfully cast a spell on the unit to give it the 'strikes first' rule. In each combat I managed to cause enough damage to cause the unit to flee.

WoC are hard as nails, and now that you always fight with the front rank intact (assuming you haven't lost sufficient models to lose that rank too), I was able to dish out a horrendous number of quality attacks (although the cost of the basic warrior means I am always likely to be outnumbered).

The only other combat of note saw his Gobbos charge my Nurgle Warriors in the flank. I lost the resultant combat due to the size of the horde, the charge bonus, a hill bonus, ranks and banners etc, but held, giving me a free reform ensuring that in the next turn I would fight with the whole rank plus the second rank. The game had to end before I got to play out that turn as the store was closing, but I have no doubt I would have caused significant damage.

I won the game as I held the Tower. If we had continued, Stef had enough units to charge it a couple of more times. Although I was tearing through each unit, he would always rally the next turn, and he was slowly whittling away at my unit. I think though that I would have easily destroyed his Gobbos, and been able to reinforce the tower with a fresh unit.

It was a really cool learning game, and I am looking forward to playing more soon.

I also got a game of 40K in against Jay on Saturday. He took a Smurf Marine list relying on a load of heavy support options (which now I think about it he had too many for a force org chart), with minimal troops. We played annihilation and I had a similar Guard list to my previous outings.

The game went to 6 turns and I got him down to a Land Raider, Dreadnought and his Chapter Master, but he actually won on a kill point count back - lame. It was still a great game, and we went through each of his unit choices afterwards to see what performed well and what didn't (ie a Scout Squad which had no purpose and his Chapter Master which was a one trick pony - he bought it solely for the Orbital Bombardment which scattered right off target).

I have finished retouching my Marines t give them red trim on their shoulder pads. The army has a bit more 'pop' with the addition of that little bit of colour.


You can see that I still have quite a few primered models (shamefully collecting dust), as well as some models awaiting a repaint to bring them up to date with my current approach (ie layered from foundations to highlight rather than ink washing). These will get the red trim also. I am waiting on some Microscale Decal solution to aid with decal application and the whole force will get a treatment to bring coherency. Still tossing around doing something to highlight the Veterans - ie a helmet stripe etc.

I have gotten a couple more plebe Marines done and have one or two more to do before I switch to something else - probably some WoC seeing as how most of the guys I play against are making the switch back to Fantasy.

We are having an ad hoc RPG session on Wednesday to test the new Death Watch system. I have downloaded the free supplements and will have a read through prior to the game. Looking forward to playing one of the Emperors finest.

And that's the state of the hobby for the last week or so. Adz gave me some MDF to use as bases for some 40K barricades I want to make for the board so I might have a crack at that during the week. We are having some work done around the house which might eat into my hobby time for the next couple of weeks so I might slow down on the blog front for a bit, but will still lurk on everyonelses.

Hope you're all kicking ass and taking names with the new Fantasy.

Cheers all,

Pom