Sunday 3 August 2014

Playing with a brother!

Rob joined me for some a Sunday fun day of games so I thought I'd post up some of the highlights. First up was a 40k rematch between my Guard and his Orks followed by an exploration in to speed Zombie killing with Zombie 15'!

Having tweaked my list to give a few mere units with a range over 24" I thought it best to give it another run out. Plus I wanted to give the Tactical objective missions one last chance to disabuse me of the notion that they are in fact lacking in any tacticalness (ok that's not a real word but understand my meaning!).
We rolled up the diagonal deployment and secret Tactical objectives. Here's the obligatory story by pictures:
Oddly I had already set up the terrain in a diagonal arrangement before rolling for deployment so it helped give a clear central line.
Here's the unit that ate most of my army last game so  was keeping a close eye on them this time around...
...and that included their pimp-mobile!
Some times I forget how much I enjoy just coming up with the layout of the board and using the theme of the terrain to create a little visual story. This time the Orks were plundering an Imperial Promethium processing plant!
Don't be confused that very sunny Chimera was actually a stand in for the 'currently under construction' Wyvern and the Demloisher turret was actually a Nova cannon (which as it turns out could't hit for love nor money).
I hadn't worried about the defkoptas...

...beacuse I forgot the get a Scout move, leaving them with a first turn shot at the Wyvern! Luckily Rob's dice decided that they would betray him for the first turn as they failed to do any damage and the the Ogryns gunned down the biker Warboss with only three wounding hits! Some terrible rolling!
Come second turn though I got a battle cannon shot that hit and penetrated all four trukks in one go only for Rob to roll three cover saves and my damage roll to come up a 2! Still Rob would rather have kept the Warboss alive I think.
Whilst I was currently winning by 5 vps to 1 at this point I really feared I'd be put to the power klaw and lose by sudden death before turn five. What I hadn't banked on was remembering that my Priests Warhymns and hatred rules allowed the Vets on the left to re-roll to hit and to wound and that the tankbustas would get a 6" blast that would kill over 12 Orks spread between three units.
This time I'd managed to ensure that the Ogryns avoided the Mega-nobs and aused them to secure a double Tactical objective after smearing some Grots and a Weirdboy across the ground. 
You'd think that a raving mad Ork hating Priest would lead from the front but  that Trukk is loaded with a unit of Lootas and the range of Scythe just isn't that good.

It;s the age old question: How many Mega-Nobs does it take to kill a Lord Commissar and 10 Veteran Grenadiers? Well Rob used four and he had plenty of wounding hits left over! Oh the guys at the top of the ruins are stand in for ratlings who, as it turns out, are the perfect foil for Ork artillery as T7 isn't a great problem when you use sniper rifles.
By the end of turn three Rob had had such a tough time of trying to get any useable Objective cards that I was 8-1 up and he had almost no hope of clawing it back as a few bad rolls for penetrating the Wyvern from behind with his Defkoptas and a couple of crappy leadership test left him unable to destroy all my units to even try for a Sudden death victory, sod we called it at the start of turn four.
My main observations from the game where that: 
- One Psyker is not reliable enough now to make it worth it and the game ran smoother when we didm;t have to go through the motions of Rob trying to generate powers then trying to shoot me and remove a couple of models, all of which could be achieved through giving the model a special shooting attack used like any other weapon. 
- Not using and Ordinance turret for my Russ with Heavy Bolters was a lot more fun even though the turret was terrible at hitting, it still would have missed if it had been a battle cannon only I would have wiffed all my extra shots too.
- Two Wyverns would just be rude as one did exactly what I wanted, laid down a nice barrage to weaken units. I just don't think I could be so mean as to say 'oh you moved unit out of it's tank, let's just sweep those away with a dust pan and brush!'
- With the new Mob rule the Orks really suffer at smaller unit sizes as it's just too easy to make them take tests if they don't have a decent cover save.
- Tactical Objective cards are so wonky! I'm calling time on those missions as I feel I've given it a fair crack of the whip but I've seen so many games swing on the pull of a card/random table roll and have nothing to do with player skill what so ever. Next game I'll be moving back to using the standard Eternal war missions and replace the secondary missions with three random Tactical objectives from the 41-66 card range for each player at the start of the game and see if that helps make a nice balance between tactical play and asymmetrical challenge.

So once we had packed away we cracked open Zombie 15' and went through the first three missions to teach ourselves the rules. The missions are really well designed to ease you into the game and you only need to play the missions once to get the hang of the mechanics it introduces before moving on to some more advanced ones later. Some people may prefer to jump straight in to get the 'full crunch' but I don't think you can really do that and have a fun game as you really can;''t keep the tension in the game if you are stopping to check rules or discuss a process. If you tried you would lose the games real selling point which is that you are up against the clock and you can't stop to think or the Zombies will just keep piling up on you!

Game one and two use the same map but are very clever because it is an escalation just like in the movies. First game you wake up in your homes and race to the nearest 'safe place' (the Police station obviously) and there are only a few Zombies for you to kill. But would you Adam & Eve it the old Cop Shop is overrun too, so you have to fight your way out of town after clearing the neighbourhood (to stop them following you of curse!).
We played mission three twice as it had the full rules pretty much so we wanted to see if we could better our first time of  9 ins and came in just over 7! This is a fairly easy mission as it's hard to split up, but if you get left behind it'd pretty easy to get overwhelmed when the Zombie growl just happens to come on your turn and a trio of walkers pop up out of the bushes to chew on your tasty calf muscles! 
One word of caution for the game would be that whilst it says it's for 2-4 players you will need to take two characters each if there are only two of you and whilst in most games this is only a problem from a role-playing perspective, here it can become a little tricky to remember which of your characters you are using at which time she you are racing against the clock and each character is in a different predicament! I love it and think it's going to make a great addition to the games library (it can also double as a drinking game as you are trying to avoid having the Zombies growl on your turn!).

5 comments:

  1. Very cool guys

    What are those minis you're using as Ogryn?

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  2. Karman models from, the now out of production, AT43 from Rackham. I'm also using them as Tau Battlesuits for another army as we managed to find a vender at Essen who was selling them for 5Euros a pack and buy four get one free. You can pick them up at:
    http://www.miniaturemarket.com/rkh-kael02.html
    Unfortunately the ones I used are two to a box leaving two left overs but you can easily use a different unit type. Will's used them for his too.

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  3. What a deal!

    They would make awesome tau battlesuits too, good find.

    The actual game passed me by, was AT-43 any good?

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  4. Not great, gave to a try but never really grabbed the attention enough to make me want to play it more than 40k. I did also use some of the U.N.A walkers as my Sentinels as I really liked the armoured ED209 style and the different sizes helps to differentiate between Armoured and Scout Sentinels.

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    Replies
    1. Always wondered where they had come from. They look right at home in your guard army.

      Off topic, the Jones' have 'encouraged' me to spend money on AvX dice. Addictive is not the word for it......

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