The Orcs are Marauding - First Game vs. Michael

The scene Wednesday night, upon deployment, as Michael and I had our second game together - and his first with his fully painted army!

Michaels great 'Ironskin' Goblins - the two units of these proved to be a pain in the neck as they seemed almost impossible to kill off!

Last wednesday I had a great game of GOB15 with my mate Michael who had painted up his very first army in, well, forever really. It looks rather good on the tabletop and this also meant that we could finally adhere to my houserules of no gaming without painted miniatures!

Astute readers may note that we're playing on a 'new' battleboard than what I've shown on the blog up until now. It's the old 4' by 4' battleboards that I made way back when and the only reason as to why I pulled them out of storage is because each of the individual boards are only 2' by 2' - making it easy to set up a nice battlefield for GOB15 that actually fits my tablespace! Still - I prefer my mats and I'm going to be making a couple of 3' by 2' mats in the spring for my GOB15 games - the current one is just a tiny bit too big for my table space.

The skeleton horde fights against the Ironskins... for something like three turns in a row, which gave the greenskins ample opportunity to outflank me.

However it also meant that my unit of the match - the Skeleton Knights - had an equal oppurtunity to outflank on the right hand side; hitting the Ironskin unit in the side again and again in the vain hope of giving me a couple of points!

Mere moments before the skeleton Horde, alongside the Necromancer are demolished by a party of War Orcs that hit them in the flank time and again, which finally freed up the Ironskins to hit my Skeleton Warriors in their flank, killing the remnants off outright and thus winning Michael the game.

The game was a good one as ever. It came down to a couple of tactical errors on my part coupled with the wrong die-result in the wrong die-roll. But once again it made it clear just how much I enjoy the game in itself. It really is great! However it is not perfect and we discussed some things that we might need to change at some point in our "league".

First off it doesn't seem "fair" that the defender may include the Camp and Baggage as part of his point cost when deploying as he has not paid for them either. We're instead suggesting that the Camp and Baggage are taken out of the equation during deployment and that the defender has to place half his points worth of troops on the table. Otherwise, there's little point in being the attacker apart from the first turn.

Further, there's still some niggles about the Camps and Baggage as well. I'd personally prefer that the camp had a number of "hit points" equal to the number of sutlers and what not that would appear as part of a habitat roll and that they would then act as a unit on their own. This would then mean that upon contacting the camp, you'd "move to contact" with the camp instead of just mosing in and setting it ablaze.

And finally - how exactly does unit foot-print work in GOB? We couldn't really figure out whether a unit could move through an enemy unit based on the unit leader or the figures around the unit leader. Does the models in a unit signify the area of no-go-zone as for movement or do you base it on the unit leader fully?

Still - a great game and we're slowly getting ready to publish a completed set of rulesadditions for GOB15 - next up, we're looking into making ourselves a couple of scenarios, especially one suited for three players. Any ideas for this are more than welcome!