First game of Age of Sigmar

Last night Duncan and I finally got together for a game night, and with all the buzz surrounding it we decided to give Age of Sigmar a go. Both of us were rather skeptical from the get go, but the freedom provided with the army building (i.e. just pick the models you want to use) and the promise of a quick and easy game lured us in to giving it a go.

So having packed a lot of miniatures that have rarely seen the table, I set off to meet up with Duncan at his place and we went through the motions of setting up a game, as per the rules and played with absolutely no modification... except for some units were we couldn't make them fit with the rules given.

For instance I had a Flesh Golem which I counted as a Crypt Horror Haunter - but normally in order to field such a unit I would need to have 3 of the things. Seeing as the rest of the game system relies more on the social agreement of having fun rather than overly competetative list min-maxing, we both agreed that it wouldn't really be a problem.

This is what Duncan fielded as his army. A long neglected collection of High Elfs from days of yore when that number of miniatures was all that was required for you to play a game of Warhammer Fantasy Battle. I had never seen them in the flesh and I'm pretty sure Duncan had great fun getting them back on the table. Notice all those damned Princes running around with their Charmed Shield - they're pretty damn hard to get off the table when you yourself don't rely on such magical trickery to win you the battle!

And this is then my hodgepodge collection of miniatures put on for this game. A good amount of Undead (soon to increase, once I get around painting all of my Mantic miniatures), with a couple of "Mercenary" units from by very small collection of Chaos Warriors and Orcs - an alliance of Evil, if you will, led by Niels - the Necromancer. To me, then we might as well have ended the game at that point - I was happy enough to have put all of these miniatures up for a battle - some of them freshly painted and others had been painted years and years ago and only now saw their first battle - such as this Snow Troll that I used as a Gorger in this game:

And not to forget these chaos warriors that I had painted up when I had the idea of starting an 8th Edition Warhammer Fantasy army and had to find the army with the lowest model count. Sadly, that never came to fruition (I got burned out almost instantly because of the number of models required - even for a low-model-count army such as this). So here they are then, on the table for the first time as well:

The initial turn saw us manouvering our flanks and slowly moving our centre towards each other. And by turn two we got stuck in. I won the roll-off for going first in turn two and was already within charge range of most of his units, and thus the undead horde shambled to war.

However, I hadn't enough models in any of the Skeleton Warrior unit to get their bonuses, but even then they stood their ground for a turn or two. I could easily see how you could completely overwhelm an opponent with these units - so it really does require you to think about what kind of experience you want out of the game. If you just want to win at all cost, you could easily do so. But if you want to have some fun, pushing around lead/plastic miniatures on the board and invent a narrative as you go along, then it's just as easy to go for this with minimal fuss.

With my center slowly falling apart I was doing what I could to get my right flank up to engage his left flank that was slowly coming apart. Those White Lions are pretty great but they couldn't really keep the flank secure. Unfortunately, my Chaos Mercenaries weren't overly interested in moving forward at this critical juncture - which meant that his center broke through!

My Cairn Wraith, along with some dismounted Hexwraiths out there on the far right, was doing what they could to get through and start mincing up his right flank. But alas, the Prince joined in on the battle and made short work of the Cairn Wraith - and then, with Duncan having initiative the next turn, he then proceeded to engage the Hexwraiths and stalled my flanking.

Meanwhile I tried, as best as I could, to stall his right flank going forward, with my Black Orc Big Boss (the ogre miniature here) taking out a Great Eagle, then surviving a round of fighting the Dragon... which then proceeded to make mincemeat out of him. Sad to see him go, but then again - it was to be expected - as great as a Orc Boss is, he isn't really kitted out to take care of a Dragon on his own!

As for the actual game, then it was really a great experience - so much so that it automatically triggered an idea in my head that I'm currently working on. It flowed really great and was easy to get into and play - but not so easy that it was devoid of any tactical decisions. In fact, there was a lot of tactical considerations in the game - provided, I think, that you play with "balanced" armies. Duncan had a Dragon which was, basically, impervious to most of what I had brought to the table. He wasn't himself overly keen on taking it but I did encourage him as he had just painted the thing.

Alas, it was a hard nut to crack - I simply didn't have any Mortal Wound causing units around that I needed to take care of it. The bloody thing had a Save of 4+ with a Charmed Shield, meaning that it would re-roll any failed Saves. Oh and it had something like 14 wounds as well!

But all in all - I had great fun! The game flowed really well and the freedom of choice - i.e. just put some miniatures on the table - was really welcomed. I'm pretty sure that was the main selling point for me, coupled with the fact that it was free to play as well. I for one welcome this new edition, if you can call it that, to Warhammer Fantasy and I'm hopeful for the future of the hobby with this new kid on the block. There's so much potential in this game for narrative scenarios and, provided that you play with likeminded people, then there's a ton of fun to be had by simply putting your miniatures on the table and get a game going!

As for what I'm tinkering on... well, I'll let you know in a week or so.

Lord Felix D'Arthoin

Just a very quick post of my first foray into using the Metal Vallejo Model Air Color line of paints. I have to say - I have no idea how I've managed without this line of paints!

He joins the unnamed band of City-State troops that I'm painting on and off inbetween projects. As fate would have it, I'm currently working on some cavalry for my 15mm Republican Guard as well - hoping to get them half-painted tonight on my first day of a looong weekend!

The start of my Infinity Army

So - these have been quite some time in the running, but as I'm getting ready for a quick "learning-the-rules" demo game tonight, I figured I'd share with the lot of you how far I've gotten with my Morat Agression Force army.

The grand total of painted miniatures for my army.

Seeing as you only need a handful of miniatures in order to play Inifinity (more than those pictured, mind you) I decided that I did not want to go through my usual regimented motions of speedpainting the whole lot in one sitting - but rather take my time with each individual model, paint it up as nice as possible (whilst cutting my usual corners), base it up and get it all done before progressing to the next one.

These are some great miniatures, I'm nowhere near qualified enough to do them justice.

So - that's the main reason as to why there's only three models painted so far. I started out with all of the more "special" units that I had from the starter box and I'm slowly working my way through the rest of the army... which, because the miniatures are way too expensive for my tastes, only consists of a couple of grunts and some more grunts with Heavy Weapons. Once they're all done, I'll look into getting additional reinforcements and do this army as stated - buy one model for it, paint one model for it.

I really, really love this model - and as such he was the first to be painted up.

Oh and I hope that you'd notice that I've managed to figure out the lighting and camera setup for taking pictures of my miniatures now - turns out my camera had an auto-whitebalance thingy which helped immensely; barely any post-processing involved in these pictures. Huzzah!

Getting into a painting-zen

Here's me then, trying to get the hang of actually updating the internet about the ongoing hobby-stuff that I'm currently working on. How other manage it with a full-time job and a big family I'll never be able to understand; it seems to me to be a bit of a hassle sometimes... but I guess it's just about experience, persistence and other tences. Ah well, back to the grinder!

It is still not my second nature to take pictures of everything I do in my hobby-life, but today I happened upon something that will - at the very least - make those pictures that I do take a whole lot more interesting to look at. Ladies and gentlemen may I present to you...

The Transmorgraphical Landscape-o-Matic! (Patent Pending)

Okay, so it doesn't look like all that much, but I'm pretty happy about the end result. It came about when I was doing the usual commute back from work and was contemplating how I could make this here blogging/updating process easier for myself (because even though I tend to moan about it, I do enjoy sharing my stuff on the web).

One of the things that I thought of was that I often found my pictures to look a bit rubbish what with all the paint-bottles in the background and all. That and I also wanted something a bit more gradient background in general to showcase my miniatures on.

So I had a scrap of foam-card lying about that I had already been painting a sky backdrop on a couple of months ago and then I had an ephinany; paint one half as a small bit of land and keep some of the sky on the other half - then do a single half-cut of the foam-board and voila, instant backdrop that is not a hassle to store or set up!

A Swordmaster for an Arabian-themed faction.

With this I can then easily set it up on my painting area of my table (where my best lamp of the house is also located), snap some photos that looks slightly better than before and then easily pack it away when I need to do some actual painting.

Speaking of which, I'm currently on a bit of a fantasy-bender when it comes to painting miniatures. I have a whole slew of various miniatures that I'm working on for a game that I'm also working on. So far it is just called Fantasy Nebula as it takes the base-rules for another skirmish-set I was writing and places it in a fantasy universe instead.

A Templar and Sergeant for a more European-themed faction.

I'm hoping to hit some sort of Mordheim and Necromunda hybrid game, with all the usual campaign shenaningans of those games - but hopwfully also with some more checks and balances to keep it from spiralling out of control as the two mentioned games had a tendency to do. I will, of course, keep you posted on developments on the game (and I'm guessing a play-test version will be in the works soon enough).

And to help my playtesting I've started on not only one but five different warbands that I'll most likely showcase as soon as I've managed to write more about the game than just some few scattered notes here and there - you know, when there's actually something that a person could read and actually decipher!

Anyway - thanks for reading and I'll update you, at the latest, next week!