Regular life has not been playing well with my hobby time, making it difficult to paint, but I did get some models built and primed. Also got a couple more Vanguard games in, so that's always a plus!
First game was Light the Beacon, we rolled up and Norther Alliance decided to attack. Odd setup where the beacon is on a hill near my edge and most of my models need to be 12" away. After setting up we realized the defender only gets 175 points for this mission, so I removed the 2 elves next to the river on my left side before we began. Northern Alliance needs to light the beacon fire by ending a turn having a model in
B2B w/ the beacon while no elves are in
B2B defending the beacon
End of the first turn, not much happened, just ran more people in to guard the beacon and prepare to counterattack while the northerns pushed up the board. I end the turn w/ 2 spearmen and the Shambler protecting the beacon, a citizen levy behind, my prince taking cover behind a pillar near the right building and my mage & archer on the 2nd story walkway overlooking the main attack run
Turn 2 went very, very badly. He ran the Bear Cavalry right into center of board and said "Come get some!". My Prince activated and got a glorious charge attack , the charge-of-charges! Boosted the attack, exploding "8"s go off, 6 hits at Crushing 2 (-2 to the armor save) and he rolls absolute fire for his saves, only takes a single wound of his 4. Worst yet, his counterattack does 4 wounds to my prince knocking him to the ground and even with a reroll I fail the don't-die-check, and my prince dies on his own activation! My heavy-hitter is down and the Bear Cavalry is Bear-ly scratched. Enemy mage moves up the board and I charge in w/ the Swordmaster (Tallspear w/ extra Greatweapon), who wounds but doesn't kill the mage. His half-elven berserker then charges my Swordmaster and goes full frenzy, carving him into bit-sized chunks of ithilmar armor and blonde hair. Archer does a poor job guessing range and misses, mage fails to do much with a lightning bolt. Bad times, boys.
Mage blasts a few nobodys for light damage, but the enemy champion and a friend charge up the hill and take out the Tallspear and Levy. Berserker charges the Guardian Shambler who mostly shrugs it and smashes the berserker in retaliation, then stomps on the corpse to make sure it stays down.
Turn 4 turns into a mosh pit on the hill with the ranged and casters cheering on from the rafters. Elven mage got to live the dream an tossed an empowered lightning bolt into an unengaged dwarf that splashes to all his friends, so I took a couple extra pics of that:
Didn't do a whole lotta damage in the end, only killed one dwarf and did some wounds to the chieftain, but I got to roll a whole bunch of dice at least so that felt great! Just need to hold out one more turn and...
Derp. Chieftain rolls up into combat aided by the 2 surviving dwarves and they manage to overwhelm the Shambler and light the beacon at the last minute, winning the match for Northern Alliance. Many "Gondor calls for aid!" jokes were made and it was an amazingly close game considering how quickly my Prince died
Game 2 as more of a demo game for another player and once we got his list set up and deployed, we only had time for a half-game before the store closed. Game 2 was "Secure the Portal" against Varanguard (Mortals of Chaos, complete w/ marks of the gods. You earn points by ending a round w/ models in
B2B of the portal, but there's a chance to get sucked through it into the Abyss. It's only on
D8 roll of 7 or 8, but that wound up being more like a 50-50 chance in this game...
Setup for first turn
End of first turn, mostly just moshing in the middle. It's at this moment I realized I've made a huge mistake and that only Command and Spellcaster models earn extra
VP for being
B2B with the portal, Support models do NOT earn you extra points. At this point I looked at my opponent and said "well, that means he's going to get sucked through the portal and I'm going to lose a 35 point model for nothing". My opponent has known me for many years, and knows my luck, and replied "Oh Yea, he's a gonner, you've doomed him to an existence of eternal agony". Remember, you ONLY lose a model on a roll of 7 or an 8, so the odds are actually pretty good that he won't get sucked through the portal
Which means I rolled an 8 and he got sucked through the portal. I might have been upset if I hadn't seen it coming the moment I realized Support models don't earn extra points.
End of turn 2, where we had to call it. Rather bloody affair, where my prince cut down a Bloodsworn (Chaos Warrior) only to be charged by a new one, who would be charged by a Tallspear that killed the Bloodsworn, who would be charged by a Bloodsworn killing that Tallspear, who would be charged by a Levy (killing that Bloodsworn) etc etc etc. I think 5 models were taken out in the back and forth and a few more wounded. I ended the turn (and the game) runnin my Mage into the portal, knowing full damned well that he's get sucked through. Sure enough, rolled a 7 and down the mage went. I began singing "I want it now!" in my head as I pictured him diving right in after his beloved arcane construct like Varuca Salt's father in Willie Wonka.
I
technically won that game 6-4 because of that, but mostly it was just to show how the game plays soe we can get a third player and maybe start an actual campaign.
On the modelling front, I got another 10 Spearmen converted up. Need 5 more for the full unit of 20 (the first 5 are already painted). Need to figure out what to do for the unit champion, the sword arms I have that look right wonn't actully work on a model that needs to rank up, and the ones I have that will rank up don't match the style of the rest of them. The Anointed of Asuryan has been built for a while, just got him primed today since the weather was nice, and built 4 more Ellyrian Reavers to fill out a unit of 5. I need to do a full unit of 10, but I'm not looking forward to that one. Hoping to get some paint on models this week