The Madness, part the second. Also, good works.

Hi all,

To start off, I want to announce something of a THMG club project for the upcoming Remembrance Day.

The plan is, each of us puts together a single figure or small vignette, between now and Nov. 11th, and then we sell them after Remembrance Day, with proceeds going to the Wounded Warrior fund.  I'm planning on doing a French Napoleonic command stand with 1/72 figures, suitable for Black Powder or something similar.  Blog posts for the next week or so will probably include WiP stuff along with whatever else is going on.  We'll be selling off the various miniatures individually, via a dedicated account.  Stay tuned for details.  There are some really excellent painters in the club, so we're hoping to raise a decent sum.

On a less serious note, I'm still sorting through the various pictures from last weekend.  When we last left off, I'd retired on Friday a happy, if somewhat inebriated man.  Saturday morning wasn't as rough as I probably deserved, but I was definitely searching around for first gear longer than normal.  The fierce competition for bacon, along with prodigious amounts of coffee, managed to rouse me however, and we set out to play a bit of Blood Bowl.



The plan was to play a very limited sort of league over the weekend, starting at a team rating of 1100, which would account for both players and any skill upgrades.  Although I had planned on trying out a couple of new teams, in the end, I opted to stick with humans (I can use all the practice I can get).  I did, however, take the opportunity of the higher team value and "reboot" to include an Ogre on the team, something that turned out to be quite fun.

My first game was against Jack1080, who is notorious in the club for his capacity to steamroller opponents in the game.  He was running a Lizardmen team, the first time I've had a chance to play against them.



While Jack1080 is terrifically good company, and and excellent sportsman, he is also an experienced, savage ,and ruthless opponent on the pitch.  I went into the game expecting to have him clean my clock.

Need

As it happened, Nuffle smiled upon me (perhaps because I had a fully painted 11 for the first time?), and my usual approach of "do crazy crap a more experienced player would never try, trusting to a ridiculous number of re-rolls to see me though" worked surprising well.



In the end, I manged to beat him 2 or 3 to 1.  It was mostly dumb luck, as Jack1080's hands down the better player, but I did my best to put into practice what I've learned playing the game to date.  The ogre was a blast to play, giving me some serious beef on the line for the first time.  While he mainly served to help counter the Kroxigor Jack1080 ran, there were a couple of satisfying moments where he hammered a Saurus into the ground like a 10-penny nail.  Big guy's due a paint job, first chance I get.



Game 2 was against marke's circus goblins (more pics here and here).  Sadly, Nuffle was not as pleased this game as last.  The first half was pretty entertaining, as marke revealed a series of goblin tricks, and I pushed my luck a wee bit too far.  Twice.  Resulting in turn-overs and a goblin goal each time.



For all that the goblins lack a passing game and are stunty, they're surprising effective.  They can gang up on bigger opponents (like I do with humans), and the double trolls plus special rules that they bring to the table gives them not-insignificant situational power.





If the first half was amusing, the second half took the wind right out of my sails.  marke set up for the second half with both trolls, a chainsaw, and a fanatic (the whirlagig thing).  The sheer concentration of force completely overwhelmed my hapless humans, who ended up with half the team in the KO box.





When my ogre went down to the fanatic, there wasn't much left with which I could counter, and I watched in mounting horror as my plucky players were swarmed by a horde of smelly green ankle-biters.






Final score was something like 3:0 for the goblins.  Oh, the shame ;)

While a few of us napped, and Jack1080 and marke played their semi-final game for the regular league (Jack1080 won, his Skaven will face off against DaveB's orks), I got in a game of C&C Napoleonics.  I've been eager to try these for a while, they seem well represented on the blog-o-sphere.  I didn't get any pictures, sadly, but my main impression was surprise at how quickly the game resolved.  I played against ernieR, in I think the Rollica scenario.  Attacked on the left, got my cavalry in behind his right, but he pushed hard in the centre and broke me.  Fun, light, and I can see the appeal for a conversion to miniatures.

In the evening, we broke out Zombicide again, and once again, I took up the role of the Law.  After one game that resolved rather quickly (and successfully), ernieR had the notion of playing one of the larger scenarios that require the use of a car, only without the car.  It seemed like a good idea at the time, but once we hit yellow (which we did a little more quickly than anticipated, thanks marke ;) ), things got a little out of hand.

Ash went down fighting, surrounded by a horde . .



 . . . and there was nothing that Machete and I could do to stem the tide.



Machete and I then went down, fighting back to back; the outlaw and the cop who arrested him, dying together.



And in the end, even our most resourceful players couldn't hold them off.





I was pretty bushed by that point, and hit the sack.  In the morning, between clean-up and packing, we squeezed in a few rounds of Lunch Money, Magic, and Zombie Flux.  The former will, I suspect, take on a "schedule-spackling" role at the club.  Magic is a game I've somehow managed to not play over the years, but I enjoyed it enough to join into the limited league some of the guys are playing.  Zombie Flux I brought from home; I've played it before with the Beloved, but it's a much better game with 7 players looking to cause problems ;)

Many, many thanks to marke for a terrific weekend.  We managed to stick to the "no stains, no fires" rule, and hopefully, we'll be able to do something similar again.

FMB

Last ride of the Beaming Screagles. Or is it . . . ?

Hi,

I got in my first-ever Blood Bowl playoff game on Wednesday night, against DaveB's "OMG, your armour is what?!?" ork team.  With, I might add, my snazzy new, offical NAF member, not-blocking dice.  Which is to say, when I signed up, I thought I was going to get some b-dice, and instead, got a set of all the other, non-specific dice instead.  Le *sigh*.

You may remember DaveB's orks from the last time we played.  The game where I started my last drive with six players on the field, out of an original complement of 14.  Since then, Dave's beefed up his crew with the addition of this:



Not that he needed the muscle . . .


Not to fear, however, my plucky gang took to the field in perfect weather, and lined up across the pitch from more green bulk than an alfalfa harvest.  I won the toss, elected to kick, and DaveB opened the game by having his Troll injure one of my linemen so badly he missed the rest of the game.  Things kind of progressed from there.



Having torn a rather unsettling hole in my centre, he recovered the ball, caged up, and proceeded to drive down-field.





I did my best to hold him up, and even got a few spoilers downfield in case I managed to break the ball loose, but the ork hitting game was hot, and he kept knocking my guys around like nine-pins.  Casualties began to mount, and it became harder to block off lanes.



He managed to screen off a chunk of my team, and managed to get the first goal of the game.  One-nothing orks.  There were a couple more turns left in the first half, but I couldn't get a drive going, and the half ended with the score still 1-0 for the greenskins.



At the kickoff in the second half, he sent the ball deep.  I recovered, and set up a cage, which he promptly fell upon.  Like unto a pack of wolves.  Green, smelly wolves.



They knocked the ball loose, and the orks took possession.



While my boys often struggle to break orky armour, they can hit still do a decent job in the physical game.  With the abundance of skill-based and team re-rolls humans can sport, they're also able to take some chances from which other teams mind shy away.  Thus, out of kamikazi desperation, MY guys knocked the ball loose again, my blizter and catcher broke loose, and carried the ball downfield.

Now, at this point, I lose possession of the ball again.  I don't remember if my catcher went for it and flubbed, or if it was the result of a hit, but the orks ended up with possession about mid-way into their end.



Once again, human skillishness came to the rescue.  Two mutually reinforcing players with the Guard skill (which allows you to assist team-mate's blocks regardless of the proximity of opposing players) make for a decent little force.  Enough to blitz a catcher out the opposing players' box, and fire a pass downfield to score.





One-all, and the "where the hell did THAT come from" look on DaveB's face was worth the price of admission ;)

The rest of the second half was a grind, with DaveB looking to score.  A deep kick on my part, a key turnover on his, and some decent defensive play saw the second half end with a tie game.







In a tie, the game goes into sudden-death overtime.  You don't get re-rolls back (though DaveB picked one up off the kickoff table result), and all injuries carry over.  I started the overtime period outnumbered at something like 3:2 odds from all the injuries that piled up (DaveB lost two goblins all game, both ejected on foul attempts).

On the upside, I won the toss again, and elected to receive.  It was do or die for the Screagles, and I wasn't going to win a grinding game.  I stacked my line on one side, broke open a hole, and ran my catcher through it down the field.  Now I had to recover the ball, and make a long-range throw to throw to the receiver.

The only problem was that both my throwers had been taken out of the game by DaveB's orks.  One of them, in fact, was dead!  That meant my Blitzer had to pick up the ball, throw an accurate pass at max range, and my catcher had to catch it.



I pulled it off.  My catcher was now poised within easy scoring distance of the goal line.  The only hitch was that it was now DaveB's turn.  But hey, no problem, right?  He only had one player that could possibly reach my ball-carrier, and that player had to "Go for it!" (risk a fumble, and turnover, to get extra movement).  Then he had to successfully strip the ball.  I figured I had pretty good odds, right?



Yeah, not only did he get off the successful hit, he also broke armour, and took my poor catcher out of the game.



It was pretty much downhill at that point.  I was now out-numbered about 2:1, and only had 5 guys on the pitch.  I simply didn't have enough bodies to effectively cover the board, not that I stopped trying.



DaveB scored, in over time, on the very bottom of turn 8, with his last point of movement.  Final score 2:1 for the Kill Street Orc-ganics.



My boys had played their guts out, and had the casualties to show it.



4 players on the pitch by game's end.



Man, what a game!  What a heart-breaker!  That long-bomb was one of the sweetest, most ridiculous moments I've had in gaming.  I've got to hand it to DaveB.  He's an excellent player, very experienced with his team, and has a terrific command of position on the field.  The only times I seem to get around his effective play is when I go for pure audacity, and then it comes down to whether Nuffle smiles on me or not.  DaveB will now move on to the finals, and play the winner of the Nurgle (marke) vs. Skaven (Jack1080) game.  Best of luck to him, he earned it.

In the meantime, the Screagles will make good use of the off-season to heal up and finish their uniform transition.  The war-chest is getting pretty full, so we may start scouting for a few additions to the team as well.  Casualties have brought the team value down a peg, so there's room for a few, shall we say, larger players?

FMB

Catching up

Hi,

Regular readers will have noted that the usual progress of the blog has gone rather to pot of late.  A number of factors have contributed, from a rather pleasant trip out East to see the Cub, to the far less pleasant, successive, bouts with some kind of malignant grot.  The latter has left me with little motivation for anything in the evenings but sitting around, getting caught up on Breaking Bad and Sons of Anarchy.

That said, life continues, and I've got at least a few things on which I can report.  First up are a couple of completed Blood Bowl figures for my growing human team.  Not much to show for going on three weeks, but better than nothing.







I'm actually cautiously pleased with these, as they're conversions from the stock lineman figure.  Lacking the number of Blitzers I'd need for a full team, marke was kind enough to donate some spare humans he had kicking around, and I greenstuffed them into Blitzerly glory.





As I've squeaked my way into the local league playoffs, these guys should be hitting the table soon.  With a bit of a push, I'm hoping to finish the team in the next month or so; I'd definitely like them in the "completed column for the year.

I also managed a stop at the Halifax Citadel when visiting the Cub.  The first time we went, in the spring, a fair bit of the fortress was closed off to the public.  This time most of the fortress was open, and a number of staff were present in period costume.  We managed to catch the firing of the noon cannon, as well as a musket demonstration.  Cub was intrigued by the school-room built into the fort for the benefit of the soldiers, and we were able to get into both the interior of the walls (accessing some of the deeper gun emplacements), and the moat that surrounds the fortress.





Another bonus was that the small museum based at the fort was open.  It's got a decent range of military gear spanning from the mid-1700s through Afghanistan.








I was frankly flabbergasted when I turned a corner in the museum  and discovered this:

Yeah, that would be Wolfe's cloak.  You know, the one he wore on the 1759 campaign that determined the future of North America.

The one he died in.

So I'm standing there, and I can actually imagine the man huddling up in it against a wet breeze off the St. Lawrence.  I tried to give the Cub a sense of who he was, and what being that close to something that was there, at a pivotal moment in history, meant to me.  He's 7, so much of it went over his head, but I think he caught a bit of my mood.

In completely unrelated news, Reaper's announced their second Bones Kickstarter.  So far, I'm feeling iffy on this one.  While the first offered more minis than I'm likely to ever paint at a not-un-supportable cost, the second offers quite a bit less (at least so far).  They're being cagier about expanding the base package, and instead are offering expanding add-ons; so the $100 pledge grows, but more slowly, but if you chip in another $50, you get an additional set of models which will expands as the pledge count does.  They're also staggering shipping (the current buy-in ships Dec. 2014!), and they're charging actual shipping to Canada (plus presumably customs duties).  The upshot is that to get about the same amount of figs as last time, I'm going to be dropping about twice as much money.  Given that I've yet to actually paint any from the first batch, I might have to sit this one out.  If they post up any of their mind-flayers, I might dip a toe in, but that's about it.

I'm hoping I've shaken the last of the grot, and things start getting back to normal around here.  We've got some newer guys who've contacted the club about playing Bolt Action, which is good news, and I've been itching to get some work done on my Impetus and Musket and Tomahawk forces.  Unless work / life goes more haywire than usual, things at the blog should be settling into more of a routine.  Until then, take care.

FMB