Saturday Evening, Amanda and I went to hide in the basement and play a game of Warhammer Underworlds. Despite the brief reprieve earlier this week, we were back into the heatwave and it hit +37°C and it was just brutally hot upstairs.
I've been wanting to play this again for a long time, more so since finishing up the Sepulchral Guard and Ironskull's Boyz. We haven't played since May, when Amanda got Wingspan, after which that was pretty much all she wanted to play for the longest time. Because it's been so long, we were both a bit rusty. Also, because it was a spur-of-the-moment game I didn't really have any time to go over the Sepulchral Guard's decks and just played with them out of the box - adding three bonus objective cards (because warbands of this era only came with nine and you need to play with twelve).
Despite it still being above 30°C outside in the early evening, and me being absolutely soaked with sweat, Amanda found it cool enough in the basement that she needed a hoodie!?
I won the first roll-off and selected the The Arcane Nexus board from the Shattered City Board Pack. This was the very first of many, many poor (un)life choices the Sepulchral Guard would make this evening... okay... poor choices I made this evening. Should have let Amanda pick first and then be able to set up the boards in a way that would have helped ME!
All of the Guard go very, VERY slow and with seven I'd have to use ALL of the stoarting locations which would put a pile of my guys WAAAAAY in the back where they would unlikely be able to participate in the game. The next seven mistakes I made were where I put each of them. I should really have put all of the good fighters - The Champion, The Prince of Dust, and the Harvester - right at the front, as they were most likely to be useful... and if they DID die... I could bring them back - as long as the Sepulchral Warden was still on the table. In fact, I kind of WANT them to die, as that is their Inspire Condition - being returned to the board!?.
I'd kind of forgotten what tricks Amanda had in her deck... yeah... it was ALL BAD.
For all the stuff that she'd forgotten and I had to remind her about, Amanda DID remember that she likes setting up boards lengthwise to take advantage of her vastly superior movement and set the pace of the action and decide where and when fights happen. In addition to the better move, she had two fighters that could hit at a distance greater than one - Morgwaeth's glaive has a reach of two, Kyrae's bow has an amazing range of FOUR! All of my fighters could only hit things in adjacent hexes.
My next series of mistakes was NOT discarding my initial card draws and both the objectives and Power cards were rubbish (four upgrades of little use - even if I COULD equip anyone with them!?)
ROUND ONE
Amanda won the roll-off and decided to go first.
Lethyr hopped onto Objective #1 and stayed there for the rest of the game.
In my first activation, I used the Sepulchral Warden's ability to move TWO other warriors and had the Champion and one of the Petitioners shamble up to Kyrae.
I think this ability would better be used to marshal the skeletons together into a mob and let the enemy come to us... lessons learned.
SO MANY lessons learned.
I just hope I REMEMBER some of them!?
Khamyss charged in and slashed at the Champion with one attack (and missed! WHEW!) and then dealt one damage to the Petitioner with her combo attack.
The Champion then stabified Kyrae, dealing two damage!
Morgwaeth joining the fray and... I think she took out the Petitioner...? Or attacked The Champion and missed... This is what I get for not taking notes...
Pretty sure the Champion finished off Kyrae with a second attack.
maybe THEN someone took out the Petitioner...?
On my last move I used the Sepulchral Wardens ability to move two again and had the Harvester and a Petitioner move onto objectives. I was pretty sure I didn't have and objective holding cards... but I knew Amanda DID... so might as well try and deny those while moving forward...?
I used a card to return the Petitioner to the board.
The nice thing about returning these undead to the board is that inspires them. It doesn't give them any better defence or wounds or damage they can deal... but it does make them marginally faster (three hex move, instead of two) and one more attack die.
By the end of this round I'm pretty sure Amanda had FIVE Glory Points to my ONE...
ROUND TWO
Khamyss started things off by moving to Objective #4 - but didn't attack - she also played a card that said the most damage that could be dealt was ONE... so I feel like I did something other than attack, which I was totally set up to do, even if I only dealt ONE damage, I was holding a card that allowed me to push an enemy one hex - that could have landed her in lethal hex and finished her off... or... maybe I didn't get that card until round three...? This is what I get for not taking notes or more pictures...
And this is where I more or less stopped taking pictures. It was getting a little overwhelming trying to figure out how to recover, even just a bit from this utter shitshow, and taking pictures was just another distraction. Ah well...
The end of the game. I brought things back in the last round because I had a card that scored one glory if I'd returned two to the board in the last Action Phase...
Amanda counting up all her points - the game ended with her winning SEVENTEEN to three...
To be fair, she was playing with a HIGHLY customized deck and a warband she has played 14-15 games with. I, on the other hand, was playing with a deck straight out of the can of which I had no experience with... AND I was constantly reminding HER how to play the game and how to use certain cards and pointing out better moves (all in the spirit of helping her relearn the game... also to get her to play games AGAIN! She just doesn't GET a lot of the intricacies of the game and forgets all sorts of stuff and if I just leave her to figure it out herself, she gets very frustrated very quickly and threatens to not play anymore... on the flipside, she was no help to me with figuring out how I should play MY warband).
Really need to play this regularly to keep it fresh in the game.
I picked up Arena Mortis from my FLGS (Dragon's Den Games) as they had it in their 75% off bin! Along with a bunch of new cards and a bonus board for use with Beastgrave - there's rules for a whole new game using Warhammer Underworlds miniatures and cards. It's a 3-6 player game where everyone take ONE warrior from any warband and plays just that on a single board with one objective token. The fluff is that the battle is taking place in an area where the Katophrane Curse is strong and warriors are reincarnated almost instantly. It looks really fun! But requires and entirely different sort of deck-building - and at least three participants. I'm sure I could get Amanda and Finnegan to play... but I'll probably have to build all three decks...
I also asked the Den to get in a copy of the new Kill Team Octarius box for me... I was kind of back and forth about this one for a long time. Initially not wanting to get in on it... but then reading articles and reviews (and videos) it seems it's finally looking like it's got everything I'd hoped the PREVIOUS edition of Kill Team would have (individual, alternating activation with action points... you know... like NECROMUNDA... which actually came out BEFORE the previous version of Kill Team!?)... and DEATH KORPS OF KREIG!? How could I pass up those... and Ork Kommandoes... and all that terrain (which could easily find use in the underhive as well!).
Looks like New Kill Team and WArhammer Underworlds are going to be my go-to games for the rest of the year. So much for getting Cursed City ready to play anytime soon.
Oh, I also managed to get a copy of the Mollog's Mob warband for Warhammer underworlds. A freind of mine pointed me in the direction of a website where a guy in Regina (other city in Saskatchewan - where my friend lives) and he had a TONNE of GW stuff he was selling, pretty cheap... in the end I passed on all of it... well... almost all of it... ONE thing caught my eye - and that was the Mollog's Mob CARDS - apparently he'd bought the warband to use in his Age of Sigmar army and had never used the cards and was selling them for $5! Conveniently, all those older Warhammer Underworlds out-of-print warbands have been repackaged without the cards and sold for use in Age of Sigmar. So I got him to grab me the cards and I picked up the minis and now I'll have ANOTHER warband - and one of the cooler ones that I kind of thought I'd probably never be able to track down for a reasonable amount of money. I have no idea if it will play well... but it just looks fun - one big Troggoth with a couple little squigs following it around. The Troggoth is a BEAST - but there is just ONE of it and the others are useless... definitely won't be a HOLD OBJECTIVES kind of warband....? Probably a KILL EVERYTHING sort of thing... but if you can only do one more or charge with a character in a turn, not sure how that will work out. Other warband will just stay out of it's reach and run circles around it killing all the squigs and holding ALL the Objectives!?
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