Pull up a chair and roll some dice, welcome to the Space Dinosaur Gaming Table, where I cover Age of Sigmar battle reports to list building ideas and everything in between. Today's post is the first in a loooong time as COVID has finally eased up enough for my group to get a game in. To celebrate the end of second edition, we made it a big one at 8000 total points squeezed onto a 4X6 gaming table over a few hours of fun.
Ordinarily, we'd play 1v1 games with 2000 points a side, but with the first game in so many months, we decided to go for a big game and squeeze all of our armies onto one table. The Beasts of Chaos (BoC) and Khorne armies were natural allies, so joined together against the Cities of Sigmar, played by myself, and the Orruk Warclans. The battleplan was Scorched Earth from the 2020 GHB. Thanks to the pandemic, most of the units were fully painted, although shamefully I had the least painted army with quite a few of my units only primed. There's something to be said for the immersion of a fully painted table, where even the terrain has had lots of work put behind it.
The list I used was built around the 3 Helblaster Volley Guns that I had, buffed by the Celestial Hurricanum, Cogsmith, and Runelord. In hindsight, I had far too many sources of re-roll 1s to hit, so in the future I might look into using a different endless spell or getting more varied buffs. I also had lots of Freeguild Guard to screen my army from any BoC deployment shenanigans. The army also wasn't particularly mobile, but the Gore Gruntas of the Orruks more than made up for it. The BoC were built around large blocks of Gors and Bestigors with a Mega Gargant to support, while Khorne had 3 Bloodthirsters with lots of Bloodreaver chaff.
Turn one the Chaos team got the initiative, which they would have for the rest of the game, and moved up the board to try to get some early game charges off. Luckily for my team, they weren't able to make the charges, so my cannons opened up, shooting twice in the first shooting phase thanks to the Greywater rules. I was able to knock out a few Bloodreaver units from a combination of fire power and battleshock, and the Ardboys and Gore Gruntas did some work on some Skull Crushers and Gors, respectively. My Rocket Battery shot everything at Skarbrand and missed.
Chaos came in swinging the next turn however, with Skarbrand absolutely deleting the Ardboys from the table. Some Ungors were able to remove some of the piggies as well with a lucky turn of shooting. But it would not last, as Skarbrand was soon shot off the table, many more gors perished under the mounts of the orruks, and our army moved forward to capitalize on the lost territory. From this point onwards we managed to keep the opposing army on their side of the table save for a lone Mega Gargant who made his way into my halberds.
Chaos was definitely on the back foot at the top of turn 3, but with some blood tithe points were able to bring in another Bloodthirster. Some buffs were applied to the Bloodthirster, and he set up to make a charge that would bring them back into the game. Unfortunately for them, they missed that key charge that could have seen my artillery core obliterated. With that fail, and looking at the state of the board, the enemy army conceded and the Orruks and Cities team won the day!
At the end of the game we discussed anything else we might have done differently. Terrain definitely played a key role due to some choke points that kept the Beasts of Chaos player from utilizing all of the units fully.
I'm pleased with how my list played, though I know it's not very competitive and would struggle to do enough damage on its own. It would also ironically be very susceptible to other shooting armies, as the outputs of the volley guns aren't high enough to effectively deal with other shooting units. I was also disappointed with the Rocket Battery, as the 3 attacks it has are pitiful and I could only get one or two hits off through the whole game.
Overall we all had a blast and this was an excellent send off for Age of Sigmar second edition. In the near future we'll be playing a game post third edition, so look out for that here. Till then.
-The Space Dinosaur
No comments:
Post a Comment