Warmachine Action 1.2.11

Mike and I got in a 35-point game of Warmachine on Sunday after some army storage and transport confusion almost doomed us to sitting on our hands and trying to referee a 2500 pt Apocalypse game between Duffin and BRose (in a house with no 40k rule book in it, for the love of God).  Once things got straightened out, though, we had a pretty decent game.

35 points is the biggest engagement we’ve played so far.  We just played a straight ahead caster kill game–we’ll probably add in objectives or play one of the scenarios from the book in our next game–and it was really fun.  We were both trying out some new units and Warjacks that let us try out some new rules, so it was slow, but it was pretty competitive in spite of ridiculously high casualties for my force compared to Mike’s.

The big game-changing new thing that showed up was the fact that Warjacks are able to pick things up and throw them.  If they pick up an enemy Warjack (like my Crusader) and throw them at a tightly-packed infantry formation (like I was using to put a lot of my rocket troopers in range of a target they had no hope of cracking) they pretty much knock them over like tenpins.  Tenpins that die.

That power collapsed a flank of my army pretty conclusively, but it’s a testament to the competitiveness of Warmachine that I never felt completely out of the game.  Even at the end of the fourth turn I was able to sneak a handful of damage-dealers through the heavily armored Khador lines and take a pretty serious poke at Mike’s caster.  Unfortunately for the Protectorate forces, that caster was the Butcher of Khardov–one of the most durable casters in the game.  Between a badly damaged Warjack, some long shots, and a few spells from my warcaster (channeled through the Warjack), I was able to do damage sufficient to drop nearly any other caster.  Sadly the Butcher hung on long enough to tell his big bruisers to squash my caster.

Butcher, co PP

If I thought you could damage me enough to kill me, I'd probably wear a helmet.

That game was a great illustration of two things Privateer Press says about the game: the system favors the aggressor, and the outcome isn’t really certain until very late in the game.  I held some elements of my forces back hoping to get some big turns of damage in on single targets in turns three and four.  What that got me was a bunched-up formation that got a giant robot dropped on its head, eliminating most of the firepower I’d been planning on focusing.  Beyond that, though, the aggressive move to make the attack that Mike made opened up a space for me to move my (badly depleted by this point) forces through to take a stab at his caster.  Desperate moves like that aren’t sure to win the game, but they can and it’s very dramatic and fun when they do.

Plus there’s my brother’s Cygnar battlegroup in my basement getting its last spritz of primer tonight.  Soon he’ll be taking his first steps into this game.  I don’t know when he plans to take them home to start painting them, but while they’re in my basement this is a good time to come try the simplified game, the rules for which are available on the Privateer Press website.

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