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CHOP! for Xilos – Xilos Landing, Game 2

Posted on September 20, 2016

After their humiliating defeat against the Freeborn mercenaries, the ground forces of the 21st Regional took to the holosim to practice new techniques in warfare. The local Algoryn commander volunteered to oppose the Concord, but insisted on being the ones to drop.

Whispers took root among the 21st, about whether the Algoryn had volunteered to show them up after their initial failure at Xilos. Morale lowered the longer it took to prepare the simulation.

As the “game” started, Arenal Yu chose her battle plans carefully, placing a strike squad on the generator, an X-Launcher team hidden in some nearby trees and another strike squad on the far side of the generator, attempting to spread out any possible damage from landing pods.

The Algoryn landed a mere 3 units after the simulated Concord anti-air guns, however they were laser-like in their precision of landing and destroyed the X-Launcher and all-but destroyed one of the Strike Squads upon reaching the ground.

(In my initial game I missed that the drop-pods caused D6 SV3 hits as well as placing the unit Down! This is huge!)

The Algoryn seemed confused in their objective as they raced past the generator to get into combat with the physically weaker Concord. After brutalizing a few squads, they remembered their plan and hopped back to take the generator and hold it for the rest of the simulation.

The Concord fought forward, forced to come to the monstrous Algoryn and fight them on their own terms. That, combined with the Concord’s lack of fast-moving troops ensured that they couldn’t get to the generator to stop the Algoryn from holding it.

At the end, both sides were devastated. Arenal herself took an entire salvo of gunfire from a skimmer squad, a move that seemed calculated to embarrass the leader as she took to the field of battle herself.

This is a much more balanced game with the D6 SV3 hits. >.> Also although Pat (who played the Algoryn) landed with the same number of units as I did when I defended, this game was only 750 points so ratio-wise it was a lesser loss of power. This is a hard scenario, no matter what side you are. The Attackers start with less units, but the Defenders have really no where to hide if they want to contest the generator because there’s a big open space around it.

I need faster models. It’s just that simple. I’m losing these games because I can’t get to where I need to go, and even though I have a couple different squads and my hope was to be able to fire with one while running with another and then switching, it just doesn’t allow me to place enough pins on my opponent. I brought my T7 to this game, but Pat wanted to play 750 so I wasn’t allowed to play with it! There was a mess-up in an order at my local games store and so I’m still waiting for my drop command to come in!

I only took the one photo, because I forgot. 😛

Tournaments

CHOP! for Xilos – Xilos Landing, Game 1

Posted on September 8, 2016

Fluff

Freeborn Privateers led by Lady Jessica held a Quantum Gravity Generator on behalf of the Ghar. Concord forces led by Arenal Yu used borrowed Algoryn drop pods to land and try to take the generator from their enemies. The Freeborn anti-air guns proved exceedingly accurate, destroying 8 of the 12 incoming pods, 5 of which contained Concord forces. The remaining 4 pods contained a 5-man Strike Squad, a weapon drone unit of 2 C3D1 Light Support Drones, a kitted out X-Launcher squad, as well as a single support lander that held a table edge against Freeborn reinforcements.
Bereft of leadership, Strike Squad Delta attempted to fulfill their mission to capture or destroy the Generator, but were overwhelmed by Freeborn forces.

Game

I cut out 12 3″ circles to act as drop pods and showed up to help Clayton learn how to play Gates of Antares by playing one of the more complicated scenarios. 😛 I didn’t want to buy 12 drop pods for a scenario I might play once or twice, so “drop construction papers” it is!

When you get down to it, the scenario wasn’t that complicated. The deployment was complicated, and we both had a lot of fun playing it. But the game was simple – touch the thing in the center, and stop your opponent from touching the thing in the center. The deployment was a mini game where the Attacker chose a number on a dice and the Defender had to guess it. Simple, but there were some other rules that made it more interesting than just “guess my number!” which would have been pretty random. There were 3 types of “drop pods”, one of which had special powers if it did get hit. As well, hitting the final target or overshooting the final target gave different deployment results. All in all, not a game I would play every Sunday, but definitely a new and cool way of deployment your army!

Clayton had some really good and/or lucky guesses. There were two times when he said “2…NO 1!!” and I had hidden “1”. This photo is of my entire force that managed to land. He destroyed 3 Strike Squads, my Nuhu and an X-Launcher. We played 1000 points. >.>

We might have given up and re-racked in another situation, but it was Claytons first game at all and I wanted to help him take the rules he’d read and turn them into reality. Drone squad got Down early and couldn’t get up, my X-Launcher came on in the 2nd turn and missed the one shot it got, and my Strike Squad got surrounded by Freeborn and assaulted and destroyed!

Clayton has a neat mix of troops. A Command squad, some feral troops, some of the well-armed shooty guys, a bunch of bikes and a MOD2 skimmer thing. He put most of it together in a weekend, since I announced this campaign on Thursday and he’d only picked up his army on Wednesday!

CHOP! of Antares

Posted on August 14, 2016

Today one of our club members held a Beyond the Gates of Antares tournament. I got into this game because I had the itch for something a little more “massed battle” than Malifaux and Blood Bowl, but not a GW game. I looked briefly at Bolt Action, but to much Real Life in my Fantasy makes me a little uneasy.

If you read my blog regularly, you’ll know I’ve been busy working on an army. It was 750 points, roughly, which was how many points the event was. We had 6 people to start, and got to 7 (someone sat out) mid-day. The plan was to have 8, but the 8th got busy…something about his girlfriend needing to go shopping or something.

We played 3 games and they were relatively quick. We played scenarios 3, 5 and 6 out of the main rulebook. In short — “get to the other side”, “defend objectives” and “take a thing from the center”.

I took some photos after I got destroyed in my first game. I learned a lot about mortars in that first game, and about how they are supposed to be used. Followed by some bad luck with my own mortars — the first was destroyed in an unlucky 10, and the second spent the entire game trying to recover from a Down result that it just couldn’t shake.

The photo just above this line, at the bottom left, is the mortar that just wouldn’t “go”.

I learned some important things about the game, and my army in particular:

It’s nice to have portable shields (those blue template things), but it’s not as useful to need them to be portable and have them on your long-range artillery. There are other units that can take the shields, and I’m going to look into them as options. Perhaps a General Purpose Drone with a Batter Drone — 40 points for an extra dice (tempo) and a portable shield.
Having no units that can move any faster than 5″ and still be effective, is a real pain. You can see below, it’s a foot-slogging army. Scenario 3 needs you to literally run across the table. Scenario 6 needs you to run in and then out again. Scenario 5, which we all think we messed up on, requires the attacker to run across an open field towards the defenders. Faster can mean moves faster — like jump infantry or bikes — or it can mean has more actions per turn — like tanks. I don’t know which direction I’m going to initially go, but it’s nice to see the use of each.

I lost game 2 horribly, and took no photos of it. Every single attacker felt it was a super lame scenario. The defenders got to place 3 pieces of terrain on their side of the table, along with 3 objectives, and then 3 pieces of terrain on the attackers side of the table. The 3 pieces on my side were all hills, which are True Line of Sight in this game. So I had nothing to hide behind while my gun-line opponent shot me to death. Maybe some trees?!

Game 3 was great. I played against another fellow who had lost both of his games. 😛 It was a “run in and out again” scenario, and we both had some great tactics and bluffs and it just really felt like there was a back-and-forth, the kind that makes for a great game. This photo is of my troops lined up behind a shield, looking for a good moment to grab the prize!

At the end, every one got a special edition Concord model (shown in metal below) and a Ghar battle suit sprue (which I don’t know what I’m going to do with). I won Best Painted, which in this case is also known as Only Painted. 😛 It’s such a small community and everyone is just starting out with it and I guess they all just don’t have the same “if you’re playing in a tournament, it’s gotta be painted” mentality I do.

Lastly, here’s a photo of us poking fun at the special edition model. The model looks very much like it’s on one knee taking a selfie, so we all mimicked it for this photo (not a selfie…)

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Malifaux – Henchman Hardcore and Enforcer Brawl

Posted on July 22, 2016

I had a free Sunday so I went to Wet Coast GT for just the one day. They were running Henchman Hardcore, an alternative Malifaux format where you get 20ss, must take a Henchman as your Leader, no summoning and the only Strategy is Turf War and the only Scheme is Assassinate. The goal is to run at the center and hurt your opponent — a decidedly “unMalifauxy” goal, in my opinion.

It’s not my favourite format, but it was nice to play Malifaux again. I took Kang and 3 Rail Workers and got my ass handed to me.

After that, we played an Enforcer Brawl with….9 people? Maybe 8? You get 1 Enforcer and one upgrade. You get 1VP for wounding an unwounded model (2VP if it’s more SS than you), 3VP for killing something (4VP if it’s more SS than you) and -3VP for dying. I took my Ice Golem because I haven’t really played with it a lot, and wanted to show it off! He ended up being excellent, as whenever he died I tended to get 2VPs for doing damage to someone for his explosive, which means I lost fewer points than others who died.

I won this event, but only because Mark won and Mark was the TO. Mark also played an Ice Golem, he just died a lot less than I did. 🙂

The next day CHOP! chat got excited about Malifaux again. I think the confluence of WCGT and the GenCon order stuff going up caused folks to get excited about it again. I pulled Taelor out of my to-do pile and put some paint on her. A few hours later, this was the result:

I was tempted to leave her albino after I had shaded basecoated her boots, pants, shirt and hair. She had this crazy goth look to her that I really liked. So I ended up leaving her skin less coloured than I would have otherwise, adding white to the Dheneb Stone when I highlighted, which took a lot of the pink out of the colour.

Otherwise I was just trying to copy this drawing. The pants really are that shiny — I tried to tone them down but have been unsuccessful so far. Still, I really like the contrast here.

Tournaments

NO FIRES: Blood Bowl Tournament in Vancouver, BC

Posted on May 21, 2016

I’m running a 1,200,000 credit Blood Bowl tournament on May 29th at the Fraternal Order of Eagles! It’s a charity event, with proceeds going to help the Fort McMurray victims. Details are available here.

As part of the charity, I’m also selling these Special Play decks:

$20, with $12 going to the charity.

If you’re interested, check out the details and get me a team list!

Tournaments

GottaCon 2015

Posted on March 5, 2015

I think just the one post this year, hoping to keep this relatively short. I don’t really do short though…

I flew over to the island early Saturday morning as I had other commitments Friday night. It was nice to just have the one night at the con, I think, as it kept me from getting absolutely zonked like usual.

I was playing the Malifaux “Masters” event on Saturday and the “Story” event on Sunday, and had planned to play Through the Breach with the guys Saturday night, but ended up doing other things.

Saturday

Game 1

I had a dream that I played Clark Hartnett first, and then I did. Prophetic! Clark is an amazing Malifaux player, and whenever I play him I really feel like I’m on the back foot the entire game. I said this to him, and said I didn’t like it, but really what I should have said was “I need to learn to get over this”. I’m as good as Clark, I can beat him if I don’t let him beat me before we get started. 🙂

He’s an awesome dude, despite beating me, we had a hilarious game. He played Marcus. Turn 2 or 3 he said he was going to throw my Rail Golem into the lake, and then turn 4 he did. Then the Rail Golem took 4 damage from hazardous terrain, and then another few and…died. I had Frame for Murder on him, expecting he’d die, but at no point did I expect he’d die to terrain…

Another moment, Cojo was super far up and dangling in the wind. Bodyguard was an option, as was Frame for Murder, and I thought about it for a while and decided that Clark was no fool and wouldn’t have put Cojo that far up without a plan, so I turned and headed towards from Hoarcats. I killed the shit out of those out-of-the-way, flanking Hoarcats with Joss…and then Clark flipped Frame. I kicked the kitten and lost the game 8-5 because of it! Never kick the kittens!

Game 2

I played Nico from the island. I’ve played him a number of times, usually against his Lynch but this time he declared Outcasts and I had no idea what to expect. He pulled out the Viks for Reckoning, and it was a roller coaster of a game.

Turn 2 he moved to far forward to early and I charged and killed Blood. Killjoy popped and did some damage, but then I killed him too. A surprise Reckoning point and a lot of stones gone from the game, I was feeling good.

Turn 3 he killed Joss and the Rail Golem. >.>

In the end I won this one because of Breakthrough and Plant Evidence, with Mei and the December Acolyte tag-teaming the scheme marker drop.

Game 3

~~I think the fellows name was Steve~~. I have been corrected by the internet – I played Josh. Sorry Josh! He only had the one crew, Von Schill. We played Turf War and I decided to take the all-Gamin crew for an achievement. This was ok, until Steve started moving his crew in a ball of Schilly death and I had nothing that could break it open. I slowly tried to maneuver around a piece of terrain until I could kill something, but I screwed up positioning at one point and didn’t outnumber him in a quarter. This game ended in a 5-5 draw.

The only photo I took all weekend, placed here to break up this “short” post. 😛

Night

We were supposed to play 4 games, but it was late by the time game 3 ended so we stopped. We had some dinner and drinks and then the guys went to go drink some more and I went back to the con to play some games with Jer, a good friend of mine whom I haven’t seen recently! He gathered 2 other people, and we played Boss Monster (one of my new favourite games), Small World Underworld, and Lords of Waterdeep. Then we went to the Empress Tea Room, now redubbed the “Bourbon Room” to find my drunk ass friends yelling and playing King of Tokyo. We swapped to Coup, which I love, but which has some complications.

A friend taught everyone the game one day, but then Jamie bought a copy and didn’t read the rules. Months pass and everyone is drunkenly playing the game very differently from the rules. I kind of hate this and have been campaigning to play the actual rules. This night Mark suggested it, and I backed him up, but I got in a bit of shit from some folks who didn’t appreciate me trying to railroad the game. We finished the one game and then all of the really drunk folks moved to another table to go back to Tokyo. I should have felt snubbed, but then and still now, I’m too tired to bring as much caring as I usually would.

We had game of Kittens in a Blender, which is a great game despite my moral objections to the subject matter. 😛

I went to bed around 1:30am.

Sunday

I woke up at 7 and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I had a relaxing shower, did some juggling, packed my stuff and went for breakfast.

When I had booked the room, I had written that I wasn’t picky about what room I got. I usually share a room to cut costs, but since it was only the one night I figured I was happy to pay the money to have the silence I desire. And because of the con, it was a very reasonable rate. Well, they moved me to a room that technically didn’t have a bed. 😛 It was the “living room” of a joined 2-bedroom parlour suit! It had a pull-out couch and a bathroom, so whatever. But the lady thought I looked annoyed when I checked in, so she gave me a voucher for breakfast. Which was amazing, because the waffle is $18 at the Empress! I had the kind of breakfast where you want to say “Lovely.” to everything that happens, because it’s just so fucking classy.

I got to the gaming hall so early that I started setting up a 35ss game with Clark. We got 3 turns in before the actual tournament started. 😛

Game 1

I played Tao. Tao is a fantastic man, but he’s another dude that I’m afraid of and I realized why, while in the washroom after our game. His goal is to remove all of my models from the table. It doesn’t matter to him that Malifaux can and usually should be played differently. Usually, when my other friends play this way, they lose because I’m getting points while they are killing models. Tao doesn’t play that way. He’s so efficient at killing that he can both table you by turn 4, and win the game 6-5.

It doesn’t hurt that I screwed this game up hardcore. I thought it was Standard deployment, but it was Corner. This didn’t matter hugely for deployment, but it really mattered when I flew Kaeris with Imbued Energies to one corner of the table to start scoring Breakthrough markers, and the next turn when I started measuring Tao tells me I’m no where near his deployment zone! I quickly flew her across the table, but it was too late, his “remove models” strategy killed her before I could drop a single marker. It’s too bad, because I got greedy. I could have moved 6″ less and ended with a tie game 6-6, but wanted the 8-6 (I’d revealed Breakthrough) so I moved a bit further so “he couldn’t kill me” so turn 4 I’d be able to drop, move, drop. His crew was so ridiculously fast that he managed to get me anyway. Fuuuuuuck.

I think I need to study a different way of playing Taoifaux. He plays wildly different from anyone else I know, and it’s important to be able to learn how to deal with that. I’m not as good with the game-crushing combos as he is though.

Oh yeah, he played Perdita with Hopkins, Fransisco and Santiago in 35ss.

Game 2

After lunch, Tao was burnt out and didn’t want to run the tournament anymore. You can do this when you go to lunch with the entire turn out of the tournament. 😛 So we played a random game each, I played Jamie in the second tournament scenario against his Tara crew. I think the scenario screwed him a little here, as we both had VP-gaining-goals very close to our deployment zones, and I cleared mine a turn before he cleared his, giving me a turn to get into position to get him. I won this game, but don’t remember by how much.

The End

We raffled off all the prizes and I ended up with a Lady Justice crew box…for the Death Marshals! And a Lady Justice Avatar…for…I don’t know! The Brutal Emissary for my Hoffman crew? I don’t even know, there wasn’t another prize in the pool that I wanted at that point in picking. 😛

We missed the 5pm ferry home because one of my club mates won the Warhammer tournament, which is badass and we stayed for the Warhammer awards ceremony. We played a ton of Boss Monster in the ferry terminal and the ferry which made the time pass super quick.

And that’s GottaCon 2015 for me! I think it’s one of my favourite events, I love love love that it’s more of a nerdfest than PAX. The fencers come, and the robotics guys, and the vendor hall is so much fun, and it’s big enough to be awesome but not so big you have to worry about hotels and tickets and crushing population. I still love the shit out of PAX, but GottaCon is a super solid event.

Photography Tournaments

OFCC 2014 – Photography

Posted on October 3, 2014

One more bonus post before I get back to painting stuff.

This photography setup was in the corner of the gaming room. A lot of lights and tripods and hangers and not shown is a very sturdy tripod with a camera on it.

Tournaments

OFCC 2014 – Day 2

Posted on October 2, 2014

Day 2 came early again. Tournaments are crazy because you stay up super late because you’ve got fun things to do, and because you’re excited for the next day and then you wake up super early because the organizers are trying to squeeze as much into a single day as they can. If you start at 10pm, run a 2800pt tournament with 3 games in it, with lunch and a mid-afternoon break, you’re ending at 9pm. It’s a tough call to make, and most people seem to be on the side of waking up early.

I only played one game on Sunday, because of our 5-person-4-person team. I thought of this only while watching Pete play my army — me sitting out the last game was perfect. As the worst player on my team, we’d naturally want to have our strongest players on the table at the end of the tournament when we would be playing against our strongest opponents. I didn’t plan it that way, but I was super happy with how it turned out! 🙂

After the jump, more photos!

Tournaments

OFCC 2014 – Day 0 and 1

Posted on October 1, 2014

Instead of pulling my photography stuff out, I edited photos from the weekend. I know I still owe you guys some final photos of my skinks, rippers, maybe those tokens and *cough* the last Old Blood (who won’t be finished anytime soon), but I just couldn’t be bothered to set it all up last night. >.<

So now you’ll get to read about OFCC 2014. I’m going to post these in quick succession instead of waiting my usual 3 days, and hopefully we can get back to some painting shortly!

There are a ton of photos in this post, so I’m going to put them behind a cut.

Musings & Meta Tournaments

OFCC 2014 Painting Todo

Posted on September 8, 2014

While the last month and a bit of blog entries has been scheduled after the Wyrd contest, and while I did not get much painting done at all in the last months of the show I was in, I haven’t been entirely slack. I’ve been busy assembly-lining skinks for OFCC.

I don’t have photos of them yet, but they should be done really soon, because I have a list of things that need doing before the 26th of September!

24+ extra skinks. My lists have been under powered by far because I only own 33 skinks. Another 24, plus using my camo skinks, means that I can get up to a useful amount. These guys are almost done.
6 Ripperdactyl riders. These are such cool units and models, and I really want to use them. I need another 3, as I already have 3 in a box, but either way I need to shake a leg to get them painted!
Old Blood on Cold One with Stegadon Helm. I have my Old Blood with the Blade of Realities sorted, but I need to get my tanky guy done. I’ve built him, but he’s on pause while I finish skinks and figure out this Agrellan Earth business.
Finish a base for my 3rd skink priest. He was previously riding a stegadon, but I need the steg naked now and need a third priest.
Make another 1-3 skirmisher movement trays. I need at least 1 more, but if I have time for 3 they probably will get used at other tournaments.
Something to replace the Engine on my stegs back. This is the least likely thing on the list to be completed, but here it is. My current stegadon has an Enginey thing on it’s back, and I’m not using it as an Engine. Also, has no Giant Blowpipes, which is a bit of a WYSIWYG issue. We’ll see how the month goes.

I’m not doing as much circus this month, having brought it down to a single 2 hour class…on Wednesdays. I really want to take this class, and I’m super sad that it interferes still with Warhammer, but sometimes we don’t get everything. 🙂

However, I should be able to bring up the painting. If anyone has 3+ rippers they don’t want…I’d love to buy them from you. 🙂

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