Monthly Review - October

Notice the misleading title - it suggests that we often do these reviews, and perhaps you have simply missed all the previous ones.  What it really means, is that Vince has been busy the last couple of meetings, and I've been to busy in-between to write up a report on them!

Our Friday meeting this month was fairly exciting for me - I finally got a chance to test out the Kings of War rulebook that has been sitting on my bookshelf for the last few months.  Kings of War is a fantasy, massed battle game, by Mantic Games.  It's written by Alessio Cavatore (some of our older members may remember his name from the glory days of Games Workshop), and is described as "Warhammer-lite" on a lot of on-line forums.  This epithet is usually bandied about by people who haven't actually played it, because it is a very different beast to Warhammer.  Yes, they both use 28mm miniatures, both are a "compnay-level" game, but they play very differently.  I won't go into too many more details here, suffice it to say that Harley and I (Kingdoms of Men and Undead respectively) had a very fun game (the men trouncing the hordes of the undying) and are looking forward to more.

On the other table, Peter and Ben had some games of Warmachine, with Ben pitting the iron of Khador against the armour of Skorne.  I'm not sure of the score, but Ben was crowing to me about his first Warmachine victory, so obviously fun was had.  We also had a couple of other guys popping in for a visit and a chat, so a nice night in all.

The Sunday games this month was a relatively quiet affair - with Peter, Neil and Simon off at a weekend tournament for Warhammer, we were missing some of the usual suspects.  Craig had bought along some older boardgames (Kingmaker, a game I have fond memories of playing with Harley, and Temple of the Beastmen.  Not sure about this one myself, but Craig said it had been released along with Space 1889 (a Victorian speculative-fiction wargame about wars between Earth and Mars) and had some rather spiffing miniatures with it.) and so the lads settled down for an afternoon.  I had a trailer load of topsoil to unload, so had to leave for a while, but when I came back Ross and James H. had played the Temple of the Beastmen, and Aaron, Craig and Harley were engaged in a battle to get their particular King on the British throne.  I spent the afternoon gluing miniatures together while talking to James H. about starting out in wargames, and Jacob gave Ross an impromptu sword-fighting lesson.

James.

Sunday September 30

As reported by Simon.

Craig brought along boxes of his Hordes of The Things (HoTT) armies. HoTT is a simple system for fun fantasy and science fiction games. They're here as a free download, scroll down to the bit about HOTT for the link: http://www.wargamesresearchgroup.net/WRG.net/History/wrg.html

Simon used Tomb Kings, Craig used French Napolenic and 1930s American Gangsters, Ross used Generic Fantasy, Ross' frend (sorry, Simon didn't get his name) used Orcs, and Aaron ued Goblins.  Lots of fun was had over several games trough the afternoon.

Aaron and James also played Warmachine.

Various others dropped in through the day to catch up with buddies, see what was happening and talk toy soldiers.

Rundown of the last Friday meeting

Hey chaps, how goes it?  Our last Friday meeting went quite well, with five of us gaming, plus a couple of bystanders.  Neil and Simon had a good, old-fashioned beat down between Dwarfs (Simon) and Warriors of Chaos (Neil), with both of them trying out rather savage armies in preperation for the Warhammer Fantasy tournament season.  The Dwarfs were soundly thrashed, thanks to some rather clever tricks in Neils army list, good tabletop tactics, and terrible dice rolling on Simons part.

On the other table, we were having a War machine/Hordes smash-fest.  After hearing that Peter had assembled a Skorne army, I quickly (and rashly) dusted off my Menoth starter box and challenged him to a game.  Ben has also been thinking about Warmachine for some time, and decided to get a Khador army.

The first fight between me and Ben was looking pretty bad for me, until Ben got his general a bit too close to mine - with a cry to Menoth, Kreoss knocked Sorscha to the ground and gave her a good stomping, leaving me with a victory.  I then took on Peter, and had the ignominy of watching the mighty Kreoss have his battle group dismantled, and then get nickel-and-dimed to death by Morghul and his special ability - even if he can't beat his opponents armour he still
causes a single point of damage. Very nasty!  Then Ben and Peter played, adding a few more models to their armies.  Peter showed the tabletop skill that put him in 4th place at Call to Arms in the WarmaHordes tourney knocking Bens army around the table, but like any good game it could have gone either way up until the last turns when Peter managed assassinations on Sorscha, Bens battlegroup commander.

A good night had by all!

New goodies for Dystopian Wars

It seems that Spartan Games are at it again. Some of you may have seen Craig's tiny steam punk ships at previous games days, and some of us have been lucky enough to play with them, and fall in love with the Dystopian Wars naval combat (my Covenant of Antarctica fleet is sitting on the painting table now!).

Anyway, I spotted this on TMP this morning - looks like Spartan aren't content with the plundering of my wallet so far! I present to you, Victorian SciFi in 28mm:http://www.spartangames.co.uk/games/dystopian-legions

Wargaming in Italy

Photos from Lorenzo Mele's excellent websitehttp://www.tagmata.it/ Wargaming has quite a following in Italy. Italian wargamers don't react like Anglo Saxons! LOL

The Tide is Turning!

Ladies and Gentlemen - consider this your official invite to Vermintide!  This great annual little tourney is organised by our own Neil Williamson, and this year is being co-hosted by the Masterton Marauders!  As you can tell, I'm a little excited about this.

Anyway, the gist follows:
- November 17th
- 1200pts Warhammer Fantasy
- Pure Awesome.

Here's a link to the players pack

There's a limit of 20 people, hope to see you there!

Team Wairarapa at Call to Arms

Call to Arms is the Wellington Warlords annual convention. This year it was also the club's 40th anniversary. Fittingly, it was held at St Patrick's College, Wellington. The first meeting was on St Patrick's Day, 1972. At that first meeting eight people played an American Civil War game, using several boxes of Airfix toy soldiers. This year on August 18-19, 158 people took part at Call to Arms. Among the 158 was the eight-strong Team Wairarapa (go team!). It was fantastic weekend - well done the organisers. Here is a selection of photos from the weekend.

Warlords club president, Michail Woolf, (left) and Alastair Duncan opened the convention with the traditional reading from Harry Pearson's delightful autobiography of himself as a wargamer "Achtung Schweinehund". 

Seven members of Team Wairarapa: Vince, Neil, Peter, Simon, Aaron, David and Phil.

The eighth man, Stuart.

 A view across the St Patrick's College school hall. My brother's name is on the honours boards  you can see in the background but, sadly, mine is not.

Among the visitors were the Perry twins of GW, Foundry and Perry Miniatures fame  http://www.perry-miniatures.com/  .  They are in Wellington working with Weta Studios on merchandise for the Hobbit movies. Details are all highly commercially sensitive. If they told us any more Sir Peter Jackson would have had to shoot them and bury them in the backyard. From left, Alan Perry, Alastair Duncan and Michael Perry check out Hinton Hunt figures from the 1970's.

Team Wairarapa's David Kinzett in action. David used Anglo Danes in the 25mm Ancient tournament and finished second.

Team Wairarapa's Phil Gates ponders "what the ---- is Dirk doing?" Phil used Polybian Romans and  Dirk used  "Astrerixian Romans". That is, the whole army is made up of figures from the Asterix books - very cute and winner of the best army.  

Simon is pondering what those nasties are going to do to his Dwarfs! Not only did Simon score two 20-0 wins but at the barbecue on Sunday he scored five sausages wrapped in bread, two steaks, onions and coleslaw. Clearly he is deprived and starved at home.

Stuart's beastmen are things of beauty - in a beastly sort of way!

A German armoured train from the Flames of War competition. A very useful engine, peep, pip, peep!

Part of a large Dystopian Wars demo game. 

Somewhere in the Middle East.

 Vince posted this commentary and pictures.