Welcome to the New Year!

Well, I know things were a bit slow over the month of December, but we're starting the New Year with a hiss and a roar, starting with a one-off meeting this afternoon, starting at 1pm.  I'll update this post after the meeting with some battle reports and photos.

And...here's the update.  It was a good start to the year - despite our Warhammer stalwarts being otherwise occupied with tournaments, we had a good turn-out with myself, Craig, James B., Aaron, Vince and Jake all turning up, and Ross and Gary joining us later.  Jake had bought his Battletech starter box with him, Aaron had his Ogres, Vince bought his DBA box, and Craig had more Dystopian Wars goodies then the Pope.  After realising that he couldn't play Warhammer without an opponent, Aaron left his Ogres on the shelf and gleefully got stuck into Battletech with Jake, Vince took the opportunity to draw another member of the club into his Ancients D.B.A web, and Craig and I set out to recreate the Battle of Midway with a steampunk twist.

Here are Jake and Aaron battling it out with a couple of 'mechs over the battlefield.  Jakes confident dice rolling here will come to nothing, as Aaron crippled and destroyed his 'mech, killing his pilot in a final, coup-de-grace!

Above we see Vince teaching James B. the finer points of ancient warfare, and a rather rubbish picture of your friendly, neighbourhood pillaging horse marauders.  I love the pun on the sign.  James did quite well, beating Vince 2-1 in a series of hard-fought games.

On the big table the Federated States of America (me) faced off against the Empire of the Blazing Sun (Craig) over possession of a strategically important floating base (if you squint you may be able to see it behind the island in the middle!).  It was an absolute pleasure to play, using Craigs superbly painted miniatures and terrain!  The advantage worked best for me, though as the Feds won out against the crafty Nipponese - after three turns (we're both easily distracted) I had managed to destroy or severely damage 3 of Craigs capital class ships, while only losing two smaller ones and sustaining some damage to my battleship.     Time was getting on, so Craig conceded, leaving the field of battle to the Americans!

Look forward to seeing you all there at the next one!

James

Sunday Meeting Roundup

Well, the meeting on Sunday went very well considering that four of our stalwarts were suffering from wargames burnout from Vermintide last weekend!

Our club was graced this week with two new members - young James returned (he's not that young, but he's younger then me, so as long as I'm doing the blog posts he'll be " young James"!), and a new chap Alex came along with his Warhammer Dwarf army.

The games on the day were quite varied - Alex and Aaron had a large game of Warhammer (Ogres vs Dwarfs), which ended with the Ogres making a meal of shorties.  Craig bought his Napoleon's Battles collection along (a very impressive collection of fully painted, 25mm leads) and him and Harley recreated a slice of musket-era warfare.  Jake brought along a bit of a treat with his Battletech boxed set, and him Ross and James bashed seven kinds of hell out of each other with walking tanks.  James won with a lucky laser shot that punctured Jake's armour, setting off a catastrophic chain reaction of unfired auto- cannon ammo.

Everyone had a great day, and it's always great to see people trying out new games.  I'll have to see if Jake can make it with Battletech next time.....I do have a thing for stomp mechs!

James

Marauders off to the Masters!

Our very own Peter and Neil Williamson are off to the Masters in December!  This will cap off a very good year for these two guys, and I'm sure that you will all join me in congratulating them on qualifying for this prestigious, invite only event, and also in wishing them the best of luck!

No word yet on whether they'll  be showing their allegiances with matching tattoos of The Gentleman Wargamer (our mascot), but I'll keep everyone filled in as news comes to hand!

Thanks to Slave to Painting!

This is just a quick post to thank the great website Slave to Painting (www.slavetopainting.co.nz) for their recent sponsorship of the Vermintide tournament.  Not only did they post the info on their Facebook page to drum up some more interest, but they also gave every participant a $10 voucher for their webstore!  Thanks again, Chief Slave!

I'll be following this post up with a more detailed post on Vermintide (just this weekend gone) once I get some photos (and a bit more time!)

James

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!