NetEpic Battle Report Guard-v-Space Wolves

As part of my ongoing effort to use my games table more I finally managed to pin down my friend Rich for a game of NetEpic - it's only taken about 4 years since our last one.

Back in the 90's, Epic was my favourite game of all the GW systems. At the time it was one of the main systems they supported with releases every couple of months. It was a good time. Of course, eventually they canned the line but Epic left me with a lingering love of mass battles and 6mm games. I always think it is a brilliant scale for large scale warfare, allowing hundereds of infantry and dozens of tanks on a normal table - all at a reasonable cost.

Back to Epic. NetEpic is a fan based spin off of my beloved 2nd Edition Epic. I've only played it once before and enjoyed it and always wanted to play more.

My army is Imperial Guard. In epic, you choose your troops using company cards as the main formation, each one of which allows you to take 5 support cards. So I chose a mechanised infantry company, a Leman Russ company and an artillery company. I added a detachment of heavy infantry to screen the artillery company, a thunderbolt squadron, a hellhound squadron, two sentinel squadrons and a shadowsword super heavy tank.

Rich ran a Landraider company, a grey hunter company, a thunderhawk, some attack bikes and a squadron of Thunderbolts as well. 

Here is a picture of the board layout:

I would be deploying to the right of this picture, Rich to the left. We each put down three objectives and off we went. Deployment was alternated unit by unit. This was my left flank, where I planned for the main punch to come. The idea was for the Russ company with air support to move forward and push through whilst the artillery company cleared the way.

 I deployed my mech company in the centre to push on the town and my two sentinel squadrons on the right as a delaying force.

In the first turn, things went slowly. As we gradually wrestled with the rules, it took a while to achieve anything. From a game perspective, my thunderbolts proved themselves by flying forward and strafing a few landraiders out of exisistence, something the artillery had failed to do.

In the centre we both sent mechanised forces forward and occupied buildings. The exchange of fire was fairly non commital, and the left flank was also fairly quiet.

In turn 2, things certainly heated up. The Russ company took loses from advancing Land Raiders, but more worrying Rich's Thunderhawk dropped a detachment of grey hunters in the middle of my artillery company:

In the centre there was more jostling for space and exchanges of fire, with both sides taking losses, though I had the worse of it. Over on the right there was more moving around, with the sentinels being engaged by the attack bikes, but holding their own.

The fight amongst the artillery company was short, brutual and one sided, with all three bombards falling. However, my screening platoon of heavy infantry did their intended job, about facing and destroying the attacking marines.

As a final note, I was realising how effective Thunderbolts could be so I managed to take out all three of Richs:

Turn 3 was all we managed to complete for this game, and we didn't quite finish this either. By the end of the turn, my Russ company was really suffering and not making ground, the situation in the middle was not much changed and the right my Sentinels were all but wiped out.

The left flank, where my Russ company is noticable by its absent. The ray of hope was was that Rich's infantry was running away from the hellhound squadron and its flamers:

The centre, I held two buildings and Rich only one, but his was the objective and in the top right you can see a landraider detachment advacing to cause issues:

Thr right flank. The only ray of hope here was my thunderbolts shooting accross the table and about to engage the Landraiders. Sadly, we had to pack up before they got to fine:

And that is how it was left. Rich held more objectives then me so was the nominal winner. Had the game continued, I suspect Rich had more heavy units than me and would have used them to push forward. However, he thought my superior numbers would overwhelm him, especially because he thought my Thunderbolts would wizz about taking out a detachment per turn, which they had done so far in the game to be fair.

Overall a great game. I need to get some anti air painted up to free my Thunderbolts up for ground attack - they were my stars. Also, my screening force for the artillery company worked well. Sure, they took losses but witout the them the marines would have rampaged through the artillery company with ease - wiping it out.

Both Rich and I are hoping to get a game a month in, and not just in Epic. We are both 6mm fans, and there is talk of Napoleonics, modern and WW2, so who knows! 

Gaming in our Pyjamas

For the whole of her little life, my daughter has had a daddy who plays with toy soldiers. She has known no different, but for most of her life not paid too much attention (she was taught at an early age not to touch my models without asking). However, the last year or so she has been paying more and more attention. She has joined me for some painting (which is just her slapping pink all over some one piece Skaven I got her), and she lost interest in that quite quickly. 

But recently, since her fifth birthday, she has been paying more and more attention to what I do. She is, by her very nauture, an inquisitive little soul, and this applies to toy soldiers just as much as anything else. I've been promising her a little game for a while. And since we were having a lazy pyjama day, it turned out today was the day. 

I decided not to do anything too drastic. I used what fantasy forces I had painted, and gave us each two units of ten troops and one unit of ten archers. The rules were simple:

4+ to move a unit

4+ to hit

5+ saving throw

Biggest unit strikes first (or, in the case of equal size, my daughters unit went first!)

Everyone moves 6", archers can fire 24"

I think it went quite well. She stuck with the game all the way through, and got the hang of the dice rolling quite early on. 

It was a straight forward way to introduce her to the very basic concepts of wargaming. She got the hang of moving stuff, rolling dice, and it's only going to help her counting. We already have another game arranged for next week and it gives me an excuse to buy and paint some more stuff, because what I really need is an excuse to do that! Who knows, she may become that rare thing - a female wargamer! Plus, she will provide a good test bed in how to get the boy into the hobby when he gets a lot older. 

Here are some photos of the highlights. As an aside, this is the first game EVER on my gaming table. Result!

The opposing forces. All my daughters stuff was on movement trays. 

My daughters archer unit takes first blood on the High Elves in the distance. 

Aerial shot of the closing armies. 

My daugher's forces closing on mine.

The first close combat. Victory to Evie's Skaven!

My High Elves take out the last of the opposing archers.

Evie shows no mercy to my last close combat unit.

And the end, victory to Evie!

Blood Bowl!!!!!!

As most do, I dropped out of the hobby around 18/19 years old as reali life began to assert itself with full time work, girls, beer, bills etc. I never truly lost touch (still picking up White Dwarf for example), but my actual participation in it was very minimal - I imagine I painted about 3 models in 7 years and didn't game at all. 

When I began to the slow return, my gateway drug was of course Games Workshop, and the first offering was Blood Bowl. A mate, Simon, and I picked up a copy and started playing. For us, it was the ultimate game for playing with a beer or two (or eight). Many games followed, but if died off a few years ago when my hobby took the parent hood hit. 

Anyway, the other day we dusted it all off and got our first game in for quite while:

We played our usual teams, I opted for my Skaven team, known as the Sewer Skutters, whilst Simon bought his Wissenland Wolverine human team out of retirement. Both these teams are arch rivals. We haven't kept an exact track but I think honours are roughly even over the years. The Skaven's speed often leads to two-turn touch downs, whilst Simon's humans can be quite good at squashing rats. 

Here is the table at the start of the game:

Simon was receiving and it was fair to say the dice were diabolical for him to start with. His thrower couldn't pick up the ball, all his blocks led to his guys falling over and it just went horribly wrong, leading to the Gutter Runners tearing through the lines, picking up the ball and making it 1-0. Here's the Gutter Runner receiving a handoff and about to score:

After that, his rolls got a little better and his chaps battered there way through the Skaven lines to leave it 1-1 at the end of the first half. 

At the start of the second half, the Skaven team received the kick off, but despite making a run for it, the gutter runners got smacked down, and Simon managed to turn it around and go 2-1 up:

The Skaven then got to receive the kick again. This time I managed to pull off a two turn touch down and even the score. You can see here that my team have made a hole and got three gutter runners through with plenty of support:

Getting at them would prove troublesome and marking/blocking all three is near impossible. Even when I am defending I try to get at least two gutter runners into the opponents half as they are dsitracting and can cause mayhem.

The last section of the game was a propper scrap. With Simon receiving he was able to batter a couple of my guys off the field and force his way into my half. I realised at this stage I was playing for a draw so used my speed to surround my his blitzer:

This left the whole fate of the game resting on a single roll. If he got a natural 6, his throw was accurate and he would just need a 2+ with a reroll to touchdown. To both our surprises, the dice came good for him when it mattered and he took the game 3-2!

The whole game was great fun, and I think it's fair to say the Blood Bowl bug has bitten again. It's a real shame that GW canned the whole specialist game range a few years ago as otherwise I would pick up another team in a heart beat. Oh well, I have already found a couple of alternate sources for teams that I think I will be investing in soon.

To keep up with all my Blood Bowl shennanigans, visit my facebook page: A Cardboard Fortress

Hail Caesar Battle Report

I have been playing a fair bit of Hail Caesar of late, and thoroughly enjoying it. A friend of mine, Tim, who I have met through attending several of the large games put on by Like a Stone Wall wargames group, has the most extensive mini collection I know of. He is the one who has introudced me to this game and the anicent period in general and in this game he very kindly lent both myself and my friend Chris the armies we used and acted as umpire.

So I plumped for Dacians. I had three divisions in total. Two of these consisted of three warbands and an archer unit, with the warbands split evenly in terms of Flax armed or not. The third division was my cavalry division, consisting of three light cavalry units and a unit of Sarmatian Cataphracts. There was also a looted bolt thrower that eventually did nothing.

Chris was fielding Alexanders Macedonians. He had opted for crack troops, giving him just two divisions, one of heavy cavalry (including Alexander and his companions) and a infantry division containing 3 heavy phalanxs of pike and some skirmishers. 

Here is my battle line:

I deployed the two infantry divisions in the centre and on the right flank with my cavalry on my left. My rought plan was for the cavalry to hold their ground to give my infantry time to use their superior numbers to outflank the pike blocks, two of which can be seen here:

For the first few turns the infantry advanced towards each other slowly, with my misreading of the terrain causing my right flank to bunch up (later with fatal results). It was the cavalry that stole the show in this early stage.

Chris threw his companions and other heavy cavalry unit head on into my cataphracts. In the first round of combat I was pushed back, but then in the second round my cavalry began to push back, driving the Macdonian cavalry back. Another of my light cavalry units wiped out one of Chris' and things were initially looking rosy.

In the mean time the infantry closed:

I got lucky at this point. As you can see in this picture, the very top block of pike engaged a warband. However, the middle block took some fire from an archer unit and was forced to back, creating a gap. I was then able to use on warband to pin the third block in place, whilst another outflanked it:

We discovered at this point that pike blocks don't like being flanked, and in a single round of combat they were wiped out with minimal loss to me.

It was around now things went wrong. The cavalary combat that had ground on on the flank finally went the Macedonians way, and my cavalry collapsed very quickly. Along with this, some pesky peltasts pinned my most flankward warband, preventing it turning to block the cavalry. They held just long enough to allow the cavalry to start rolling up the infantrys flank:

At the same time, my flanking warband was in turn hit in the flank by the previously pushed back pike block after the archers I had hoped to block it failed:

At the same time, on the extreme flank the griding combat of pike-v-warband went on. The warband were gradually losing and were pushed back into a second warband, dragging them into the combat as a direct result of the earlier bunching.

Then came the coup-de-grace. With my cavalary divsion already broken, in one turn the two flanked warbands went down, and the extreme fight on the flank resolved itself when the first warband lost. Unfortunatley, this took the supporting, untouched warband behind them with it, breaking a second divsion and handing Chris the game.

Overall, it was a really great game that see-sawed back and forth more than the end result suggested. Had a few rolls gone the other way I think the Dacians could have taken it. Hail Caeasr is a game I would highly recommend. I will certainly be building an army for it soon, I just can't decided which one!

As always, please like my facebook page for more updates: The Cardboard Fortress