17) Hot Nerd Summer: Echoes of an Unbothered Past

This was the biggest tabletop miniature game I have played in twenty years, and it took up the entirety of my table. It was the biggest KoW game that my friend Michael had ever played, and it was also his first time playing with his complete and full Abyssal Dwarf collection. We learned a lot about our armies, and how they work in theory vs how they work in practice.

My rat Army is really big. Having three hordes makes it very wide, and very unwieldy. I think I have an idea on how to fix this without changing the list. I just have to deploy it differently at the start of the game.

My Broodmother and my Rat Ogres are fragile, and I am using them wrong. Broodmother is a support character, and shouldn't be on the front line. She should be behind the lines, healing the infantry blocks.

Rat Ogres shouldn't be fighting other units head on. They should be protecting and supporting other units. Instead of running two small units of rat ogres, I have consolidated them into one large unit.

Michael learned that it is a waste of a high mobility flying unit to have his gargoyles pulling guard duty to protect his mortar crews. In the future he will probably use some small, cheap infantry units to do this role.

He also learned that the vulnerability of his blunderbuss unit is that they can potentially be charged by certain units which are fast enough to avoid being shot at. They have a short range, but unlike most gunpowder units, they can move and shoot. He should have moved them forward and shot my cavalry as soon as he could. While breaking ranks is risky, it would have been better than hanging back and getting charged by a fast unit without ever getting a chance to shoot at them, which was what happened. As it was, that expensive unit got killed off without ever firing a single volley at the enemy, because my cavalry hung just far enough back to be out of shooting range, but still close enough to be able to charge the next turn.

We both learned that counting out the right number of dice before a roll is a huge chunk of the time spent on each turn. I'm going to remedy this by having a few small dice trays labeled with the number of dice that they hold. For example, a tray with 30 green dice, a tray with 20 gray dice, etc...

It was a close game, but my rats managed to squeak out a victory. Michael gets bragging rights, though, for the duel between BasuSu the Vile and Scud Light. BasuSu absolutely curb stomped poor Scud for three turns straight. He beat that rat so hard that little Scud couldn't even fight back! I also had a couple of units that really should have broken in combat, but Michael rolled poorly for their nerve tests, and they stubbornly stuck around into the last turn of the game despite having sustained severe casualties. If the battle had lasted one more round, my Tunnel Buddies and Mutant Rat Friend were both in positions to flank charge his center infantry units, which probably would have routed both of them and collapsed the remainder of his forces, but that is speculation.

On the hobby side of things, I've been repairing, touching up, and repainting my old Bretonnian knights so I can rebase them for KoW instead of Warhammer. I painted most of them when I was still in high school, and I used some pretty cheap paints to do it, so they definitely need some attention. I'm really looking forward to painting the Ogre Landsknecht minis from Atlantic Wargames to be an Ogre Palace Guard Regiment. I've also been touching up my undead army. Having more than one army means I can demo the game, and teach others to play.

My friend Ellie sculpted a really great little undead bone dragon critter for me to include in my Undead army. I tried to do an advanced paint technique with it, called one source lighting. It didn't really work like I had hoped, so I will probably watch some tutorial videos and give it another shot to see if I can make it "glow" a little better. The custom mini is great, and I want to do it justice.

I did, however finish the banner for the Ratkin Tunnel Buddies. I originally intended to trace and copy the original banner from the official model, but then I got this idea to instead paint a little wind up mouse on the banner instead. I'm really pleased with it.

For the Fourth of July, my wife and I drove up to Fondulac to visit one of my old Army buddies for a cookout with his family. Scottie had suggested that we play a game of Axis and Allies, but I pointed out that the last time we played that game, it took us something like three days to finish. Instead I brought along an old Milton Bradley board game from my childhood, called Screaming Eagles. It's a much simpler, faster paced board game, which his kids would be able to easily pick up and understand. The game was a hit. His kids and his nephew really loved it, and didn't want to put it away. I told them they could borrow it to play overnight at their sleepover. I said I would pick it up next time I visit, but I think I will actually just see if I can find another copy, and I'll let them keep that one. It's a pretty common game from the 1980s. Mint condition collector's grade copies go for up to $90.00 these days, but used beat up copies like mine are more like $25.00 on ebay.