Trevy's Painting Table

So, I've started playing in a Warhammer Fantasy Battles Warbands Escalation League (quite a mouthful) at my local gaming store.  The league uses a slightly modified version of the old warbands rules (i.e units may consist of a minimum of 1-3 models depending on base size, no characters required etc.).  For those who don't know them, a think a quick Google Search could help you out.

I decided to take my Lizardmen to the league because I had a humorous idea to play an army entirely made up of Skinks.  Enter the Skanky Skink Liberation Front!

The league started at 200 points and will increase every week by 50 points until we reach 500!  I figured that it would be cool to track my progress on this blog as well as show all you guys any models that I paint for the league.

As far as I know, our lists could be changed whenever we wanted to, but I ended up running the same list for the first week (I only played two games, though):

5 Chameleon Skinks w/ Stalker (the Stalker is there to be the army general; considering that Chameleons are slightly hardier than normal Skinks, I figured that it would make sense to have the general in one of the Chameleon units)

4 Chameleon Skinks

3x 3 Skinks

2x 4 Skinks

(since Warbands only requires that units be their normal minimum size if they purchase upgrades, there was no reason to put more than a very small egg in each basket)

Each week, players are paired with another player (who I'm assuming has similar league points to their own) who they have to play that week.  Otherwise, games you play are free-form and count towards a number of points that will determine the winner.  I was first paired off against a Beastmen player...

Game 1

This player was running a Chariot, 10 Gors (w/ Foe-render) and 5 Raiders.  Unfortunately, he didn't use the tiny minimum unit sizes to his advantage.  While his army is very good at accruing combat resolution at a small scale (it's a one-two punch with the Gors and then the Chariot), Warbands is chiefly about maneuvering and damage output.  With their relative maneuverability, I think that small units of 3-5 Gors could have done the job that 10 Gors could not have.  With 2 attacks apeice (w/ additional hand weapons), they can put out a decent number of Hatred fueled swings.  Unfortunately, having put so many points into slow, unmaneuverable units; the Skinks quickly surrounded his army and threw pointy things at them until they went away.

The Ungor Raider did manage to finish off a unit of Chameleons with a charge and the Gors got into combat with a single unit of 3 Skinks before being mown down, but by the end of Turn 6 I had wiped out his entire army.:o

Game 2

My second game was against an Empire player who had the same failing as the Beastmen one; his army was made up of two blocks of 10 troops, one of Swordsmen and one of Halberdiers led by a Warrior Priest.  Like the Beastmen, this list lacked maneuverability and; being a Human army, it lacked speed as well.

As such, I was able to almost completely envelop the army; panicking the Swordsmen off the board and killing the Halberdiers so that only the Warrior Priest remained.

He was able to manage killing two units of Skinks, but because my Chameleon units remained intact he had only netted a fraction of my army and I was able to kill the Warrior Priest as well by the end of Turn 6.

Looking Forward

Given that I'm up 2-0 in the league so far, I don't think that my list really warrants heavy change.  If I continue on the trend of all-skinks, I am going to fall prey very soon to heavy shooting and magic armies.  Because lists can be changed, I'm sure that opponents will soon start taking those elements in games against me.  I would like to take something more heavily armored then skirmishers, but I don't feel that Saurus are viable in a game this small (maybe at 500 points, but not now).  That said, taking 50 points more Skinks is not viable either, seeing as an additional 2-3 units of Skinks begins to clog the board and make Panic a real problem.  Normally I would take a Saurus Scar-Veteran on a Cold One or a Horned One to be a fast moving, heavily armored threat, but again, the points don't really allow for it.  I think that at 300 points he becomes a viable option, but he's too expensive for 250.

In order to maintain some semblance of cohesion, I'm going to try to keep the army relatively compact by spending my points on upgrading the Skink units to Skirmishers.  For an additional 2-3 points (I'm still debating on whether Javalins or Blowpipes are the better option; Blowpipes allow for more shots, Javalins for more hits), the amount of flexibility and maneuverability that Skirmishers have over mundane cohorts is enormous.

Whew!

Two weekends filled with Warmachine, cramped gaming stores and copious amounts of carbonated beverages are behind me, and what do I have to show for it?

Some awesome batreps, that's what!

And for Tourney number two...

Enjoy!

I recorded a couple of batreps yesterday - Warhammer Fantasy and Warmachine.  Enjoy!

I recently played a 750 point 40k in preparation for some tournaments of the same size that my local game club/store is thinking about putting on.  It was an interesting experience - the game didn't take much longer than an hour (and in all honesty most of that was because my opponent was playing an Ork foot horde) and the impact of individual unit tactics was much greater - something that unfortunately often gets lost in larger games.

The downside, of course, is that 40k books are balanced (not really :D) for a 1,500-2,000 point game size on a 6'x4' board, whereas we played on a 4'x4', so some units are a little more/less powerful than they would be normally.  Dice rolls play a huge part in the outcome of the game as well, and a turn of above/below averae rolling can turn the tide of the game much more dramatically than it would in a smaller setting.

Anyway, it was a fun change from the norm.

A am again very sorry for not posting more often on this blog - classes aren't giving me a lot of time to write blog posts and, to be perfectly honest, there hasn't been too much going on worthy of note.

I did, however, recently play a game of Warhammer 40,000 at the first meeting of the campus gaming society's tabletop gaming branch.  Apparently the local gaming club is a many limbed organism encompassing anime, RPGs, video games, TCGs etc...

Like an octopus.

But, in any case, I do now have a battle report to show you!

Unfortunately I won't be able to play as many games as I have been, but I'll try to give you guys as many reports as possible!

I played a 4,000 point game of Warhammer Fantasy last night with my newly-completed Beastmen.  It was very awesome.

My video embedding isn't working right now, so just click this text in order to view the battle report!

In other news, the Beastmen army is up on eBay as a Buy It Now or Best Offer dealio.  Check it out!

There are some photos and information about the army in the gallery to the left.

Every year I run a giant Apocalypse game for local players called TAB, short for Trevy's Apocalypse Bash.  This event is desgined to be fun, narrative based game where players can bring all of their models and spend the day playing Warhammer at no cost.

This is the second year that I ran this event and I'm happy to say that we topped last year's showing by quite a bit.  While least year we counted 26,000 points of models on the table, this year we upped the ante to 30,000!

While we didn't do a model count, I would be surprised if it was too much lower than 1,000 models on the table.

If you guys were wondering where my posts had gotten to - there's your answer!  I was too busy building terrain and repairing models!

Anyhoo, here's an awesome vidrep for you!

I just had a post here and it disappeared... wtf?

I got another battle report up - this is a good one, so hopefully it will make up for last week when I didn't make one.  These Lizardmen are actually my own army that my friend was using, sorry for the unpainted models.

I've gotten another battle report for you guys!  This time it features the noble Beastmen versus the evil and cowardly Dark Elves!

Unfortunately YouTube appears to be acting up again, and all I can give you guys is a link and no neat embedded video.  Oh well, enjoy anyway!

Yay!