Age of Sigmar and Small and Silly Games

I recently has the chance to play an interesting little game with my nephew, and it got me thinking about what I like about games, and what my preferred approach to gaming is.

My nephew is pretty young, and not very interested in rules or competition. He does like story telling, though, and we have a lot of fun when he comes to visit just running around and making up adventures for ourselves. He's also fascinated by the miniatures I own, and we've had a great time just making up little stories around them.

This visit, I decided to try a little something different, something a bit more structured. I let him pick the miniatures and the tell me who they were, while I provided the rules, and interpreted them... loosely. This is what we ended up with:

A group of friendly ogres were wandering around the ruins of an old castle, looking for a good meal, as ogres often do. It seemed for the longest time that there was nothing to be found, only dusty empty barrels and lots of cobwebs, and the ogres were ready to move on. That was when they saw it. A turtle!

 Now it is a little known fact that ogres love turtles as friends, and while they were happy, they did not want to eat the turtles, rather they wanted to take them home. But that was when the evil and sinister ghosts of the castle appeared, who wanted to keep the turtles trapped there for all of eternity!

And that it how the game begins. It might not be high art but it was fun to make the story up with him.

The game was simple enough. Each ogre moved seperately, and had to reach a turtle. When they did, you rolled a dice. 2-5 meant a rescued turtle! 1 meant the ogre lost control and tragically devoured the turtle. And a 6 meant the turtle turned out to be a rare Turtle of Power, and both the ogre and the turtle ascended to a higher plane of existence, and were removed from the field.

The ghosts, meanwhile, were trying to steal the turtles away. They could grab a nearby one for free, but it slowed their movement down to 5" instead of 8, giving the ogres a chance to catch up. Combat was done with age of sigmar rules, but could only take place if one of the combatants had a turtle nearby.

It worked pretty well, and the ogres ended up winning, rescuing six turtles, eating two, and one ascending. The ghosts only managed to steal two. Since I was the ghosts and my nephew was the ogres, this was the ideal result.

It was fun, and I think this is the kind of game I like to play the most. The one where it's more about working together to tell a story, than anything else. I leave you with that, and this one picture

Another Sort of Battle Report!

I promised another and here it is! So, this time my regular oppenent (for a very broad definition of regular) and I decided to see what a very small 500 point battle would look like. Was that too small? Find out!

(Yes it was)

It was Ratkin vs Kingdoms of Men round two.

(Here the soldiers of the armies of men line up, with guns and swords and.... that was about it. But they felt ready for anything!)

The Ratkin were ready for them. Kind of. There followed a turn of both armies advancing cautiously and exchanging potshots, the Ratkin doing a bit better. Finally, the shield walls charged!

Sharp eyed readers can probably see the mistake they made. Most readers actually.

The Ratkin were never the sort to let good flank go unflanked and thus, flanked the men were. That is a terrible sentence. The results were predictable, with the brave men realizing they weren't so brave and routing, along with one of the units of arquebusiers who got tired of being shot by the weapon team.

This was the last picture I got, but the results played out about how you might expect. The KoM line was rolled up and wiped out, with only the General surviving. None of the Rats were lost.

So a victory for me, but not exactly a fair or... well played battle, I think. Hopefully we will learn more by the next one, and there will be a next one!

A Semi Battle Report!

So I managed to play a game of kings of war! It was not a fancy game and this will not be a fancy or complete report, but there will be a few pictures at the very least.

I played the game against my dad, because that's just how it is. I used the ratkin and he used the mess of kingdoms of men that I have, and we managed to put together two lists that ran to about 1000 points each. A nice little game to start with, and we went with the first scenario, kill. Such a dramatic name.

A lot of the game is in the deployment and neither of us are any good at that yet!

Here we go

(The Ratkin line up and get ready to charge gloriously forward or stumble over each other, one of the two)

(An army of blurry humans face them down. They are all berserkers except the leaders and bowmen, no doubt their sheer excitement causing them to blur)

My initial plan was for the warrior regiments to move up and hold off the berserkers while the hordes moved behind them to charge in after the they'd been worn down. In practice... things got muddled.

(The two forces meet in the middle of the Snowy Quilt fields, near the Hills of Paper Plate)

The thing is, berserkers hit hard and generals on winged beasts also hit hard, but in this case they only hit hard enough to waver everyone... which made for a bit of a road block for my army.

(The brave and noble rats hold the vile and evil humans at bay... just barely.)

So it became a confused melee in the center!

(The warlord of the rats boldly commands his horde to fight on, though he has forgotten the fact that he has no arms.)

Unfortunately I stopped taking pictures here because I was tired of trying to get even semi decent ones in the bad light. The berserkers broke through in the center, and while two of them were routed, the hordes broke too. We called it for time, and while i'm not sure it was a clear victory by the rules, I declared my dad the victor.

So that was that! It was a lot of fun to be honest, and I want to try to do a more... better written one of these some time, but just getting to play a game was a blast.

Rats!

Is that rats as in I forgot to post for too dang long, or rats as in, here are some rats?

Answer: Yes

I picked up most of these guys for quite cheap, which makes sense as they are rather battered. But I guess I have a ratkin force now!

Next: More actual detail on this, and perhaps a short report!