Club Night 25th May

A new Warhammer league has kicked off. Having finished 3rd last year I was looking forward to this and had decided to try something different after a silly conversation earlier in the year. After scouring e-bay I have bought most of the listed Beastmen chariots and am deploying a force with no less than 12 of them, including some Razorgor chariots. Not knowing if this was going to work I hoped at least it would be fun to play. To open the league I booked a game to play Luke's slayer heavy dwarfs with an Anvil of doom. Immediately the gods were not with me as we rolled the watchtower scenario with the Dwarfs starting in it. With only two screens for my Shamans able to attack it, it was going to stay in their hands, just depended what I could do to the rest of the army!

I swept forward around the tower trying to ignore the missile fire. As my spells failed to cast, and actually caused me more losses due to miscasts (by the end both shamans would be dead thanks to their inability to control their magic!). Fortunately the Anvil of Doom was proving equally ineffective.

As my chariots started to impact I started to realise how good this army could be. Attacking in groups of 3 the impact hits could be devastating, and the extra attacks from the Razorgors were proving really useful. Even if I didn't break units I was reducing them so far that it was almost even in subsequent rounds. Gradually I wore down the dwarfs, charging extra chariots in for more impact hits whenever one was killed and a gap created.

Meanwhile on the other flank my hounds and harpies were managing to hold the Thunderers until a chariot arrived to swing the combat. By the end of the game there was only the dwarfs in the tower left, surrounded by Beastmen chariots like some kind of fantasy waggon circle! A good start for the Beastmen Chariot army of doom!

Club Night 18th May

Luke and I played the next in our very slowly running early desert axis of attack campaign. This time the British were attacking, and had rolled a hold the line scenario, so the Italians were not only defending but had extra defences to help them out.

While the Jock Column is good on the move it really doesn't have the strength or heavy firepower to assault a fixed position and suffered accordingly to massed defensive firepower where the small number of men in the units to enable the truck mobility meant they could ill afford the losses and it was an easy Italian victory.

D-Day Game, 28th April

On Saturday a group of us headed up the club to play a slightly tweaked version of the D-Day scenario from Wargames Illustrated. I tool the Americans on the right Allied beach. Although I had plenty of troops facing me was a wall, bunkers and dug-in Germans. It was not going to be an easy task.

Above: The calm before the storm, below: Americans begin to land onto a crowded beach

As I began to make my landings I came under fire from every angle, but was able to rush up to the sea wall and take cover as I prepared my assault troops to attack and knock out the bunkers, but before I did that I had to deal with the village on my left were lots of fire was enfilading my approaches. With my engineers and rangers armed with flamethrowers able to close up in a very small blind spot I was then able to start attacking and driving the Germans back.

Above: Pushing into the town on the left of my beach, below: "You get moving!", Steve K issues orders to the British armour!

With the village cleared I was now free to start attacking the bunkers. I was able to use the blast wall of the 88mm bunker to avoid fire and close and then assaulted across the barbed wire and survived the final bursts of fire and knocked out the bunker. This just left the machine gun bunkers in the middle which now drove my assaulters back. However with the 88 knocked out I was able to bring some armour off the beach and engage it and knocked it.

Below: And they are off (the beach!)

But as my armour advanced further in shore they came in range of a platoon of PAK40s and quickly started to brew up. But my infantry was beginning to advance and the British were making equally good progress. More importantly to me the American paras were beginning to attack the Germans from behind and had seized their primary objective and was just about holding off the German armour counter attack. Unfortunately 6th Airborne had not fared as well, but as we ran out of time it was clearly an Allied victory.

This was a really fun game. Despite its size the scenario had been well designed and by using the same forces as in the magazine we had quite balanced force and I really enjoyed playing it. Maybe next up should be something big for the desert?

Club Night 27th April

Woff is coming soon and I will make a return. As it is doubles I am being joined by Ed with his Chaos Warriors to fight alongside my Beastmen. We thought we ought to try and get at least one practice game in and Duncan and Mike agreed to take us on with Daemons and Ogres. Against this we had two really big blocks of Marauders, with a supporting unit of Chaos Warriors and a Hellcannon. My Beastmen to provided smaller supporting units for impact hits from the chariots and flank protectors and war machine killers with smaller units, warhounds and harpies.

It was a very good game, the armies worked exactly as hoped, we had a little luck and did serious damage to our opponents and won. This is quite an achievement as I can not remember the last time I beat Duncan at warhammer as he is a very astute player so hopefully this bodes well for the tournament.