Warmachine Batrep: Borka vs Rahn

Our club wrapped up its Umbra league a few weeks back and I was able to catch a quick game.  Turned out to be a fairly one-sided match versus Monte and the infamous Borka Kegslayer, Most Difficult Warlock To Kill In The Whole Game.  Or, at least I think that's his title.  Seeing him, I insisted on scenario.

Borka Kegslayer and "Kenny"

Borka Kegslayer
- Pyg keg carrier ("Kenny")
- Dire troll mauler
- Troll axer
- Troll impaler
- Swamp troll
Fell caller hero
Trollkin fennblades (full+UA)
Troll whelps
(note: List is 39/40 points due to not enough models)


... versus ...

Adeptus Rahn Shyeel
- Phoenix
- Phoenix
Arcanist
Arcanist
Dawnguard sentinels (min+UA+soulless)
House Shyeel battle mages
House Shyeel battle mages

Monte deployed his entire collection of trolls.  I am not any kind of expert on trolls, but I suspect this may not have been Borka's finest list.  Borka an the beasts deployed in a clump slightly left of center and the fennblades and posse deployed right of center so the groups were about a foot apart.

Rahn's feat was devastating, allowing Rahn and the battlemages to pull all four warbeasts close enough for phoenix and sentinel charges, who were then controlling the central and left-most objectives.  The fennblades spent several turns trying to crunch through battlemages to get to Rahn -- and they would have -- but Retribution had won on scenario before then.

Not one attack was made against Borka.

Warmachine Un-Batrep: Old Witch vs Rahn

Steve and I setup to play a game this Saturday morning.  I should have seen it coming.

Zevanna Agha, The Old Witch of Khador
* Conquest
* Scrapjack
* Sylys Wyshnalyrr
Battle Mechaniks (leader+3)
The Great Bears of Gallowswood
Kayazy Assassins (leader+9+UA)

...Versus...

Adeptus Rahn Shyeel
* Phoenix
* Phoenix
Arcanist
Arcanist
Dawnguard Sentinels (leader+5+UA+WA)
House Shyeel Battle Mages (leader+5)
House Shyeel Battle Mages (leader+5)

Retribution won the roll and advanced.  Khador advanced.  Conquest fired at one phoenix doing six boxes and killing a nearby soulless escort, then setup a line of AoE and clouds across the board between our armies.

Dawnguard advanced with their vengeance move.  Rahn used Telekinesis to move both phoenixes forward, then tried to use it a third time to move a phoenix again.  Whoops!  That's illegal.  One advanced to combust and clear out the kayazy.  I misjudged the distance and only got three.  The other advanced to combust and clear out the great bears, but because I needed the second Telekinesis, he was short and missed all his attacks, leaving him two inches from the bears and five inches from Conquest.  Looked at the board… saw what was coming… saw no way out of it... and scooped.  The end.

Steve generously spent the next half hour talking through alternatives plans and how that might have affected the remainder of the game.  He strongly recommended I should have used the dawnguard's vengeance plus run to have them engage the kayazy, tying them up for a turn, and sacrificed one phoenix to the great bears to draw them out of position so I could kill them the next turn.  These still don't sound like very good options.  The battle is still replaying in my head, looking for alternatives.

Lessons learned: Telekinesis can only only affect a model once per turn.  And I need a serious revamp in my lists to deal with kayazy and underboss.

Warmachine Batrep: Magnus1 vs Rahn

Magnus the Traitor

Tuesday, Maz and I played a 35-point Warmachine game with the Longest Night scenario rules.  We missed out running this last year and he might before Halloween seemed a perfect encore.

Maz has been switching over to Magnus lists, beefing out a mercenaries army.  I somehow have never played against mercenaries and have only seen them (beyond admiring the models) once when a nearby tournament player experienced Gorten's Landslide feat for the first time.  A few pirate-y words were uttered.  But today we did not face Gorten; this was Magnus, bane of Cygnar!

Magnus the Traitor +6pt
- Mangler 8pt
- Nomad 6pt
- Renegade 6pt
- Renegade 6pt
Horgenhold Forge Guard (full) 8pt
Kell Bailloch 2pt
Master Gunner Dougal MacNaile 2pt
Rheinholt, Goblin Speculator 1pt
Rhupert Carvolo, Piper of Ord 2pt

Serious players will no doubt notice several problems with this list.  First, no mercenary contract allows Horgenhold Forge Guard to be taken with Magnus1.  The will only work with Cygnar, the Protectorate or Searforge contract.  However, Magnus' Four Star contract only allows models that work for Khador or Cryx.

Furthermore, we didn't realize until I started writing this battle report that he was running six points down.  But, more on this later.

Adeptus Rahn Shyeel
- Phoenix
- Phoenix
Arcanist
Arcanist
Dawnguard Sentinels (6+UA+WA)
House Shyeel Battle Mages
House Shyeel Battle Mages

(Getting close to my goal.  This list is almost fully painted.  One unit of battle mages to go!)

The Mercenaries won the roll and opted to go first.  He setup the forge guard on his extreme right flank with Rhupert and the rest of his force on the extreme left.  Facing a (generally) slow Rhulic force with a (generally) quick Iosan force, a denied flank setup was obvious.  Rahn's models setup far right, directly across from Magnus and the warjacks.  It would take the forge guard three or four turns to arrive -- assuming they could get past the thralls spawning from the tents.

Top of turn 2

And that's exactly what happened.  Maz played ten points short (for the mispositioned forge guard) and another six point short for using a list builder that didn't remind him about warjack points.  It was a rout.

Maz built his list with Privateer Press' new War Room application and it was a severe disservice.  As a relatively new mercenaries faction player, he was not intimately familiar with the contract requirements of his caster and units and War Room did nothing to remind him of those limitations.  It silently allowed him to create and use an illegal list.  Furthermore it did not remind him that his list was incomplete.  It blithely displayed "35 points" where it could have displayed "35/41 points".  Bad experience for Maz; bad experience for me.  Bad for the game.

For these and many other reasons: Don't use War Room.  Don't allow your opponents to use it.  Don't give Privateer Press or Tinkerhouse Games any money for it.  You will only encourage them.

Lessons learned?  Not many.  It wasn't that sort of game.  Battle mages towing enemy warjacks into melee range of a focus-charged, concentrated power phoenix is lovely to behold.  MacNaile's artillerist power with the renegades is a nasty trick, but only once per warjack and it's nicely negated by Rahn's force field spell and the battle mages' inherent blast immunity.  Pretty straightforward and short game.

Hope to try this again sometime.  Maz is always a pleasure to play with, and mercenaries are a fascinatingly fresh opponent.

Wrath/Domination Event

"Victorious warriors win first and then go to war." --Sun Tzu

Shrine of the Medals

Last Saturday we finally held our club's Wrath/Domination combo-release event.  It was a six-hour, all-factions event using both special events rules.  Much as I would love to write about the event design, prep, operation, and post-mortem, but those topics can wait.  But rather than share all that Event Organizer work, I would much rather talk about greed.

First and foremost, you need to know that the prizes for these events are custom-molded and painted faction-specific coins made by Privateer Press.  They are exceptionally cool, and as much as I love the other two Retribution players in our club (Hi, Brandon!  Hi, John L.!), that coin was coming home with me.

Warmachine: Unbound Test Drive

Who thought this was a good idea?

Steve W. and I played an apocalyptic 150 point game of Unbound on MLK Day. Unbound is a relatively new set of rules for Warmachine that allows extremely large games of 150 points or more with three warcasters in each army.  Rules for Unbound can be found in No Quarter magazine issues 36 and 38.

It hadn't been done before in our club. The models were sitting in our bags, daring us. Something had to give. We decided to start at 9 AM, but logistical issues and setup delayed us until noon.

One does not simply begin a game of Unbound. One must prepare, mentally and physically. One must ... unpack. One must pull up an extra table upon which to place models and cards and magazines with rules. One must take a very deep breath.

We began to set up.

Warmachine Batrep: Xerxis vs Rahn

Tyrant Xerxis

Chad and I played a good old 50 point Kill Box game Tuesday night.  Chad's list was allegedly taken from PG Lord Tyrant Watt's 2011 tournament list, with the exchange of a unit of Cetrati for Tiberion, the new character tyrant introduced in Wrath.

Tyrant Xerxis
- Aptimus Marketh
- Basilisk Krea
- Cyclops Shaman
- Tiberion
- Tyrant Sentry
Agonizer
Cataphract Cetrati (leader+5)
Nihilators (leader+9)
Paingiver Beast Handlers (leader+3)

My list remained the Rahn list I've been playing the past few weeks:


Adeptis Rahn
- Manticore
- Phoenix (x2)
Arcanist (x2)
Dawnguard Sentinels (leader+9+UA)
- Soulless Escort
House Shyeel Magister
House Shyeel Battle Mages (leader+5)
Mage Hunter Assassin (x2)
Narn

Warmachine Batrep: Skarre2 vs Rahn

Malice

With the League and Unbound out of the way, Chris and I thought it was high time to throw down a fifty point game.  Chris brought his Skarre2 list, upgraded and improved for fifty points.

I've played Chris' different versions of this same list at 35 points a few times now, and knew what to expect.  Cryx is full of nasty little tricks, but one of the dirtiest plays out like this: Malice harpoons one of your warjacks and tows him across the board, and spends a soul to possess it.  He then activates the 'jack and sends it running deep into the Cryx lines where the Withershadow Combine uses their Dark Industry power to wreck it and replace it with a new helljack.  Hooray.  What could be more fun?  He fills the rest of the army with units you can't really ignore, like The Deathjack and a full unit of satyxis raiders with UA and solo support.  And at fifty points, he throws in some pistol wraiths to ensure your 'jacks are easy pickings.

But it didn't quite play out that way.