AAR: Lord of the Rings: Battle Companies: Bogging Down!

    At our local Hobbytown, USA, it has been scheduled that a vast majority of us gamers play Lord of the Rings: Battle Companies on Thursday nights. The narrative campaign that I had mentioned in an earlier post is still going on. However, my wife, Kalissa has been going more that I have. I have been scheduled to work nearly every Thursday night, so these latest two games are what I played the last Thursday. Though, the narrative campaign was still being played, I decided not to play the Elves that I started with. Instead, I brought one of my other Battle Companies: my Mordor Orcs. At this point, they are nearly all Warg Riders. I like their speed and flexibility. And to boot, I brought my evil swamp board. Afterall, why only use a board once!
      So what I discovered is that my own board did not work well against me. Plus, I have come to an interesting conclusion when it comes to Battle Companies as a whole: I cannot use specialty rules in my forces! As luck would have it, almost everyone I have turned into a Hero with all of these "Bad Ass" rules dies first in a shooting phase. I have one Warg Rider with a bow that can shoot without movement penalties, with a 3+ hit that can reroll hits to kill. I do not know how good any of that is, because he died first in both games! This is a complaint, but that is only because, no one is playing a normal Lord of the Rings game. I think I could do more damage with regular troops that heroes running every where. I, also, would have rather not had a population cap, because I could have had a rather large army to use at this point.
     Anyway, here are some pictures of my demise. The first game, I lost everyone without killing anyone. "Flawless Victory!" from Mortal Combat was what I heard. The second game, I did much better. I killed three people before losing.

AAR: Congo: First Games on Safari

      It only took a year after buying the Congo rules for Kalissa and I to get figures for this game. I am pretty sure there are a lot of people who buy rule sets and forget to get miniatures for them. However, one of the things that Kalissa and I do before heading off to whatever convention we are going to is to make a list of games we have that we need stuff for. Kalissa had been telling me how easy and fun this game was, so we bought quite a few things for it. A side comment for us during these games was how we can keep up with all of the rules and games, since we play a lot of different games. I think we have been playing so many other game types that they are easy to understand at this point.
    Anyway, I went through and paint nearly everything we got for this game. What is lacking is the Forrest Tribe faction and animals. However, that will not take too much longer. Since the introduction of Games Workshop's Contrast Paints, I have sped through nearly everything we bought from Historicon 2019, which was about 200 figures in about three days. It will be another day just because of work and a commission project as well. So we just brought mainly what we had.
    Kalissa and I played to games of just killing each other. Since I had never played the rule before, I wanted to see how it played out. These rules come with campaigns, so that might be a fun to try for in the near future. As for the games, I chose to play the White Man Expedition Force against the African Kingdom. I found that the rules were fairly easy. We spent very little time looking over rules. I did find that I was rolling very well. Both games were victories for me. The second one was almost a flawless victory! I only had one casualty. The next time we play this, what to switch sides to see how well I do. Anyway, below are the game pictures as usual. Enjoy!

AAR: What A Tanker: Soviets Vs. Germans in 15mm.

   For our first official game back in Fayetteville after our convention trip, Kalissa and I wanted to play something simple at Hobbytown. Our choice was What A Tanker. This is such an easy game to pick up on and play. At the start of the game, I was facing off with Kalissa. However, because my wife operates best with food, she kind of ditched me for it. At least she was nice about by teaching our friend, Joe how to play and take over. I say friend, but he is more like my wargaming nemesis. Through this blog, you can find other game we've played against each other. At the moment, he is still up on the number of games he had won against. I am not sure why we keep track of this, but it is part of the fun.
     So Joe took over the Soviets which was a dramatic boost in morale. It did not take long for him to dispatch one of my Panthers. I was only able to knock out one SU-100 for revenge sake in this game. But the damage was done. I lost six tanks to his two. It was clearly a Joe victory. We will have to rematch with these rules again. Here are the rest of the photos. Enjoy!