Finally...

I finally got to play a game of Warmachine last night.  It has been around six months since my last game of Warmachine by my reckoning.  There are just so few people in my area that play the game that it is hard to arrange one.  I was pretty happy to get this one in.

I must begin with the statement that after so long of only playing Warhammer, it was tough making the transition back to Warmachine and quite honestly, I had forgotten a lot of what I had learned.  I had only played 6-10 games before my little vacation and only one above battle box level.

We were playing 35 points.  I was playing Menoth becuase it's all I own.  I took the following:

pkreoss
Reckoner
Vanquisher
min Choir
min Exemplar Errants with UA
min Exemplar Bastions
Vassal
Covenant of Menoth
Exemplar Errant Seneschal

This list is constructed by choosing from my limited arsenal of minis rather than the optimum build.

I was playing Khador.  He had:

eSorcha
max Winterguard with UA
2 mortars
Widowmakers
2 Kodiaks
Kovnik Grigorovich
Some merc solo that was attached to eSorcha and let her upkeep a spell for free.

After turn one.

This was a pretty tough game for me.  Not only was his list nails, I was struggling to remember my rules and to activate one model at a time.  I was still trying to move everyone and then have them shoot or fight.  I had to move minis back on more than one occasion.  Cheers to James for being pretty forgiving.

James had me go first and my deployment kind of sucked.  I totally misused my Bastions and sent them after the Widowmakers.  I eventually got there and then got two chances to hit them and couldn't.  Lesson learned.  I also didn't get my Errants into the Winterguard or block charge lanes from the Kodiaks.

My dice also abandoned me.  I sent four shots over two turns  into the Winterguard and Sorcha.  I missed on all of them, but then had massive deviation rolls.  From all of those shots I set a total of four guys on fire.  My reckoner charged a Kodiak and did no damage on his shot and even with extra attacks, did a total of 6 damage.

Finally, I forgot to Feat.  Yeah, yeah, I know.  But I had so much going on in my head that the feat just slipped out.  I'm not sure it would have helped enough to avoid the loss, but it would have made it respectable.  The game ended on Sorcha's feat turn when all of the Winterguard blew up the Vanquisher and a Kodiak demoed the Reckoner.  I did have fun and I did learn a lot for next time but it did hurt a bit.. 

Construction Zone.  Beware of messes!

Besides finishing my Errant Seneschal as posted earlier, I spent my vacation building things.  I'm on a mission to finish building and painting at least 75% of my minis before I buy anything else.  My mission is saving me lots of money and scratching my completionist itch.

I forgot I even had these guys.

I took my first large step over the past week, by going through the boxes and blisters on my shelf and building and basing what was there one by one.  I already have a large number of built and primed models, but I want to be able to look at them all and see my overall progress.  As you can see, I built a lot of crap, both Warhammer and Warmachine.

The Dragon Princes need painting before final assembly.

I have now built all of the miniatures I plan on painting (there are a few I acquired here and there that no longer hold my interest).  The only things left to build are a couple of pieces of Warhammer terrain I got for Christmas.  I'm starting them today and I hope to finish them by the end of next weekend.  I need to pick up some styrofoam insulation to make the bases of the terrain more interesting and then I can begin the long road to redemption.  Stay tuned for continuing progress reports.

A Cautionary Tale

In the time before I was introduced to the seductive world of tabletop miniature games, I am told that the gaming community in our town was very disparate.  Some people knew some of the other people that gamed and some didn't.  Around the time that I was being exposed to the genre a fellow came to town that made it his mission to introduce the gaming community to one another and to open the lines of communication.  He also wanted to provide a central place for games to be played.  At this he succeeded.  There was a "clubhouse" of sorts and through message boards and other events, most gamers in town at least were aware of the other gamers in town.  Good job and happy ending, right?

Unfortunately,  the leader of the crew took on all responsibility and in organizing and communicating with the different people and groups that make up our local gaming community.  When the club was set up, there was no formal structure or committee put in place to run it.  None of this was a problem as long as the head guy is there at the centre of the web for everything to run through.  Honestly, we were all lazy enough to just let him take care of everything and he didn't really ask for much help.  However, this past winter, due to a new child, and various family issues, our guy sort of dropped off the face of the earth.  No blame for it, but it happened.  This is when our lack of organization started to show.  There was uncertainty about when there were club nights and if anyone with a key would be there to open the thing up.  There was nobody publicizing the club or running the Facebook page.  Attendance at gaming nights plummeted.  Then in a grand finale, the space we were using was going to be closed to us. 

Since our guy was the main point of communication, the notice went to him.  He didn't respond and didn't pass it on.  Lucky for us, there were three of us in the club when the news came down that the next Friday would be the last day the club was available to us.  The three of us came up with a plan.  One of our members found us space in his school to play and since the other two are school district employees, there are three of us with keys.  We got all of the stuff moved to the new place.  We got our guy to give us admin. privileges to the Facebook page.  We have a plan to start to promote the club again.  The next step is to formalize the arrangement so that the club can survive any one of us dropping out of sight or leaving (we have a very transitory population).

I just thought that people starting clubs or running them should know the potential pitfalls of either concentrating responsibility in one person or not formalizing your relationships.