A concern of characters

Some of the forums and e-mail groups I am on have expressed a concern about percentages coming back to Warhammer, and how the age of Herohammer may be once again upon us. I don't agree totally with this fear, and here is why.

I can certainly see why people are worried about Herohammer. I remember coming into the game in 5th edition and spending all night with my buddy tooling up a Bret Lord that had a shot of taking down my brother's Slann Mage Priest of Destruction. It was fun to try to counter such an uber hero, but would not have been so much fun in a tournament setting or against a player I didn't know.
That being said, one thing I really like about the percentages system being instituted in 8th Edition Warhammer is the chance to take multiple heroes, and have those heroes in very specific roles. Sure, you can take three Black Orc bosses, but honestly, that's not a ton of points left to kit them out, and this makes them vunerable. What I think will be more fun, and hopefully more likely, is people using those percentages to fit in some cheap characters that provide the army with something very specific. For example, how many engineers did you see an empire player take? I never saw people running then, and for good reason. You had four characters. You had to take a lord (1), you were crazy (or at least very ballsy) not to take 2 mages for magic defense (2), and that left you with 1 choice left. So naturally, it's pretty hard to slide past a captain or a warrior priest. That meant, despite having some cool rules and nice fluff, you just weren't going to see an engineer. There are other examples of such problems through out the army books. My hope is that the new percentages will give rise to characters who are weaker, but more specialized. Consequently, you will have a chance to use and play against a wider variety of builds and characters in a competative environment. Sure it can be abused, but so could the army restrictions from 6th/7th... thus the never ending comp debates.

There are definately some things I am concerned about (from what I have heard) but I am actually excited to give the percentages a try.
Could this old boy be seeing some action in 8th edition? I sure hope so...

It's Here

The new Warhammer 8th edition dropped for pre-order today on the GW website. This monsterous 528 page tomb is full color, and comes in at a hefty $75 price tag. Fairly expected, but still, if you get that, a unit of great swords, and some blood knights, you'd have to mortgage your home...

Still, pretty exciting. Check out this link for more details.... http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/content/blogPost.jsp?aId=10500132a

Assasinate!!!

I played a game of Malifaux last night against RPA and his Pandora band. It had been a while, so I was a bit shaky on the rules, but he has been playing a little recently, and helped me out. To be fair though, both of us are still learning our factions, so we played for fun and had a nice time but neither of us probably played optimal with our crew.

we played a 25 SS game on RPA's beautiful Wild West town terrain. To spice things up, we had a train rolling through the middle of the board that caused damage if people were hit by it, or thrown into it. It moved a random card length each turn. It was very cinematic and fun. We each deployed on table halves (3x3) with the train running down the middle. Our factions were:

His Crew:
Pandora

Baby Kade

Candy

3x Sorrows

My Crew

Perdita

Santiago

Nino

Excecutioner

I love Perdita, but have found she is much better with soulstones, so I have been leaving one extra character at home to pump those up. I took Santiago b/c he is always a beast in my games, and b/c I love, love, love the model. Nino is a great, long range threat, and with buildings he's very good to post on a roof. Finally, I don't think the Excecutionar was the best choice for this game, but he's my newest model, and has some paint on him, so I wanted to try him out.

We both drew the Assasinate Strategy, meaing we got 4 VP for wiping out the opposing crew, and 2 VP for leaving only Master's alive. For my schemes, I took body guard (+1 VP if alive at end, +2 if you declare it) on Perdita since I knew I'd want to keep her alive and she's so fast, she can boogy out of danger. I felt confident enough with her to declare this scheme. I also took bodyguard on Santiago b/c he can heal damage and b/c he's such a beast when he get's wounded, I thought maybe RPA would ignore him. In retrospect, I should have taken one of my bodyguards on Nino, since he hid on the roof all game. I didn't find out RPA's other scheme, but he did declare break through, which meant he had to get more of his models in my deployment zone than I had. He had me outnumber 6 models to 4, I knew he was counting on that to help him.

- to start the game, we both advanced towards each other. I got Nino forward on a roof, and put Perdita by the Exec while Santiago came up by himself. I opted to spread out a little, as he could dump his guys anywhere he wanted in my deployment zone and win. He linked his sorrows and crew, and advanced. Below you can see santiago pushing up, the neverborn on on the otherside of the tracks.

- next turn the train got in our way. I contemplated rushing perdita across the tracks, but I knew it would make her very vunerable, and so help back. I did try to "obey" candy in to the train, which worked, but failed to cause any damage. Nino could get a bead on a sorrow, and blew it to hell. Pandora saw throught he gap in the train to Santiago, and caused him to blast himself, and run away. Candy failed to cause the Excecutionar to "self Loath" himself. Below, you can see the crews moving towards each other. Santiago is about to run, and Candy has not yet emmerged from the General Store.

- Next turn saw major action. RPA probably got a bit too anxious, and used Candy's ability to "phase" through the train. When she failed to make people run, this opened her and her Sorrow up to a combined barrage from Nino, the Exec, and Perdita. It didnt' go well for her.

- In round four, the train passed far enough for Pandora to come around the back. The highlight of the game was her attempt to get the Executionar to run and panic 3 times, and to fail them all. This was absolute luck from me, as I drew high cards and RPA drew low ones. The Exectionar even charged her, but failed to do any damage. Later in the round, I popped Baby Kade and Perdita's sorrow, and RPA conceeded.

It was a fun game. I got some lucky cards at critical times, and that swung things. We both could have played better, but we are still learning. It also took to long, but that was 100% my fault, I am rereading the rules again this weekend. Great time though.