alexanderlambert

We chose and built one battlefield (off the heroscapers.com forums) using two of the Rise Of The Valkyrie master sets and one Road To The Forgotten Forest expansion set, creating the ruins of a hilltop fortress with an open catacomb underneath, with waterlogged areas on the east and west, and starting areas on the north and south slopes of the hill. Tweaking the original design to make it less symmetrical, I put my forces in the ruins and the catacombs, while Nick set his up on either side of the hill, forcing me to divide my forces (thus offsetting the advantages of higher ground and concealment).

I brought with me one field case with dice, order markers, wound indicators, and the figures and army cards for all my Terrifying Undead (personality and species being two of the descriptors on the army cards); the entire Esenwein family of vampires (including Iskra's three pet Rechets, these gargoyle-looking things that are also listed as Terrifying Undead), both of my squads of the Shades of Bleakwoode (ghosts who can possess people), and sixteen squads of the Zombies of Morindin. At 3 figures to each of those squads (though not to all possible squads), that was way more figures than I could field, but I wanted to stick with a Terrifying Undead theme, so I brought everything. And three times, I defended the two glyphs of Brandar (double-elimination capture the flag, basically), while Nick sent armies at me from both sides.

Each time, I used basically the same build. Cyprien Esenwein the vampire lord as my superheavy, his wife Sonia to boost the hit rate of his life-draining special power, one squad of Shades as high-mobility scouts, and five squads of the Zombies, as brute simple muscle.

Game one, he fielded an all-Marro army, with two of the gigantic Marro hivelords (Tor-Kul-Na to trample over my figures and Wo-Sa-Ga to crush them in her coils) and a couple squads of sacrificial Marro Nagrubs to heal their wounds with, and a large number of Marro Drones to be the main crushing force of his assault in the midgame.

I won, easily. Nick underestimated Cyprien's ability both to slice his way through minions to get to the hivelords, and then to cut them down in turn (although I got really lucky with the dice and killed Tor-Kul-Na in one shot). And by the time Cyprien fell, I had enough numerical advantage for the Zombies to clean up what was left, despite being slightly weaker than the Marro Drones individually.

Second game, Nick recognized the hero-killing threat of Cyprien, and fielded an army of werewolves, with only one low-value hero, but a lot of high-cost squads to pummel me with. I responded by cutting out the Shades in favor of Iskra and the Rechets, hoping to be able to summon her pets just behind the front line of his first wave, breaking their stride.

And that time he got ridiculously lucky, one-shotting Cyprien in the first round, making it very hard for me to get the numerical advantage that Zombies need to achieve victory. And then he managed to kill Iskra before she could summon her pets, reducing my army's overall strength to half normal, while I'd only killed one of his cheapest figures. I put up one hell of a fight, and made him pay for every hex of the battlefield, but in the end my Zombies just couldn't hold up against an equal number of stronger, more durable, faster-moving werewolves.

Third battle, Nick went cheap, going out of his way to only field units specifically immune to at least half of my army's arsenal. But he'd gotten some bad news between the second and third games, so I consider that one to be purely therapy for him. In which he absolutely crushed my army with robots that I couldn't life drain, plague hounds who could poison my undead (an oversight in the rules) just by moving next to them, and every single figure couldn't be turned into a zombie, which reduced my army to a flying guy with a sword (but no super-strength), and some goons who like to gang up on people. Versus plague hounds and giant robots. Sure, I added Marku the berzerk vampire to the mix, but he didn't have the defensive strength to last long against the killer robots.

Oh well. The important thing was that I got out of the house to have some recreation before tomorrow.