Yugioh, AKA Magic and Wizards AKA Duel Monsters!

Hello there!
Sorry for some inactivity, but my excuse is three days of gaming and then some hard work on my Black Knigth-conversions.
But enough of that!

Today, I will write a column about the latest trend in my FLGS, Yugioh.
I know that to some of you, it might seem like a childish game, and I can't deny that you've got a point, but for now, let me tell you how this childrens' card game came to be a trend.

TOMATOOO

And yes, I said childrens' card game. As in Yugioh abridged.
For those of you not aware, Yugioh abridged is a parody of the series on youtube, which focuses on all that is stupid in the real series. It's really hilarious, and something I'd recommend.
And it came to be that a group at my FLGS had all watched this series, and therefore developed an interest in YGO, which combined with their nerd-minds, and thus, they set out to play the game themselves. And as quickly I could, I joined in. And found it to be a blast.

What I think is so great about this game is the balancing issues. Not like MTG, where some cards are worthless and two are broken... In YGO, as long as you keep it on a casual level, everything will be broken. The games I played were totally unpredictable, and insanity felt like it was just a step away from me. And due to our mentality while playing it (we played like they do in the series. Try it. Hilarity ensures!), everything went overboard silly. And thus, laughter was created!
In the end, I spelt a whole evening just playing repeatedly, not having a single boring game.
And for finals, I give you two advice:
First, for those of you familiar with the series.. You should try out abridged. Seriously. Do it.
Secondly, if you have seen abridged, give the game a go. If you don't want to spend some few money on a starter, just try and proxy (but it is hard to get the true OTT feeling without the real deal). Perhaps your gaming group will enjoy it just as I.

My next article will be about my converted Black Knights. I hope you'll look forward to it!
Until then!

Fantasy Batrep Warriors of Chaos VS Vampire Counts 1500p

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING BATREP CONTAINS NO ILLUSTRATIVE MATERIAL. THIS BATREP SHOULD NOT BE READ FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!


Warriors of Chaos
Note: I'm writing this from the top of my head since I didn't save the army list anywhere.

Lords & Heroes

Sorcerer Lord
Lvl 4 Wizard
Power Familiar
Dispel Scroll
Bronze Armor of Zhrakk

Exalted Hero
BSB, Add. Hand Wep.

Exalted Hero 204
Mark of Khorne, Juggernaut of Khorne
Collar of Khorne, Add Hand Wep.

Core

12 Warriors of Chaos
Standard bearer w. Banner of rage
Shield, Mark of Tzeentch (yeah I know Frenzy removes parry saves..)

12 Chaos Warriors
Mark of Khorne
Add. Hand Wep.
Standard Bearer

Special

5 Chaos Knights
Mark of Khorne
Standard Bearer

Vampire Counts
This was my first ever Fantasy game, so I might have a few mistakes done along this match...
Lord:
Vampire Lord w/ Beguile, Infinite Hatred, Blood Drinker, Walach's Bloody Hauberk, Enchanted Shield (In hindsight I noticed that you cannot have a magical armour and shield. However, for only 5 more pts I could have taken a Flayed Hauberk and Talisman of endurance, resulting in the same saves... So not much harm done).

Hero:
Necromances w/ Vanhels Danse Macabre, Book of Arkhan - 105

Core:
20 Ghouls w/ Ghast
27 Skeletons w/ Full Command, Spears
Corpse Cart

Special:
19 Grave Guard w/ Great Weapons, Full Command, Banner of the Barrows

Rare:
Black Coach

1st turn goes to Vampire player, The Cornerfag.
I had my Black coach covering the right flank, seeking to remain alive until it hade some more juice in it. Left side was Ghoul side, with the Necromancer among them. Then Corpse Cart, Grave Guard with Vampire, and Skeletons in that order, left to right.
I wanted the charges, so I decided to only move slightly up, hoping that he would move against me and provide me with the charges. Ghouls go around a tower, and Black Coach stays a little behind.
Magic Phase was fail phase. His Sorcerer Lvl 4 Wizard (Sorcerer Wizard, wat?) Dispelled. And nothing exciting happened, except thjat my Coach ate a dice.

Chaos Turn 1, Hate
Let the carnage commence....
Basically I just moved up my front line, trying to get as many charges in next turn. During the magic phase we rolled up a 6 and a 3, so 10 dice for me. The first spell i tried to cast was Treason of Tzeentch, aiming for the tomb..temple.. Ehm Grave Guard, with two power dice.. The result was a (not-so-very) glorious snake-eyes, my chaos sorcerer was obviously busy scheming great plans instead of concentrating on casting spells, so I passed the turn back to my undead adversary...

Vampire Counts, Turn 2
Alright, I had some possible charges to do... Or well, two. My Skeletons were close to the far right unit of Chaos Warriors, and my Grave Guard had their sights set on the other unit of Chaos Warriors. The Black coach had by now devoured two dice for his power-up, so I decided for him to move inteo the fight.. However, fearing his wolves in the right flank, The Coach stayed behind the Skeletons, at a safe distance.
The Skeletons got their charge, but the Grave Guard failed ofcourse. Ghouls moved up a bit.
My main problem was that if I didn't do anything, his Knights would be crashing into by Grave Guard Line on his turn.
My solution came with my magic phase. I actually got through with casting Winds of Undeath, creating a spirit host in front of the Chaos Knights (and got to kill a chaos warrior or two as a bonus!), blocking their charge.
The Skeletons didn't manage to defeat the Chaos Warriors, but they sure did hold them there. And with that, I passed the turn to Hate.

Chaos turn 2
Yes... Everything went just as planned...
This turned I charged his Grave Guards with my chaos warrior, 'twas a mistake to do this without support from the knights, but I underestimated their prowess. And yeah.. The knights charged the spirit hosts.. Yaaaaay...! Also.. I forgot to move one of my warhound units.. Hmm... Maybe I should've brought the attack dogs and not the guard dogs .. Oh well.

During the close combat phase my brave exalted hero challenged the fancy-pants vampire, who actually dared to accept.. So they fought each other and both wounded once.
... And then my Chaos Warriors Fighting the Grave Guards got clobbered... Taking some rather heavy casualties. The Knights Slaughtred the spirit host and my other unit of Chaos Warriors broke some bones, making the other unit of skeletons lose most of their unit.

Then I shipped the turn back to my vampiric nemesis.

Vampire Counts, turn 3

Now, taking a look at the table, I decided I still didn't want those Knights crashing into my Grave Guard lines, and my Ghouls had a pretty nice reach to their flank.. Which they reached.
In the magic phase, it was just my Corpse Cart, having been held back, that cast his Miasma of Deathly Vigor, giving the Ghouls and Grave Guard Always Strikes First (which in the Case of the Grave Guard cancelled out their ALways Strikes Last, and had them striking at I3 instead. Woo!)
My Skeletons managed to get in a few kicks and punches, but nothing too dramatic.
The Ghouls were AMAZING. Kinda. They did actually manage to wound the Lord on Juggernaut, before getting some of their brethren gruesomly killed, while the Necromancer stood the farthest back, looking at his boots in shame of not daring to accept the challenge.
My Grave Guard kept dismembering his Chaos Warriors, while my Vampire won the challenge, regaining his own lost wounds and one or two for the Grave Guard unit.
And I shipped turn to Hate.

Chaos turn 3
Mwhahahaha....
This movement phase wasn't very dramatic. All of my relevant units were still locked in combat, so I just moved my warhounds into a better position.
In retrospect.. This turn wasn't very dramatic at all.. Ehm... Very well.
During the close combat phase my last chaos warriors fighting the grave guards were utterly destroyed to oblivion (note that some still survived.). But the foolish count didn't remember that blood only makes the blood god stronger.. Mwhahahha..
My Exalted hero on the juggernaut slayed a huge number of ghouls, and the other unit of Chaos Warriors (finally..) destroyed the unit of skeleton warriors, then reforming so that they were facing the Grave Guards.
Then I let my noble enemy have at it in his next turn.

Vampires, turn 4.
Well, this is were things started going downhill. With the skeletons dead (HURR), I decided for my Black Coach to charge the Chaos Warriors' flank, hoping to, well, do something. Other than that, there wasn't much for me to do.
Nothing in the magic phase, really.
Grave Guard bashed major warrior brains, who fled. Baha, bye!
Black Coach underperformed... Although he did live to tell his underperforming tale, but oh well. Atleast he had the Warrior unit away from the Grave Guards.
Ghouls just flew around in nice, red arcs of blood to the swings of the JuggerLords axe.
And turn shipped.

Chaos Turn 4
All that I was able to move this turn was the two units of warhounds. So I released the guardogs, charging the Black Coach, and the other hound charged it to, in the rare and in the flank.
Then there's the magic phase:
Then there was close combat. Unsurprisnigly, the black coach was no match for my viscious dogs.. And chaos warriors. The Exalted Hero slayed another bunch of ghouls.
Then I decided that my vampiric antagonist could have his next turn.

Vampire Turn 5
Well, I needed some major attention from the dice gods to turn this. But you may always hope for smoething awesome to happen, and so a kept playing.
Grave Guards with my the Vampire charged the Knights. DIE, KNIGHTS, DIE!
My Corpse Cart decided to get the Chaos Warrior unit in the flank.
No magic this turn either.
Unsuprisingly, my Grave Guard didn't disappoint me this time either, as they killed most of the Knights along with the Vampire. I'm not gonna lose without a fight. Also, the dooder on a Juggernaut killed of the last remnants of the Ghoul unit.
Atleast the Grave Guard had that in mind. The Corpse Cart decided just to lull around in the Chaos Warrior unit and well.. stomping some grass, swatting some flies. Whatever undead carts do in their spare time, when deciding not to kill the enemy.
And turn was shipped, for what I suspected to be the last time.

Chaos turn 5
My movement phase was pretty much the same as the last. I CHARGED THE CLOSEST 4-WHEELED(-ISH) THING NEARBY. This time it was a cart, and it was filled with corpses.
Then I gladly continued to my magic phase.
Then there was close combat. My Exalted Hero challenged the Vampire, who accepted. Then the Exalted Hero bravely sacrificed himself to the blood god, making the charge of the warriors even mightier. One brave knight still held against the undead horde.. ehm.. Regiment.. Ehm.. pack. And yeah.. The corpse cart was no more.
And then I let the brave Cornerfag begin the end in turn 6.

Vampire turn six.
Grave Guards died. The end.
WOOOH.

Redux, Hate
This game was great, really close and brutal. Lots of dead stuff - Making it an awesome warhammer match. The things I would have done differently... First of all.. I wouldn't have tried to cast a spell that doesn't do anything against targets that are immune to psychology and then fail it... Other than that, the game was pretty straight forward, allthough I probably should have deployed one of my Warhound units differently. But all and all: Good game.
Ave Victoria!

Redux, The Cornerfag.
Well, this was my first game of Fantasy, so I was bound to make mistakes.
My main mistake, I think, was the inclusion of Black Coach and Corpse Cart was a waste imo. They are now switched out for other stuff in my general list.
Other than that, I'm pretty proud of myself. The Grave Guard were as cool as I'd hoped, they'll be a mainstay of my army.
Otherwise, I was pretty much as satisfied as Hate. It was a even, good match. Yay!

Weekly Update 16/06-2011

Hail!
This week wasn't as spectacular as I was hoping for. The only gaming done this week was playing Pathfinder yesterday. I believe we're going to start write recaps of what we do every session, so stay tuned.

During the coming weekend however, we're going to play a bunch of Warhammer Fantasy, probably batreping some. More about this in the next Weekly Update.

What to expect in the coming week:
Warhammer Fantasy Batreps
Roleplaying Recap
Something about Yu-Gi-Oh
And maybe some random article..



Ave Victoria!
/Hate

Weekly update 9/06-2011

Hail!
This week we tried out Infinity (See: Infinity by the Cornerfag). With the exception of no-one knowing the rules really well, it was fun and I will consider getting some of the awesome-looking Infinity minis and start playing it for real. We also played some Warhammer fantasy, Warriors of Chaos vs. Vampire Counts. It was a great, even match. There will be a batrep of it soon...

In addition we played Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2E (AD&D2e) , a campaign I'm currently DMing. A lot happened during the session, but it ended up with the party killing a weak Demigod. I might bother writing about this in greater detail in the future, but not now...

And the gaming related picture of this week...



And that's it for this week, next week the summer break will be in full effect, so there will (hopefully) be lots of gaming done.

Ave Victoria!
/Hate

Infinity

Hey there again.
Yesterday, I had my first game of Infinity (fully proxed for the ultimate testing experience!)
And I just wanted to say that I liked it. It was a nice variation to always playing Warhammer as the miniature wargame.

I've chosen Infinity because, well... Games Workshop are not acting the best way they could right now. And Privateer Press will most likely act the same way once they can, so I tried to find a alternative. One that doesn't require you to buy tons of models and such, and the result was Infinity.


As a skirmish-game, games only require you to have 10 - 15 models for a medium-sized game... Which felt really nice. Way less time spent on moving things around. And it will be way easier getting everything painted, meaning you can actually use your painting skills on every model without feeling that it will take years for you to move on to that next unit to paint.

The drawback of this is that Infinity solely use metal for their miniatures. As we all know, it makes glueing harder, the paint is more likely to get chipped off, and the miniature is waaay more fragile. They should really, like GW just did, move over to resin, or some equivalent. It would do them good.
Oh, and did I mention the rulebook is ALL FREE?!
Really, that was sweet.

As for the game itself... The first game really took time, since neither of us knew the rules. Usually when getting into a hobby someone you know will know the rules already, but not here, so much time was spent on rules-checking, and the rules were not easy to find at points.
But the rules we knew, the basic system... Was, in my opinion, reaaaally great. Basically, you get a number of orders per turn, and with these orders you can command models to do things (like move, shoot, climb, jump... discover hidden troops, go into camouflage... Really, there were many things to do. REALLY many). Also, the dice system was rather original and refreshing.
The dice system utilized D20s, requiring you to roll below your skill to pass. However, if you roll in face-to-face, then you want to succeed by the smallest margin possible, preferably rolling exactly on what your skill was.
And also again, for every action you did during your turn, your opponents models who could see the acting model each got a reaction. Usually this was shooting at your model. So the dense cover utilized was really important to use well!
The order - reaction system really makes the game require some strategy. I lost two models before realizing that I had to minimize the amount of reactions my opponent got (by taking out that really irritating sniper positioned up in a tower. Damned thing killed off almost 60 pts of my 300 pts army).

So, all in all, infinity was a great game, and I will surely start buying the minis and get into it. I'm not saying that it's strictly better than warhammer, but it is a really different game, providing some much needed variation.
That's all from me for today!

Spreading "An Open (Video) Letter to Games Workshop"

Watch