Thaw of the Lich Lord 2

Got in our second game of the Thaw of the Lich Lord campaign this weekend...

I had been working on some terrain for it for several weeks on and off, and today I did a trial layout to see how it was shaping up. My 11 year old son happened to see it, and he is not quite as much of a wargaming perfectionist as I am! So, funny enough, he said "it looks done to me, can't we play?"

Who am I to say no!

Here is the layout. The frozen river itself is a 3x3 gaming mat from UrbanMatz.







The shoreline of the river is made from 2" foam, covered in Lemax cobblestone and brick pattern vinyl sheeting that is always sold with Christmas houses in Michael's.

The boats are a combination of toy boats by Playmobil, Lemax Christmas decorations, and actual wargaming boat models by Games of War. There is also a boat in there from the new Games Workshop Laketown House terrain set.

I had planned on doing rigging and sails for the large ship, and detailing it a little more. The cleats are not even painted yet! I also wanted to add some more hardware. Oh well, all in time. It was good enough to get a game in with!

We set up on our opposite shorelines and got ready for battle. In this scenario, you can fall and slip on the ice if you move too fast - and in turn 3, an enemy wizard (a servant of the Lich Lord!) climbs up from below deck on the large ship carrying some serious loot.







We seemed to be following the same basic playbook on this one; our Wizards, Apprentices, and Archers took cover in the buildings lining the river, while our Treasure Hunters and Thieves took their chances on the ice! We also sent in our various summoned animals, zombies, and imps.



Unfortunately for him, I got a lucky roll in turn 2 and landed a critical hit on his Wizard with a Bone Dart!



That's one dead wizard.

He had kept another model in front of his Wizard to avoid this, but an intervening model only counts as "+1" cover. After this, he got a bit more conservative and took heavy cover inside a building with his apprentice!







Before long he had returned the favor and killed my Apprentice.

We each got control of 2 pieces of treasure... unfortunately for him (again), the only monsters that popped out did so in his deployment zone! There were 2 armored skeletons looking for trouble:



He dispatched them easy enough though.

We both got close to the ship just as the Lich's servant was about to appear.





He started to make a Beeline for the board edge, but my Treasure Hunters caught him.



After killing the Lich's servant, there was a big fight inside one of the boats as we struggled to take control of the big treasure piece.



I made it off the board with it though. His Knight was almost able to stop him, but he slipped and fell on the ice!



He gave me a scare as an Imp I had forgotten about headed right for my Wizard! Not worrying about his reputation, my Wizard cast "Leap" and flew right off the board to fight another day.



With no Wizard to hunt, the Imp tried to keep my Thief from getting off the board with treasure.



Luckily, my Ranger was able to get over there and help him out in time before he got killed.



All in all, a solid victory for my Necromancer, as I got off the board with 2 treasure pieces and the Lich's big loot pile. It was a Pyrrhic victory though...

My son only ended up with one casualty:



But look at my dead pile!



I used an Elixir of Life to keep from having to roll for the Apprentice, and lost one Treasure Hunter out of the others.

I think it's time for these guys to get some names! We've played several games with these warbands now, so they deserve proper names instead of just "Wizard, Apprentice, Purple Shirt guy, etc" haha...

Kings of War - Round 2

I got in my Round 2 game in our ongoing KoW league this weekend. It was Salamanders versus an alliance of the Kingdom of Men and the League of Rhordia.

This was the terrain setup:



It was a pretty open table... not too great for me since I don't have a lot of shooting! But I can't really complain since I was hosting, hehe. I didn't feel like digging out any woods and grabbed whatever terrain I had handy.

This was my first game on my new TableWar 4x6 mat... yes, I got MORE mats! But that's another story.

 Once we got the terrain set up we picked table sides and deployed.



My fire drake did not get to do anything before he was charged by knights and wiped out.



And the knights were unpainted, no less! How dare they!



I was so upset about getting beat by unpainted models that I swapped out my opponent's unpainted scouts with my own painted ones! Unfortunately for me, they had no loyalty to their owner and shot up multiple units in my army during the game:



My buddy Bill had a cool laser pointer that projected lines from overhead rather than having to "shoot" from a model's eye view. Gotta get me one of these! Very useful for determining charge arcs, line of sight, etc.



In the end the whole game pretty much came down to a combat between his knights and my horde of Salamander primes. The knights won. The game was lost... but wait!

The scenario we were playing was "Invade" and the goal was actually to get units in your opponents half of the table. Because of this, I actually ended up with a "win" even though I had less models left at the end.


While we were meeting up to get our KoW game in, we also played a game of Frostgrave. We got the kids involved too! My son is a Frostgrave expert by now, but since Bill's boys were playing their first game we kept it simple - a Necromancer, Apprentice, 4 Thugs and 2 Archers each. Same warband on both sides, and only picked 3 spells. We set up a nicely packed terrain layout (which was pretty symmetrical, just to keep everything even for both sides!), and got going.

The game took a while, even without rolling for random monsters! But they had a good time and want to play again... so it was a success!

Thaw of the Lich Lord

I started the "Thaw of the Lich Lord" campaign with my son last month too. We've really been having fun playing Frostgrave, and it has definitely put Mordheim on the back burner in our house since it was released!

This is the first attempt we've had at playing any of the campaigns. I have a feeling it's going to be a slow one, since I'd like to get the right terrain in place for each of the scenarios! Right now I am working on the terrain for the next scenario, the battle on the frozen river.

Here are some pics from the first scenario.





















I beat him in the end, but a big part of the reason was his terrible luck with the monster rolls. All of the monsters either popped up in his deployment zone, or randomly wandered over to him! Haha, poor guy!

February roundup

So after my big burst of painting on President's Day weekend, I never finished anything else by the end of the month. I did manage to start a bunch of stuff, but that's another story! Hopefully this month I will be finishing some more board game models, a couple of Reaper Bones, and maybe even some more ECW troops.

But anyway - I did manage to finish a quick terrain project by the end of the month. Walls! I have a bunch of the old foam Citadel walls, and I love them. They are rarer than hen's teeth these days though, much like the Pegasus pre-painted castle ruins. If only I could go back in time and stockpile sets of these! I am very jealous of this guy:

http://paulslotrminis.blogspot.com/2011/12/more-pegasus-prepainted-castle-ruins.html

Here are my walls. I hemmed and hawed over a million different projects to get some terrain done, and in the end this was all I had time for. The fieldstone walls are scratchbuilt, they are just aquarium pebbled glued in a few layers to popsicle sticks. I've had most of them built for a while, I just built a few more and painted them all.

The more formal looking walls with capstones are by MiniMonsters. They are resin. Sometimes I hate spending money on things I think I can scratchbuild... but boy were these more convenient to get done than the others!







Gotta be at least 4 feet of walls all together... I built the scratchbuilt ones to fit around my corn field:

http://paintingtheleadpile.blogspot.com/2015/10/october-terrain.html

It looked a little strange without a barrier around it. Of course I forgot to take a picture of them together, d'oh!