Painting the Lead Pile: February 2019

Monday, February 18, 2019

Gaming weekend - Zombicide (& Mordheim thoughts...)

Well after a full day & a half of Mordheim, there were bound to be casualties. Fortunately there was only one, but UNfortunately it was one of my favorite models... my son broke my Dark Elf Dreadlord's hand/shield off. D'oh! I will have to do some surgery here :(

On Sunday we decided to switch gears and play some Zombicide: Black Plague. I didn't take many pictures but it was definitely fun and a nice change of pace. Zombicide is definitely a bit more of a family game than Mordheim, so the younger kids joined in as well... here my daughter was a bit demoralized after we got slaughtered by the zombie horde:

But we tried again, and made it to the exit zone!

I've been painting up Z:BP models for over a year now on and off, but I haven't quite finished all of the zombies from one base set yet. I thought it was funny, but we actually preferred to play with the unpainted zombies (I have a spare copy of the base game), since it's easier to distinguish Survivors from Zombies that way! We were playing with painted zombies and a couple of times we forgot to account for a "runner" that was in our zone because he blended in too well with all of the characters, haha!

I'll definitely be painting up some more Zombicide models this year. I'd like to finish the Naiade Guest Box (already painted up the "Milo the Apprentice" character for my daughter), a few more of the Kickstarter Survivors, and some other types of zombies. I think the zombie wolves and Crows would be easy to distinguish on the board from the survivors, so maybe I'll paint them next.

All in all, it was a great weekend of gaming! I'd like to use a few of the lessons I learned from this Mordheim campaign to make it better next time. I've been playing in Mordheim campaigns for about 15 years, and hosting them for at least 5 or 6, so you'd think I would have figured this out by now! but anyway...

1. It definitely helps to have plenty of markers for things like wyrdstone, marking "hidden" models, marking orcs who have failed animosity, etc. It just makes the game go smoother. I used some CMON "wound" markers for this during this campaign and it worked out great (especially in some of the scenarios where you have to mark which buildings have been searched for hidden treasure). I'll try to figure out what other tokens/markers/etc. might be useful and make sure I have them. You can see the markers on the buildings here:

My buddy Bill had some nice wyrdstone makers here:

I'd like to get.make some of those!

2. Scatter terrain is great in addition to the buildings. I should paint up some more of this. I managed to get a few pieces done since last year, but I've got a ton more unpainted. And with the Mantic Terrain Crate stuff on top of it, I can get a lot more on the table! This stuff is quick to paint and adds a lot. Ladders and walkways really help and are easy to do. Must do more of these!

3. I should maybe get some more craters. They help to fill black spots on the table and it is supposed to be a city pock-marked with craters, so why not! Cheap and easy way to take up real estate and fill up more tables, and by having some scatter pieces around the players can feel like they are "setting up the terrain" without having to completely rearrange the street/building layouts after every game. I prefer not to do that because it takes up too much time. We played the whole campaign on 3 prearranged table layouts this year, and it went very smooth. But the scatter terrain will help give each battle a bit of variety on the layout.

4. I didn't need to have 7 different tables set up - 3 was plenty, because people tend to show up at different times, there are only a few "core" players in any campaign that stay for the whole thing, and we rarely end up with more than 3 games going at once. What is more helpful than having so many tables set up with terrain is having some extra space available for books, dice, roster sheets, etc. For example, I took my one 8x4 table which had been holding two layouts, and instead left 2 feet of blank space on each side. It was MUCH more convenient this way than having two games going on side-by-side and no place to put anything! Then everything ends up on the battlefield :( Having empty table space on the sides of the battlefield worked out great; I will definitely do this again next time.

Now, to get painting! Funny how getting some gaming in really gets your motivation up to paint. I had been totally interested in WW2 the past few weeks and studying up on Bolt Action and Chain of Command, getting prepared to play some platoon level games. But now after this weekend, I'm dying to get some more Mordheim and Zombicide stuff painted! Such is the life of a gamer with A.D.D.

Gaming weekend - Mordheim

I usually host at least one big Mordheim campaign/tournament at my house every year, and 2019 is no exception!

I am actually planning a big campaign for this summer, but this weekend a bunch of the guys got together for a one day "practice" campaign to refresh on the rules... I've got a few regulars but some folks hadn't played in years. Hopefully everyone can make it for the big two-day extravaganza this summer.

This weekend we played Mordheim all day and night on Saturday, and had a lot of fun. One of my buddies from out of town arrived on Friday and we got a few test games in, and of course he decided to scout out the weakenesses in my warband and completely restructure his list for Saturday. This was an evil, cunning plan... typical of a Chaos Magister. My Orc Warboss was not as subtle and stuck with the same troops and plan for Saturday. My son joined in with a Dark Elf list, and our 4th player was running a Skaven warband. We had a few special guests pop in for a random game as well (Witch Hunters and Averlanders).

After 6 games on Saturday, The Carnival of Chaos and Skaven were neck and neck for "winner." Skaven won the final game but Chaos rocked the post-game sequence, and likely would have dominated if we played another game!

Here are some pics from the Mordheim action this weekend:

Warbands