Hammered!

This is a post that’s managed to jump the queue and it should become obvious why later!

My regular wargames opponent John has played “Warhammer” games since I’ve known him, which is quite a while!  The reason for the inverted commas is because his rules are based on Warhammer but they have evolved over the years to suit how he games.  So they’re not so much Oldhammer as Johnhammer!  Every now and then a group of gamers John has known for years get together to reminisce, roll the dice and catch up with things (although I suspect beer and nosh is also involved) and the latest session involved a big fantasy game (by which I mean a Johnhammer game – a fantasy wargame in my eyes is one of any genre that I actually win)!

Since John set up and umpired the last game, and I didn’t play, he kindly offered to set it up again so that the two of us could battle it out!  Based on past experience I expected this to run over several sessions!  All the models and scenery shown below are John’s, whereas the bad photography is mine!

Day One

John explained the background to me, but it come down to me leading the Forces Of Man against the Forces Of Sauron in a Middle Earth setting!  Generally, I can recognise the non-human troops ’cause they’re very rarely normal flesh-coloured, but I frequently get them mixed up and that will no doubt have happened here.  Basically, I had three units of very good quality mounted knights, backed up by spearmen, crossbowmen and some halfling skirmishers.

John had a boatload of green-skinned individuals, some with bows, some with spears, some large, some small and some riding beasts.  There was also what I will call an elephant unit since I can’t spell mumakil!

Most of this first session involved getting the troops transferred to the table, catching up on news and drinking tea, all important parts of the process in their own rights!  Once we’d got the troops laid out, we made a couple of initial moves that got several of the units close enough to charge into hand-to-hand combat and left things ready to continue in the next session.  The picture below shows the situation at the end of Day One, with my human army on the right.

Day Two

Unfortunately, I forgot to take my camera along for this session, but I wasn’t too worried since I expected to be able to catch up taking pictures in subsequent sessions.

Wrong!  Sorry!  Wrong, Big Time!

By not taking my camera along, I failed to capture what effectively turned into the destruction of my army!  Of my three good units of knights, one failed to charge and got chased off the board by trolls (could be ogres, but I think they were trolls), one got demolished by the elephant unit and the last (and best) got beaten and chased off by what I was led to believe were a pretty crap bunch of skirmishers!  Although my tactical ability isn’t great, bad dice rolls really didn’t help.

And then, once my halfling skirmishers got shot up and ran off, it transpired that I’d lost over half the points value of my army and I was permitted to withdraw with the remnants intact.  I thought John was being pretty decent there and it saved me coming back for a third session which would only have resulted in the destruction of my whole army in detail.

But, as usual, I enjoyed the game and it was different to what I was used to (well, OK, the losing bit wasn’t)!  I think next time I need some tanks though.  You can never go wrong with tanks.  Well, OK, I probably can!