Summary of my games, from memory:
Friday:
-Played against Dave, my Spain vs. his Aztecs. There was a little hill in the middle of the board and I became convinced it would be cool to take it with Dragoons and shoot their muskets down on his advancing dudes. I made a 2000 point army that I thought would do and support this pretty well. Then Dave reminded me we were playing 1500 points, and instead of reconsidering the Dragoons thing (they aren't cheap!) and putting one of Spain's excellent javelin cavalry units on top of the hill, I cut some random units and went with it. Results were unsurprising; I was smashed by angry Aztecs.
-Played against Gull2112 with what I thought was a bad-idea 1500 point High Elf army: 3 Battlesquads, Battlemages, Knights, Bowriders. The plan was to hope he took small numbers of powerful Orcs, build a little wall of Battlesquads in front of the mages, and do annoying cavalry tricks while I shot him. Instead he brought 3x Orc Spearmen, 1x Trolls, 1x Goblin Bomb Chucker. Oops! Despite this basically forcing me to advance, I think it was a way better result for me than, say, flooding the board with crazed goblins backed up by a few real Orcs, or anything involving Wolf Riders. I switched to a pretty straightforward hammer and anvil approach, sending the battlesquads forward to tie up the orcs and troll while the cav flanked. I was worried about the bomb chucker once ranges closed, though, so I stacked the Knights and Bowriders on the same side and let the Mages do pinch duty on the other (heh.) My fears proved well-founded as the Bomb Chucker had a great game, rolling many 1's to hit, combined with my failure to draw defense cards for a long time. I took lots of losses, and failed to kill any units except the Trolls in pinches because Battlemages are bad engaged and 'squads just don't have enough dice. So when Mexico and Dave wandered over I had an uninjured Knight and a Bowrider in the yellow, both in my deployment zone or near it, vs. Gull's uninjured Orc Spearmen, in-the-green Orc Spearman, and in-the-red Orc Spearman. I'll admit this looked bad - so bad in fact that they said I should scoop and we should go to dinner - but since I spoiled it before you'll know I pulled it out. In short, the dice turned, and the Spearmen were spread out enough and the first was close enough to my cavalry that I was able to pinch them one at a time. The first two failed their rout checks and got cut down; the third passed and traded for the Bowriders. My Knights then got pounded on another lucky bomb chucker hit - three damage from eight or so dice at 1's and 4's! - and routed to the very edge of the chucker range. But after rallying them I finally got some blue cards including a critical Roll with the Blow, and the chucker finally forced its first rout check on itself with a misfire, so the Knights did the distance and picked it up. I even got a marginal victory according to the Kingdoms card, because HE Knights in the yellow are worth 252 and the marginal victory cuttoff is 150!
-Played Chad, my Aztecs against his Spanish. He went for the Spanish gunline, something that people often try early on with Spain, but my skirmishers took a lot of the fire for my elite warrior house dudes, who proceeded to slaughter their way through the Spanish guns. I also made good use in this game of what were then called the Aztec Curiassers and are now called Eagle Cavalry and may be called something else when you finally see them. They're one of two alternate history units on the Aztec side; there were only about 10 historical Aztec units worth making, because while their allied contingent was quite varied in terms of equipment, they were functionally pretty similar. So, at least unless playtesting shows it to be awful, we've got two units in the faction that are plausible but not historical, representing a "what if" scenario where a Mexica Empire that holds of the Spanish begins to adopt European technology through trade, as the North American natives did later. These units are neat, should support fun alt-history gaming, and also make Spain and the Aztecs feel a little bit more similar when they play against fantasy or other historical factions. Anyway I won this one but we got lots of good thoughts on the units and command cards, so mostly it was a victory for the faction, as good playtest games should be!
Saturday:
I had to run an event at the store until the evening, so took the train down and arrived at 7:30ish. Kevin was nice enough to pick me up at the station and also drive me home after, as it turned out around 3am. It was very much appreciated!
-Played Mexico/Jaime, his Spanish vs. my Aztecs. Jaime had a neat, melee-oriented Spain list with some Jinetes (javelin cavalry) playing support, and some crossbowmen for a nasty ranged punch. He ended up concentrating a lot of power on one flank, though, and I was able to bait him into some unfavorable flank matches with an unusual (for me) Eagle Cavalry sacrifice play where he broke my Telcopalli (civic milita) with his crossbows and used the backup rule to throw in the Eagle Cavalry and final rush his crossbows. He took the pinch with his melee units, but this exposed his flanks to my Veteran Arrow and Veteran Jaguar warriors, allowing me to win the flank pretty convincingly. He also deployed his Jinetes early on; usually a good plan, but in this case it meant his powerful Halberd infantry were behind it and kept out of the fight for several critical turns. A good game, and caused us to tone down the Aztec army ability a bit; I go back and forth about whether it needed it, but that's what further testing is for!
-Played BubblePig's Dark Elves. I've talked about this game at
http://yourmovegames.com/forum/index.php/topic,2197.0.html.
Then we went home, so I guess I just played 5 games not 6 as I'd thought? Or I forgot a game. Apologies if I did! I did a lot of gaming that weekend because I also played 2-3 games at the store Thursday night. So I might have lost a con game in there. Hope not.
Heh, hope that was enough additional detail for you ZiNOS!
