The Inaugural Grenzstadt Invitational

After a nine-year absence, my garage saw the return of tabletop wargaming yesterday!

When a friend's son started talking about getting into the re-launched edition of Warhammer Fantasy Battles, myself and another former player mused about getting back into it (yes, similar to what I said about Warhammer 40K three years ago, let it go) and two new players entered the fray. 

Warhammer was Games Workshop's iniital mass combat game and although it features fantasy races like elves, dwarfs and armies of skeletons, it is built around massed units maneuvering around a largely open battlefield, Napoleonics-style, not individual skirmishers fighting in dense cover - a style of play sometimes called 'rank & flank.'

Once I knew a pool of five players were available for the revamped Warhammer: The Old World, I asked if they might be interested in a tiny, two-table tournament at the end of summer, and they all quickly agreed. And to be clear, this is not a tremendously competitive group, eager to establish their superiority, but busy people who understood how a deadline could serve as a great motivator for building and painting!

I already had two armies on hand for this game, but the sizes of the bases (the little platforms each figure stands upon for uniform ranking) had changed. This meant over a hundred infantry in my Empire (human) army alone needed to go from 20mm to 25 mm bases, and the cavalry needed updating as well. Daunting!

This was almost enough to put me off the idea entirely, but thankfully some wise person came up with the idea of making oversized movement trays (something we've always sued for ease of maneuvering) with slots for the old base sizes, and another beautiful genius made 3D printable versions that Jeff graciously produced for me. 

I hated having to cut up the old 20 x 80mm bases (with 4 figures on them) that made both packing and ranking so much easier, but even this worked after a bit of applied snippery.

Basing the trays to match my figures was more of a chore than anticipated, but worked out okay in the end, even if it ended up making some of the fits a we bit too snug.

And after literal decades of knowing my cannons and mortars would look better if based, I finally made artillery bases.

At any rate, life conspired to keep one player away and two players from painting their armies, but four of us gathered early Saturday with completely assembled 1000 point armies and plans to get three games in before supper.

Averland Militia (Empire)

Tomb Kings

Wood Elves

Dissenters of Wing Kong (Grand Army of Cathay)

But this was not to be.

After a brief concours to see each other's armies and cast ballots for pageantry and presentation, we got into our first matches around 10 am. This was my second game of Warhammer in over a decade (and first game ever for one player!), and I was constantly referring back to the rules to make sure I was not conflating editions.

Questions flew back and forth between the tables, and our newbie-style pace meant there was only time to get two games in, but a good time was still had by all. After the sportsmanship and pageantry ballots were factored in, my two draws gave me a single point lead over Sean's incredibly tough, undefeated, and (self admittedly) slightly cheesy Tomb Kings of Khemri. And to be clear, Sportsmanship was a tough ballot, because both my opponents were a joy to play against! It's a nice problem to have, to be completely frank.)

I was already uneasy about winning my own tournament, but knowing that had we actually battled, Sean's two monsters would have rocked and/or socked my puny Averlanders with only a slight chance of my artillery causing them any real sort of inconvenience. With this in mind, I snugged up my tourney marshal hat and declared the Inaugural Grenzstadt Invitational a tie.

Congratulations Sean!

Despite only getting two games in, everyone agreed that the day was well spent, focused on wargaming and camaraderie, pushing toy soldiers around, rolling handfuls of dice and alternating from being delighted and horrified at the results of said rolls.

The applesauce bee happening just outside my garage door (hosted by my wife and her sister but involving everyone not playing Warhammer) was very productive - like, 50+ liters of pure, uncut sauce with an unknown street value - and somehow we managed to not get in each other's way, which was an added bonus. The cooks even benevolently provided some of the fruits of their labours to the players as a parting gift.

Game-wise, my veteran halberdiers aquitted themselves well, while my artillery was not terribly effective, misfiring on two sonsecutive turns in my second game before getting taken out by coutner battery fire. My 20-strong unit of handgunners were pretty decent, successfully defending a small hill from a heavy infantry charge that was decimated by withering fire before they ever got to grips with my unarmoured fusiliers.

In the end, what I really learned is that I really need and want to play more games of Warhammer again, especially with these fellows, which is a nice feeling to have after so long a pause! Perhaps the Second Annual Grenzstadt Invitational will have even more players?

Back to Base-Sicks

Once again, a legacy wargame from my past may potentially be in my future, resurrected, Lazarus-like, by the son of a friend.

My first love was always the sci-fi setting of Warhammer 40,000, but the "rank-'n'-flank" mechanics of Warhammer Fantasy Battle had a undeniable appeal all their own. 

With densely packed units of infantry and cavalry wheeling and marching across a largely open tabletop, rarely questioning which units or models have line of sight to the others or who has cover , while evoking the pre-20th century maneuvering of historical battles such as Gettysburg and Waterloo, WFB was a classical wargamers dream - but with dragons and giants and wizards to keep things lively.

The game was discontinued shortly after I left Games Workshop in 2007 in favour of a wildly different skirmish game (Age of Sigmar) set in the aftermath of the destruction of WFB's setting, a fantasy-tinged, vaguely pre-renaissance Eurocentric globe simply called "The Old World".

So when GW announced a return to rank-n-flank with a ruleset called Warhammer: The Old World, I was happy so see it, sure, but didn't see any real applicability to me. When my young associate said he was getting into the game with a Goblin army and asked if my Empire force might be interested in a small scale scrap, I had to give it at least a look, didn't I?

Defenders of Averland, where social order is defined by hat-size

The very first thing I discovered was the crushing revelation that pretty much my entire Empire army would need to be re-based. You see, the infantry of my human-sized army (and anything simliar or smaller size, such as Elves or Goblins) was mounted on 20mm x 20mm square bases, where larger figures (Orcs, for example) were mounted on 25mm square bases. This meant a row of four Savage Orc warriors took up the same frontage as five of my Empire spearmen, giving me a slight advantage over this larger, sturdier foe.

On the other hand, the larger bases would make it far, far easier to rank figures up tidily, and made them less vulnerable to template weapons, such as dragon's breath or exploding cannonballs and the like. So I didn't have any philosophical opposition to the idea, but the effort to recalibrate to the new regime might be prohibitively labour-intensive.

Now, if re-basing woes sound familiar to you, you may recall a similar lament when the current edition of Warhammer 40,000 was released in 2003, complete with free rules and army lists. This had an undeniable appeal to my budget-conscious wargamer soul, but nto only was it a lot of rebasing, it was a lot of different rebasing, and the potential enjoyment never seemed to equal the expenditure of effort required, so I never started, and now a new edition is already on the way anyhow, so bullet dodged perhaps?

I feared a comparable outcome of my survey of WOW, but in searching out the quickest way to rebase entire armies, I came across an intriguing prospect: since formations of soldiers are typically moved around on holders called movement trays, what if you didn't rebase your figures? What if you adapted larger trays to hold smaller figures, achieving almost exactly the same effect?

A Spanish hobbyist on YouTube demonstrated how to achieve this with corrugated cardboard and tape, moving from a ruler approach to pre-printed templates he generously provided at no charge. But cutting out 100+ individual slots for my figures didn't seem like a huge improvement from re-basing them, to be honest.

Thankfully, I was not the only individual feeling that way, and a helpful soul has made 3d-printable files for trays precisely like these available on the interwebs. 

For such things, it is remarkable to have a friend with overlapping interests, in this case, miniatures and 3d printing. Did I mention he is also my young associate's father and is likewise being drawn along in this young man's wake? Delightful - the more the merrier!

At any rate, he graciously printed up a set of trays that should enable me to re-purpose my Averlander army in a much, much shorter timeframe than rebasing them.

Certainly, painting and texturing these trays to match my existing armies will be somewhat time-consuming, but compared to all new bases?

I am still perplexed as to what to do about these 4-man bases I put together around 2005, the cuitting edge of wargaming expediency at the time. I have five of them...

Now I have to decide if it is easier to somehow cut the base into four pieces or maybe sand down the slot ridges in the tray - but the uneven columns that would result make me shudder.

At any rate, the idea of an army I painted two decades ago and which hasn't been touched in probably 15 years returning at long last to the battlefield has a lot of appeal to me in terms of both spectacle and effective recycling. Wish me luck!

Making Room

"It's not that I have given up on wargaming," I said to Audrey, "Lord knows I still have enough models, but boardgaming and RPGs make way more sense from a time and social capital prespective."

"How do you mean?" she queried.

"Wargames can be adapted to play with groups, but they are designed for the most part to be head-to-head encounters between two individuals," I explained. "If I set up a game with someone, I need to prep by putting together an army list, unpack or pack up an army's worth of models, and if I am hosting, deploy a tabletop full of scenery.

"The game itself, including unpacking, chit chat, scenario selection, deployment and re-packing will take a full afternoon or evening at minimum, and while tremendously fun, is only entertaining for two people."

"I think I see the issue..." Audrey mused.

"That's right!" I continued. "I can put the same amount of prep into a role-playing game and that is entertainment for 4-7 other people instead. And even less preparation is needed for a boardgame! There is only so muich free time, and while I still enjoy painting models, I would far rather do it for smaller scale skirmish games or characters and monsters for D&D than units for large armies."

Why did this topic come up? Well, with Fenya moving home from Toronto this month, we need to make a little room around this place for her stuff. As our household's most egregious accumulator, it fell to me to go through a number of boxes in the basement closet, some of which haven't been moved in years.

I was initially resistant to simply giving away some of these items, many of whiuch were rare or represented an expenditure in terms of effort well in excess of their physical value. But in the end, it was helpful to have younger people in my life who I know will put a number of these things to far better (i.e. any) use than I have over the past two decades in this house.

The go-pile

What kind of things? Well...

A bunch of old pressed-foam scenery, including a very cool cemetery

An entire fortress (with unpainted gate house because I had two of these and kept the other one)

Some siege towers with which to besiege the castle (and can you believe it, the little drawbridges still lower when you turn the wheel at the bottom!)

...and siege equipment for both attackers and defenders

Two Formula Waagh racers I converted out of old Ork warbuggies and snotling pump wagons back before Gorkamorka was released

Some unbuilt city ruins for Warhammer 40,000

And despite selling it instead of giving it away, it was still hard to part with this entire Tenth Company/Space Marine Scout Army, still in the wrap and with nearly a kilogram worth of bitz for converting them!

I finihsed going through the closet today and found some non-wargaming goodies that raised some nostalgia but went to a better home, like this electronic Star Wars Battleship-style game:

And when the recipient tells you this was an item on their childhood Christmas wish list for multiple years, it certainly makes the divesting a lot easier to take!

Other things went straight to recycling; old cylinders or movie reel canisters that could have become scenery but failed to actualize, a broken Planet Killer spaceship from Battlefleet Gothic, and over a dozen 80-90% empty spray cans of varnish and paint are headed to the Eco Station.

One of the film canisters also contained an esoteric and nostalgic assortment of bits: a keychain from Terrace BC, a handcuff key, a Canada flag lapel pin, a piece of petrified wood and four miniature badges featuring a beloved comics character.

And since they don't take up much space, some of this gets to stay - at least for now.

A Big Day of Tiny Battles

On Saturday, I played my first one-on-one game of Warhammer 40,000 in perhaps 8 years.

40K, as it is sometimes known, has been a part of Gaming & Guinness up through G&G IX, in Ottawa, but these are group games, usually involving 4 or more players. I played a smaller scale game with my friend Jeff and his son Connor some years back, but I just checked the date on my blog, and that is going back 5 years this March. Half a decade, already? Surely not.

I spent almost 12 years working for Games Workshop, the manufacturers of the game, playing it at least a couple of times a month while I did. But I played it before I worked there too, and afterwards as well. What the hell happened?

In preparing for this week's match-up, I may have found my answer.

Scott's wife called back in November and said that instead of getting him more models or paints or rules for Christmas (as he already has plenty; most of us adult hobbyists do!), she was arranging play-dates for him with friends that she knew had armies.

I thought this was a fantastic idea, and agreed, staking out the 21st, knowing that Glory and Audrey would be out of town at a feis. This week has been a frenzy of re-learned rules, uncrating of various armies and models, and no small amount of repair and touch-ups. Even digging up my old army lists and determining what to field took me a couple of hours.  

We had initially planned on a massive, all-day, 5,000 point Apocalypse-sized game, but layering those massive rules on top of a system I was already a couple of years rusty on seemed a bad idea. Thankfully Scott found the idea of 2 x 1500 point games just as agreeable.

Dusting off the wargames scenery, unpacking old models, selecting my forces; it all felt pretty good, but it underscored the primary reason that I don't play as much. This was probably 3-4 hours work spent just preparing for the game, outside of the hours spent buying, building and painting the models themselves.  And while multi-player games are possible, and even enjoyable, most miniature wargames are designed as a head-to-head, one-on-one pastime, so all that effort is spent on entertaining just two people, in the end.

Comparatively, I might spend the same amount of time preparing for a game of Spirit of 77, and that falls on me as the gamemaster. I have to pay a lot more attention while we play as well, since I have to direct the narrative (to some degree, at least). But that same amount of effort goes into entertaining a half-dozen people, including myself.

As I prepare to turn the page on my first half-century later this year, I have to wonder how much of a factor that this effectiveness plays in my gaming choices. Even if more of my friends played 40K, we are lucky to get together once or twice a month, and almost never in December. Spending gaming time with a single other person feels kind of like...splurging?

But let me tell you, there is a tremendously positive feeling to be had in splurging, so Saturday ended up being a hoot!

Scott brought his Orks over and we were ready to start gaming by mid-morning. His first opponents were my Tyranids: a ravenous alien swarm, ready to pit selectively bred troops and bio-engineered weapons against whatever the 41st millennium could throw at them.

The backbone of Scott's Ork army is an incredibly tough unit that I don't believe I have ever bested: 30 Ork Boyz, kitted out for close combat, led by a character called Mad Doc Grotsnik. Now, that many Orks running across the table at you is already a terrifying prospect, since you would need to kill 8 of them just to force a panic test, which they will automatically pass until their numbers dip below 10. When Grotsnik joins them though, he shoots 'em up full of fightin' juice which a) makes them fearless and b) makes them feel no pain, giving them the ability to ignore almost any wound on a dice roll of 4+. That's right: Orks on steroids.

My hardest battle when facing this particular mob is overcoming an ever-growing sense of futility.

But knowing they were coming, I could build my Tyranid list appropriately, stripping out the weaker, more numerous elements and making a list composed almost entirely of Genestealers (arguably the best hand-to-hand troop choice in the game) and Carnifexes (lumbering monsters that work like living tanks, able to shoot and melee). Against any other force I might have felt a little dirty, but as soon as the Doc hit the table, a feeling of justification settled over me like a cozy blanket.

We rolled a scenario that required us to designate an objective in our starting table quarter, and defend it while simultaneously trying to conquer that of our opponent. I placed a nest-looking piece next to the power station scenery we were using (a la sub-level 3 in Aliens), while Scott placed an Orky icon on the ground behind a hill he had covered with his shootiest Orks. 

After he deployed, I put a squad of Genestealers in the station itself, another by the nest, and Old One-Eye, a legendary Carnifex, behind the station to help guard it.

One lesson I have finally begun to apply to my wargaming is this notion of timing. Too many times have I run a unit out of cover, eager to get them into the fight, worried they might be left out, anxious at having paid precious points for something not providing an immediate return on investment, only to have them annihilated in due course. 

For this game, I not only deployed my best unit of Genestealers behind the crest of a hill, I actually held them back and left them there for the first turn, a degree of subtlety and nuance in my play that I found almost off-putting in its unfamiliarity.

Rather then waste time making his way toward the bridge or the ford in the river, Scott charged Grotsnik and his boys directly into it, losing a couple to the current, but saving himself at least two turns in getting to his objective.  It took me a turn or two to get my Hive Tyrant (the boss bug) and two of the shootier Carnifexes to the crest of the hill, but the mob was so big, I was actually able to shoot at it as I went, for all the good it did.

Meanwhile, Scott's Dethkoptas flew in from the flank and shot at my hidden 'Stealers, but the dice conspired against him, and he only managed to kill a couple of them. Furious at this failure, and well aware that the 'Stealers were holding up the rest of his army on that flank, he charged them into hand to hand to finish me off.

Well, given his target's specialization in this area, the assault phase didn't go that well for him. After dispatching the rest of the 'Koptas, the Broodlord and remaining Genestealers were able to dash across the river, engage his bike squad the following turn, and see them off as well.

On the opposite flank, another group of Genestealers made their way across the bridge, hoping to destroy or delay the light armour Scott was marching around in the form of three Killer Kans, miniature dreadnoughts. And although they all eventually perished, it took long enough that the two remaining Kans were effectively out of the fight.

No, the heart of the battle was at the heart of the table, where Grotsnik's PED-enhanced hooligans were frantically swimming through a raging torrent under heavy fire from the largest models in my army, relentlessly pushing forward.

As soon as I was able to, I charged my three monstrosities into the fray, thinking I could carve my way to the Doc and eliminate that Feel No Pain rule, and failing that, at least whittle them down to a more manageable number. Either Grotsnik would die, or nearly a third of my totals points value would!

Grotsnik wouldn't die.

I couldn't believe it! His Cybork body saved him from my Hive Tyrant's bonesword, and his frenzied Orks dragged my larger, tougher models down with their superior numbers and tireless choppers. True, there weren't nearly as many as there were before by the end of it, but he was still in a position to get to my nest and claim that objective.

As the Broodlord and his crew were joined by Old One Eye around the Ork objective, I threw my largest remaining Carnifex at the mob, and the Genestealers surged out of the power station to support him. But in my zeal, I ran the Chatterbug forward instead of shooting, which meant he was unable to assault! He was subsequently charged by the Orks, and Grotsnik's power claw demolished 192 points worth of bio-warmachine. 

My Genestealers whittled him down some more, but the Mad Doc and his now tiny retinue powered on towards the nest, and to victory if my sole remaining Genestealer squd couldn't stop him.

Grotsnik died within sight of the objective, pulled down by Genestealers, in a frenzied final clash I expected to find more satisfying, but I was too busy feeling relieved. A rare victory over the Mad Doc's boyz!

Then in our second game, he took my Valhallans to the 41st millennium's equivalent of the woodshed and tied a gawdawful whuppin' on 'em.

This, despite having the same deployment setup, despite having a river to impede movement and a diagonal axis along which to pour prodigious amounts of artillery fire. 

He walloped my Imperial Guard force something fierce, with a final score something like 10-3. 

Three of his points came courtesy of my doggedly committing subsequent waves of Conscripts to the fight in a futile effort to slow his advance by using Commander Chenkov's special rule,"send in the next wave". But he slaughtered them upon their appearance for three consecutive turns.

"Forward, you dogs!"

There were a couple of bright moments: I finally got to use my Chimera APCs often forgotten amphibious ability, and my Bom Squad Veterans piled out and took Scott's Ork Kommandos out in close combat! The same squad, aded by Konfessor Grigori, a Ministorum priest with an unremarkable profile but a double-handed chainsword to make up for it, almost managed to killed the Ork Warboss as well! 

Almost.

But his gobliny Grots wrecked my Leman Russ tank and his Dethkoptas blew up my Basilisk, and by the end of the game, not a single human was left alive, and the future truly was green. Well, whatever; my army still looks better. ; )

Still, one win each was a pretty good way to spend a Saturday, and a great return to full-scale battle games after a long absence! Long enough for us to notice how much sorer our feet and backs were afterwards, sadly...

Best of all though, Fenya had asked earlier in the week if she could have a game with me, since everything was already unpacked, and I was only too happy (ecstatic, really) to accommodate her!

I dusted off my Space Marines army, picked 1,000 points for her and a Tyranid force for me, and we started this afternoon, finishing up after supper. Some of those Dark Angels models have seen better days, and I bet it has been 7-8 years since I have played with any of them as well, having three other armies I use more often.

It took a while for her to wrap her head around it, and I had to make an effort to tell her where to find all the numbers I was referencing, in contrast to years of shorthand and memorized statistics and tables. She was diligent about wanting to know, to her credit.

Breaking for supper really seemed to help, and before too long she was moving through the sequence quite comfortably, needed only the barest prompting from me, and managed to have all my Tyranids off the table by the end of turn 5.

As we packed up the models and dice afterwards, I asked her what had made her want to play. She said she had always found the models and background intriguing, but mostly, it was because she wanted to see what had been such a big part of my life, both personally and professionally, for so long. 

I found this gratifying and a little ironic, since I had clearly taken it for granted and very nearly made it into something that I used to do.

She had a great time, and surprised me a little when she said she would like to get another game in at some point.  It appears that our basement may not have seen the last of Warhammer 40,000's grim, dark future. And that's no bad thing, I figure.