The Oak Tree of Failure From Small Acorns Grows

Last night James and I had another matchup of his High Elves against the Ogres. james had made substantial changes to his list after Guardcon whereas I had replaced what I regard as a redundant Crown of Command with the Earthing Rod.

I could regale you all with stories of tactical brilliance but in essence the pivotal points in the game all resulted from errors. The errors were on both sides so I hope that James won't mind me going through them.

We were playing Blood & Glory and the first of these errors came at deployment. James put his Eagles on the 15" line when in retrospect there was no need to do this. When I got the first turn I was able to declare two 18" charges on his eagles with a combination of three units. As all of these had an 8" move and average 9" charge die roll, James had to make the tough decision whether to flee or hold. He held - and two of the three rolls gave me 10" on the dice. The unit of 2 Mournfang made short work of one eagle while one Sabretusk held the other up for three rounds before winning. What this did was give me a clear advance for my units with no redirectors in the way.

The key thing is that James didn't need to deploy at the 15" line. If he had deployed at 12" in then I could charge and it wouldn't have inhibited his ability to annoy the shit out of me with his eagles.

The second mistake was my target selection. James had two bolt throwers and these were a key threat to my Mournfang. Instead of shooting one of theses with my Ironblaster first turn, I tried to snipe his Lord. Yes, I killed two reavers (due to a successful LOS) but even then he still had enough in the unit for a future LOS. Turn Two I switched to shooting the Boltthrowers.

The third "facepalm" was again one of mine. I worked out what spells I was going to stop in James' magic phase and then realised that I had incorrectly imagined the effect of one of them. Shield of Saphery provides a 5+ Ward against shooting and in combat. For some reason I thought it was only a shooting ward. I'll put it down to the fact that High Elves always run Shadow, so James using High Magic was a dirty lowdown trick. The real message is "read the card in front of you, don't just assume". The only thing that saved me was the final mistake from James.

In charging his White Lions into my Ironguts he moved the unit outside the 12" bubble for General and BSB. This meant that while he remained Stubborn he lost the re-roll and General's Ld for two rounds of combat and subsequently failed his Fear tests. He rolled up the first time but in round two his Lions were exposed for the girly-men they are. To compound matters in the second round of combat I produced a moment of wargaming genius, hitting with 15 out of 15 attacks from my Ironguts and wounding 15 out of 15 times! Sometimes I'm just on top of my game. Being ordinary James saved the expected average six out of fifteen.

The point of the post - no, it's not to show how jammy the new Ogre dice are - is to demonstrate that the small things in the game can have big consequences. The easiest way to cut these errors out is to play lots of games (and not have a failing memory).