Bruised, Beaten But Not Boiled - Skaven at Horned RAT - Part Two

So after a relatively quiet night down at the local pub with most of the participants, I rocked up on Sunday morning to find that I was playing Locky Reid.

Game 4 - Locky Reid (Skaven) - Meeting Engagement

Locky had a combat focused Skaven army which had Stormvermin pushing his Bell and a large unit of Monks pushing a Furnace. This meant that there were no Gutter Runners to contend with. I set up first and given the nature of his list, adopted a defensive position. Locky followed suit, also deploying well back from the centreline. He didn't seize first turn so my army rumbled out to meet him.

The Pretend-Seer Cowering Under Bell Before Slaves Deliver Summary Justice

Going first allowed me the upper hand in that my army got to shoot first. I felt Locky should have been more aggressive in his deployment and also should have immediately put up his Storm Banner. I was able to make in-roads into his Slave units so that they were always smaller than mine. I managed to get a cheeky Plague off when Locky pushed an Engineer with Rocket ahead to my lines and then jumped it back to his, further depleting his Slaves. My Doomwheel got the jump on his and I was able to destroy it with some Str 8 bolts.

From here I was in the ascendancy. My Gutter Runners came on and tried and failed to shoot off the Furnace. Locky then reformed and breath-weaponed one unit. However they survived, slipped past and started to work on WLC and Stormvermin. His HPA cleared out a depleted Slave unit but then took hits from the Ruby Ring and decided chaff hunting was the better course of action - rampaging on one wound. I multi-charged Slaves and then into a now depleted Stormvermin Bell unit. Locky's Assassin killed some Gutter Runners but the unit was destroyed by the combined attention of two Slave units, the HPA and a unit of GRs. In the last turn my Slaves pulled down the wounded Assassin and did four wounds to the Seer (who failed three 4+ saves).

Locky killed 212 points of mine while I killed enough to be 1054 points ahead.

Win 15-5

Game 5 - Wil Hoverd (Ogre Kingdoms) - Battleline

There had been some rumblings in the Seerlord's army about a dying curse from the Pretend-Seer but such things are the subject of fairy stories.....like non-balanced Skaven forces.

Wil and I played two weekends ago and it was a hard-fought battle with the Skaven coming out on top in the end. This game started reasonably well for the rats and I was pretty happy with how deployment left the game looking.

Unfortunately in my first turn the Seerlord slipped from Level 4 to level 1....annoying, but not insurmountable. I managed to reduce a Bull unit to two wounds and did a massive amount of damage to Wil's Big Maneaters. However my HPA broke (on its last wound ) and managed to flee and rally from the two remaining Maneaters.

Then disaster. Not regular disaster but disaster on an A-R-M-A-G-E-D-D-O-N type scale. On Turn Two my Bell tolled and rolled 6-6-6. Now if you have never seen the apocalyptic implosion that is "18" on a Bell roll, well, it's a thing of beauty. The Bell goes and then ever model with 4D6" takes a Str 4 hit. I rolled 18" and took off between 100-120 models. Good times!

So Turn 2 things are looking dire.

From there I spent my time diverting and distracting Wil, picking up points where I could and trying to ensure I didn't have more "disasters". However they kept coming - both WLC and Ratapult blew up.

In the end I thought I did very well to limit the loss to 302 points. With the Seer alive he gave up no points for the Bell and the units I lost, bar one unit of Gutter Runners (162 points) were all less than 150 points.

I'm not going to lie, it was tooth and claw fight for survival.

Loss 9-11


Summary

In the end I finished on 77 points, seven points ahead of Locky with Wil heading a group of three a further point back.

Showing how hard a fight it was - at Runefang I scored 17 points more than here.

It was a great event, well umpired by Ray and strongly contested by the participants. Having such a strong field meant that it impacted the rankings with four jumping into the Top 10.

Next event for me is Panzershreck where Swedish Comp will be used.