Last Week's Games: Gears of War 2, Warhammer Quest, Spyro 2, Juju

I’ve got a few new games to talk about this week. I discovered a better way of counting my games on the spreadsheet I have for them, and found that I had more than I thought I had bringing me up to over 1000 games now, and the number of games I have yet to play is astonishingly high so I thought I’d better play some of them.

Dom's sad story brings a tear to the eye...

I played Gears of War 2 on the Xbox 360 a lot last week. I beat it as well, so most of what I’m going to say about the game will be in the review I’m going to post up about it next week. However, I will say this: It’s among the first games I ever bought for the 360, and I didn’t play it for the longest time mainly because I wanted to get everything I could possibly get out of the original Gears of War before I moved on to its sequel. Of course, that didn’t happen, and probably never will, but I found myself thinking about the almost obsessive attitude I’ve taken towards completing games over the last eight years, and how I’m making the necessary adjustment to accommodate it.

First, I needed to break out of the need to play through games sequentially. I usually do this if I can, but it means a few things that are detrimental to clearing my backlog. For one thing, many of the games I’ve bought over the years are series; I’ve bought many sequels to a base game before I’ve even played it. I bought the first three Gears games at the same time, for example, but I’d never have dreamed of playing any but the first game first. Also, there are many game series out there whose first iterations are on consoles I no longer own, or computers I don’t have access to and never will. Finally, the quality of games tends to improve with sequels, so I’m potentially missing out on the best the series has to offer by playing them all in order first!

Secondly, I need to not worry so much about the achievement points and trophies. They’re nice to have, but difficult to justify why it’s so important to me when, say, I’m playing a game where many of the achievements are tied up in online multiplayer modes with dead servers. Gears of War is one such game, and I won’t be throwing away the opportunity to play a well-designed game with a fun story because I haven’t completed its previous iteration any longer!

Danger threatens in the dungeon...

I’ve also been playing Warhammer Quest on my laptop. I first saw this covered by TotalBiscuit, and while he didn’t think much of it, I can usually find some fun in Warhammer-related games. It’s a turn-based dungeon basher, with some basic role-playing game elements to it. There’s not a lot to it, and the skill involved with the game is almost nullified by the random number generation that permeates the game, but sometimes a simple dungeon crawler is all I want to be playing, and Warhammer Quest appears to be a game I can dip in and out of if I happen to have an hour to spare in the afternoon.

This is Ripto, in case you were wondering.

Finally, I’ve been playing a couple of games that are very much aimed at children: Spryo 2: Ripto’s Rage on the PS4, and Juju on the Xbox 360. I’ve said it before but not for nothing: my daughter Jessie is around a lot of the time now, and while she’s maturing at a rapid rate, it would be very irresponsible of me to play graphically violent or intense games when she’s around. So, when she’s with me, I stick to either racing, sports or child-friendly action games. Regular readers may remember I was talking about Spyro the Dragon a lot last year, and what I’ve seen so far is everything a sequel should be: more of the same, but with extra moves, more things to do, and an overall better experience. Juju is a charming little platformer where you make your way through an exotic forest jumping on things; I’m sure I’ll be playing more of this in weeks to come!

Last Week's Painting: Space Hulk, Terminators and Genestealers

This is the first in a new, hopefully monthly blog series I’ll be doing called Last Week’s Painting, where I’ll document what I’ve been painting over the last month. They’ll mostly be Games Workshop models; it’s extremely rare for me to paint anything else but I’m open suggestions! I’ll initially try to get these out on the first Thursday of every month but I’m already late for the first one, so let’s just say I’ll try to get it out at some point in the first week!

My painting for this month has focussed on the 2009 Space Hulk boxed set. I’ve owned this set for over a decade and even managed to play the game a few times as detailed in some very early editions of this blog, but I’d never quite got around to painting them. There were a lot of reasons for that but the main one was that there was no expectation that I had to. I acquired the set when I was a member of Games Workshop’s staff; they’ve released a few board game-style games over the last several years but rarely support them post-launch in favour of their core games. And in the shop, there was an expectation that if you were going to use your models in the shop, you had to paint them – or at least show that there had been some progress on them. So, when painting, I prioritised models from those games at the time, and as my backlog of models I need to paint has only grown since then, the Games Workshop boxed games haven’t been painted.

But when lockdown hit, I’d run out of models to paint for the Chaos Space Marine army I was working on, so I proceeded with the Space Hulk models I’ve been putting off for over a decade. I started with six of the Terminator models and tried as much as I could to paint to the reference on the back of the Mission book. For the most part it worked reasonably well, although I might try to mix the red a little thicker next time because it was a faff painting multiple thin layers on a black undercoat. (I’d never have known until I tried, and I’d like to do Blood Angels at some point so it’s well worth remembering!) Where I deviated from the reference was the Power Sword, which I’ve never been good at doing, and the gems, which I had idea how to do. With the sword, I painted it a deep blue to begin with and then tried a lightning pattern freehand across the sword. I don’t think I did a particularly good job of it, but by that point I hadn’t painted for over a month and wanted to finish them off without getting bogged down. The gems, under the advice of Steve from Warlords and Wizards, were painted silver initially then coated in the purple paint that I think is supposed to go in an airbrush. It seemed to work!

Here we see the Genestealers I’ve been working on in the last week or so. This has been an interesting challenge because I’m definitely not used to painting Tyranids; I tried it many years ago when I was still in school, and I think once when I was staff I painted a model for the shop, but I’ve never collected a whole army of them. I think that’s largely because their complete lack of humanity made them very difficult to relate to, so I wasn’t tempted to try. These days, of course, I know that’s the whole point of Tyranids – to create an unstoppable force of alien creatures to scare the life out of anybody unfortunate enough to have to face them; and the human element is the one they create – not the one they have. I’m following the guides available on Warhammer TV and painting them the classic Genestealer colours. The one at the front is the one where I’ve attempted to do the highlighting on the flesh; I ran out of time to do any more, but it worked relatively well and will probably take up a bigger portion of my time next week!

Last Week's Games: Speculations, Sine Mora, Warhammer Battlemarch, Anno 1602

It’s been a while since the last blog, sorry about that. The main reason, and one of the main problems I have with working from home,[1] is that I find it very difficult to justify doing any of my own things until I’ve done all my work. This amounts to filming a few videos, and uploading them, but until I’ve done that, I find it very hard to justify writing blogs or even doing my own music videos that some of you may have seen.

On top of that, I’ve been giving some serious consideration as to where this blog is going to go in the future. I came to within one post of stopping this blog altogether and moving it to Wordpress because I thought I’d overextended the picture limit on Blogger; this turned out not to be the case, but I have some other things to think about as well. Obviously, I talk about video games nearly every week, but I find myself with a lot more things to say about hobby games as well, especially now I’m at the point in my life where I can play more of them – if in a slightly different way to how I’ve done it in the past! I’ve been playing a lot more games with my daughter, for example, and talking about that is usually on a very different level to talking about games I’ve been playing by myself on a console or computer.

So, I might do some less-regular blogs regarding certain other aspects of playing games. With the hobby games, I rarely find myself with enough to say in one week to justify doing a new blog, but maybe after a month I could find some things to say. Painting is another one, I go through batches of not painting anything at all but if I could get something done every month it might be the spur I need to proceed – and with the new 40K due in a few weeks, I’m going to need to get a move on with my painting! And I’m still hopeful that I might be able to do an entire campaigns worth of blogs on certain of my board games, though that’s still in the pipeline for now.

A beautiful but deadly game...

So, what I have I been playing lately?

Quite a few new games, actually. I downloaded Sine Mora on the Xbox 360 a week ago and I’ve had a go on it; it’s been a long time since I’ve played an honest-to-goodness shoot-em-up and I really enjoyed the opportunity to play it. It seems to have an interesting story as well, though it is also ferociously difficult after the first couple of levels. The time-based mechanics are interesting, and the shooting and boss battles are fun, so I’ll keep coming back to it whenever I need to let my brain unwind from the day!



My painting isn't as good as that!

I’ve also had a go with Warhammer Battlemarch, the Warhammer strategy game released on the Xbox 360. This game is probably the closest a relatively modern release got to Shadow of the Horned Rat, which I absolutely loved back in the day and still dip in to every now and then. You have an option to play through an Empire, Orc and Chaos campaign, and for now I favour the Empire (that was my army when I played Warhammer!) The interface is a massive faff, but I get used to it, and I’ve been using a rather slow-paced shooting strategy where I get close enough to the enemy for them to see me and approach, shoot them as much as I can and if there’s anything left when they get close enough, finish them off in close combat.

"In 1602, we sail the open seas..."

Finally, I’ve been playing Anno 1602 on the PC. I played a demo of this years ago, I think even before the millennium, and even though I hadn’t played it since I never forgot it and wanted to give it another go. It’s a great colonisation strategy game; it looks gentle, but it isn’t afraid to let you fail if you’re not careful!

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[1] I’m not going to complain too much about that though, at least I’m working; some people aren’t so fortunate!

Last Week's Games: Eternal Crusade, Shadow of the Horned Rat and Drop Assault

This week I’ve been mostly playing Warhammer… 
 

If you don't like the taste of salt,
steer clear of Eldar...

I’ve been having a pretty decent time with Eternal Crusade; I’m starting to find my feet a bit with the game and the different classes now. I enjoy running the Heavy class if I’m Chaos, the Jump Assault class if I’m Space Marines and the Slugga if I’m Orks. It’s still very rare that I achieve a score beyond the bottom third of the leader board, but if I place anywhere other than the last position on the table then I’m happy. I’m up to level three with those three factions and I’m enjoying finding the different ways they can advance, although I find it curious that a lot of the buffs you can give them mean less points for certain weapons (you equip your characters on a points-buy system.) When your points limit is 1000, you’d welcome having to spend less on your weapons – and if there was anything else you could conceivably give them in their place, you probably would. As it is, knocking 100 points off your main weapon doesn’t do you much good when all the other equipment slots are full and there’s nothing else you can give them.

Also as I don’t play this style of game very often, I’m not used to the nastiness that very often permeates their multiplayer communities. As it stands, it seems to be a faux pas to play as Eldar, as their hit boxes are slightly smaller and their weapons do a lot of damage. They also seem to be very well co-ordinated. As for me, I don’t really mind; I’ve played against Eldar and won. But I find myself spending a fleeting few seconds wondering if people making those remarks would say that to people’s faces. Maybe they would.

Wow, this looks dated now...

I’ve also been playing Warhammer: Shadow of the Horned Rat. This was a game I borrowed off someone years ago when I was still at school. I think I still have the disc somewhere but I’ll never get it to work on my laptop in a million years, and I’ve got it for the PlayStation but the controls are very difficult on that. So I downloaded it again of GOG and I’ve been thoroughly enjoying playing through it again, although the game is very difficult and I found myself stuck on the same levels I was stuck on all that time ago. I’ll probably keep playing it though!

My new game for this week – I’m on a bit of a Games Workshop kick – was The Horus Heresy: Drop Assault for my Kindle Fire 7. This is essentially a clicker game popular on mobile devices – click on a thing, wait for a thing to happen, click on another thing to make another thing happen, build up more resources so you can click on other things to make other things happen. I wasn’t expecting much more, frankly, but I find myself disappointed that I didn’t get more. It’s supposed to re-enact one of the key moments of the Horus Heresy: The Massacre on Isstvan, but that was a swift and brutal massacre, not a full-blown campaign.

At no point when I was playing
did it get this exciting...

To be honest it’s not a canon I have much interest in exploring. There’s a series of 42 books on it, and I read about the first ten, but they’re so unforgivably grim and bleak that I couldn’t bring myself to read another. Not when I know perfectly well how it all works out anyway, given that the result of the Horus Heresy is what the entire Warhammer 40,000 universe is built upon. If there’s some form of interactive media that’s going to make the journey interesting, I’m probably not going to find it on a mobile game. There’s nothing wrong with Drop Assault, but I didn’t find it very entertaining.

I also had some time in Warlords and Wizards on Saturday night painting some of my Word Bearers. It’s a really nice atmosphere in there and it’s a pleasure to sit down and paint some models for a few hours. I’m looking forward to getting my Word Bearers on the gaming table, but one thing at a time; I’ve still got a load of cultists to paint!

Warhammer: Age of Sigmar First Impressions

So Warhammer: Age of Sigmar is now in full swing. It’s an interesting game. The substantial departure from the iterative nature of the last four editions of Warhammer means that the game has changed entirely for better or worse. Some people like it, some people hate it, some people and some don’t know one way or the other. That being the case, I thought I’d give you my first impressions:

 

Context

The army I’ve chosen for Age of Sigmar is Stormcast Eternals, and my current pool of models come from the Age of Sigmar Boxed Set. I’m also participating in an 8-week ‘Slow-Grow’ league at my local game store Phoenix Games, where the wound limit for the games are going up in increments of 25 every 2 weeks. Therefore, these remarks refer to the fact that I’ve mainly played 25 wound games so far.

 

What I like

A lot of people complain about the apparent lack of strategy in the game, but as I was always rubbish at Warhammer anyway, I actually like the fact that the amount of strategic manoeuvres and choices you make in the game are reduced. On the balance of having so much strategic choice that you could potentially win the game before it starts just by choosing what models to have in your army and deploying them properly, and so little that the entire game is decided on dice rolls, Age of Sigmar definitely leans towards the latter but there is enough going on to keep a ‘casual’ gamer like me engaged.

My Lord-Relictor. Don't mess.

For example, for a 25 Wound force, I picked the Lord-Relictor, Three Retributors and Five Liberators. The rationale was: because I had eight models in the whole army, I was almost always going to be outnumbered. I therefore stuck the Retributors at the front, the Relictor at the back and the Liberators in-between. Therefore, the enemy force would have to tackle the Retributors first, who are deadly in combat. The Relictor could use his power to heal the Retributors to keep them in the fight a little longer, and the Liberators could mop up whoever was left afterwards. That’s been my strategy for the four games I’ve played so far and it works reasonably well.

I also like the way the combat works. It’s clear what you need to hit and wound – no faffing about with tables – so that bit’s simple. The challenge comes from deciding what order to do the fights in. It’s about second-guessing what order your opponent will do everything in, and what you can afford to lose. Do I use my one remaining Retributor, or my Liberators for my first attack? The Retributor probably won’t do much damage on his own and will leave the others open for an attack, but if he’s attacked, he won’t be able to fight at all. Do I attack the Khorgorath or the Blood Reavers? The Khorgorath is doing a lot of damage, but if I kill enough of the Blood Reavers, they may then fail their bravery check and I’ll take out even more in one turn. It’s these kind of decisions that make up the fun of the game for me so far.

What I don’t like

Currently the only thing I don’t like about the game mechanics are the balancing issues coming from having to integrate every faction into a brand new system. I know moaning about balancing issues in any Games Workshop game is like complaining that grass is green, but in previous editions they tried, at least. In Age of Sigmar, you can take anything, no matter how elite or rare they purport to be, as long as they’re in the same faction. And even then, they’ve lumped a lot of the factions together so their war scrolls can be combined. You don’t even need to take a commander model, since you can nominate any model as a general. My first game of AoS didn’t go too well, as the guy I was playing used an Empire force of an Elector Count, three Demigryffs and a Hellblaster Cannon, and there was not a single modicum of restrictions in the rules to stop him.

Needless to say I enjoy it a lot more when there is some balance in the chosen forces!

Conclusion

Age of Sigmar is a very different experience to Warhammer. There’s less going on than I might expect from a conventional wargame, but as I’m not very good at them, I’m kind of enjoying this ‘lite’ version of it. There will be questions raised about balancing issues; there always are. But when I’ve won, I feel like I deserved it because of my force selection and manoeuvres, and I’ve been having a decent amount of fun with it. I’m looking forward to seeing how it develops!

Matt's Tactics: Cower and Camp

I had a 750pt game of Warhammer 40,000 in the Dudley store this afternoon with a young man called Sam. I played my Khorne Bezerker force against his Astra Militarum, or Imperial Guard as most of us know it. Here was my army list:

	Components	Points	Total Points	Total Army
HQ	Chaos Lord	65	110	748
	Power Weapon	15
	Aura of Dark Glory	15
	Ichor Blood	5
	Mark of Khorne	10
Troops	Khorne Bezerkers (8)	162	219
	Chainaxe (4)	12
	Gift of Mutation	10
	Melta Bombs	5
	Power Weapon	15
	Plasma Pistol	15
	Khorne Bezerkers (8)	162	219
	Chainaxe (4)	12
	Gift of Mutation	10
	Melta Bombs	5
	Power Weapon	15
	Plasma Pistol	15
Heavy Support	Chaos Defiler	195	200
	Havoc Launcher	5

Sam had a Vanquisher, two Sentinels, a unit of Rocket Launchers and two 10-man squads with a Command group. The scenario was Purge the Alien (1 victory point for each unit completely destroyed) and we rolled the diagonal deployment. The terrain was laid out quite densely for a 4x4 board, with buildings in every corner, but I was still going to have to run my Bezerkers at him before I did any damage, and running in to a gun line of Guard is a very dangerous game indeed…

Sam literally came out all guns blazing by firing the Vanquisher cannon at my Bezerkers who were taking cover behind the building. In but the first turn, he managed to wipe out five from the first squad, and – due to some rather fortunate scatter dice rolls – four from the second. That was over half my army and I hadn’t even made a move.

Hiding in the building was the best they could do? Really?

What I decided to do was move my remaining Berzerkers right in to the building where they were out of line of sight. There were now few enough of them that I managed to do this with all eight models that remained (My Chaos Lord was among them,) forcing Sam to move his models in order to wipe out my remaining troops. Curiously enough, Sam didn’t rise to the bait. I’m not sure what he thought I was going to do if he did, but not once during the remainder of the game – which would have lasted at least another four turns – did he attempt to take the fight to me.

On the third turn I bought on the Defiler. On the turn it arrived, I fired the Battle Cannon onto a unit of Guardsmen standing at the back of the board doing very little. I killed all but two of them, who promptly failed their leadership check and ran off the board, giving me two victory points – one for the squad, and a secondary one for first blood.

Sam directed his rocket launchers at my Defiler after that, immobilising it and eventually destroying it – but it was too late. With only one victory point, and no hope of getting another, the game was mine once I’d rolled for Random Game Length; I won 2-1.

Sam took the defeat well, fair play to him. And a win is a win, no matter how it comes about – but somehow I can’t help the feeling I didn’t really deserve this one. Khorne Bezerkers are supposed to be ferocious super-warriors who seek out battles and slaughter, and I won the battle by getting half of them killed and hiding the others out in a building like a bunch of frightened guinea-pigs. The shot with the Defiler was a gamble, and if it hadn’t worked I probably wouldn’t have won, but that literally was the only reason I did – by having the bigger gun and getting in the first kill.

The one positive thing I will say about it is that the Bezerkers at least did their job in being fearless. Had anybody else taken that many casualties in one turn, they would have needed a panic check – chances are they would have failed, run off the board and given the game to my opponent. So I guess it was a viable tactic, and one that probably wouldn’t have worked with any other unit. It’s just not what you envisage when you take Khorne Bezerkers to battle!

5/1/2014: Warhammer 40K: Chaos Space Marines vs Space Marines.

This match took place in Titan Games in Stourbridge between me and my opponent who is also called Matt. I had Chaos Space Marines, Matt had Space Marines, and we played a 1500 point game.

Now I'm going to say straight off the bat that this one ended in a draw due to time-out after the 3rd turn out of potentially 7 (the shop was closing.) Matt had the advantage on victory points and the game had the potential to turn into a complete bloodbath, but he's a really nice guy and was gracious enough to call it a draw. As the game did not have time to reach its conclusion, it won't be the usual blow-by-blow account. Instead, I'm going to comment on some of the new 6th edition codex rules that we came across, and how they affected the game.

This might just get even more nerdy than usual...

First of all, here was my army:

	Components	Points	Total Points	Total Army
HQ	Chaos Lord	65	130	1498
	Aura of Dark Glory	15
	Axe of Blind Fury	35
	Veterans of the Long War	5
	Mark of Khorne	10
	Chaos Lord	65	135
	Aura of Dark Glory	15
	Jump Pack	15
	Lightning Claw (2)	30
	Mark of Slaanesh	10
Troops	Khorne Bezerkers (8)	162	284
	Chainaxe (4)	12
	Gift of Mutation	10
	Veterans of the Long War	8
	Icon of Wrath	15
	Power Weapon	15
	Plasma Pistol	15
	Chaos Rhino	35
	Havoc Launcher	12
	Khorne Bezerkers (8)	162	237
	Chainaxe (4)	12
	Gift of Mutation	10
	Veterans of the Long War	8
	Icon of Wrath	15
	Power Weapon	15
	Plasma Pistol	15
	Chaos Space Marines (6)	88	191
	Lightning Claw (2)	30
	Close Combat Weapon (5)	10
	Plasma Gun	15
	Veterans of the Long War	6
	Icon of Excess	30
	Mark of Slaanesh	12
Fast Attack	Raptors (6)	112	164
	Meltagun (2)	20
	Plasma Pistol	15
	Melta Bombs	5
	Mark of Slaanesh (6)	12
Heavy Support	Chaos Defiler	195	200
	Havoc Launcher	5
	Chaos Vindicator	120	157
	Siege Shield	10
	Havoc Launcher	12
	Daemonic Possession	15

A curious amalgamation of Khorne and Slaanesh, but there is a reason for this: I don't really have one big army (or at least, not one that's any good,) so instead of that I have about 8 different small armies across Games Workshop's games. This is because I get fed up with painting the same thing over and over again, and want to move on to something new. This means I could start an army every 10 minutes, and about half of them would be Chaos. Having painted a few new pieces for my Khorne army, I found that I actually had enough of each army to form a reasonable force, so that's how I got it up to 1500 points.

So here's what we came across:

Space Marines: Combat Squads

The rule in the Space Marines Codex that allows full-strength Space Marine squads to split in to two squads was first introduced in 5th edition. It's still fundamentally the same rule but with one difference: You can now only do this at the start of the game before rolling for your Warlord Traits. This means you can now no longer do it once the game is underway.

If I remember rightly, this was more or less the case before anyway (A note here: When I played Space Marines in 5th Edition, I used Salamanders, who couldn't use the Combat Squad rules because it came under Ultramarines Chapter Tactics.) But the difference here is that now that the Warlord Traits can sometimes affect the way the army is deployed, the squads have to be split first if they are going to divide into combat squads. Which is fair enough. Matt actually forgot to do it, but I let him have it anyway; there's no point being a dick when we're just getting used to the new rules. But by the same token, I forgot to roll for my Gifts of Mutation at the start of the game and he let me have that. It's amazing what you can do with a kind word!

Chaos Space Marines: Daemonic Possession

This rule in the Chaos Space Marines Codex affects vehicles, and is nothing new, being in operation at least as far back as the 4th edition Codex. However, it now works slightly differently for the new edition of the game: You now have to roll 2+ on a dice to ignore Crew Shaken and Crew Stunned on the Vehicle Damage Table. As the table is now only applied on a penetrating hit, this will come up a lot less, which I'm presuming is the reason for the reduction in points from 20 to 15. It still reduces the Ballistic Skill of the relevant vehicle to 3.

There is also another nasty twist: If the vehicle is a transport unit, then you have to roll 1D6 when the unit embarks. If you get a 1, it eats one of the passengers that embarks on it. It can recover a hull point if it does this, but given the cost of even the most basic Chaos Space Marine, losing even one of them will hurt.

As you can see from my army list, Daemonic Possession affected both the Vindicator and the Defiler (the latter by default.) Did it help? No. Quite the reverse, actually. My Vindicator got shot a lot but the most Matt was able to do was glance it, so the benefit of the rule never actually applied. On the other hand, it did make my scatter launches less accurate, and I remember at least one occasion where the target Dreadnought was missed by 1 inch - the inch I wouldn't have lost if I hadn't put Daemonic Possession on it.

Ironically, the rule would have been better employed on the Rhino. This did get a Crew Stunned result, which wouldn't have bothered me except that the squad within can't then charge into combat. Removing the passengers from the Rhino would have left them in open ground with nowhere to go because the Rhino couldn't get out of their way (it was rather dense terrain!)

Chaos Space Marines: Champion of Chaos

The Challenge rule has been in Warhammer for some time and was bought to 40K in the 6th edition. It's quite a nice addition to the game and can make for some thematic battles. It's also a pretty good way of making sure your squad sticks around to take the combat in to multiple rounds; the challenge has no affect on the rest of the combat so assuming your guy survives and passes his leadership check, he can force the combat to carry on into the next turn. This is a good tactic when contesting an objective!

Of course, Chaos have their own spin on this: The Champion must issue and accept a challenge wherever possible, and if he wins, gets to roll on the Chaos Boon table (which I won't go in to for this game as it never came up.) Of course, there's nothing the Dark Gods like better than watching their champions go at it in single combat.

It's a good thematic rule but one that can lead to some trouble if you're not careful. Apart from anything else, the champion may very well end up entirely out of his depth if he happens to challenge, say, a Librarian, or an Eldar Exarch, or even an Ork Warboss. Also, even if he wins, it might not help matters all that much, because the efforts of the Champion would have been better spent on the actual combat.

In this particular case, my squad of 6 Chaos Space Marines was charged by a 5-strong squad of Vanguard Veterans armed to the teeth. I took one out in Overwatch - another good new rule, by the way - and then issued the challenge. As the squad was only 5 men strong, the Veteran Sergeant couldn't have refused even if he'd wanted to, and because my Champion had both the Mark of Slaanesh and a pair of Lightning Claws, he took the Sergeant out very quickly. The remaining Chaos Space Marines took out another Vanguard Veteran... and then the two remaining Vanguard Veterans killed 4 Chaos Space Marines, causing them to lose combat.

And no matter what happened in the challenge, surviving it won't protect you from Sweeping Advance...

Which brings me on to the final rule, which should have come up, but didn't:

The Icon of Excess

This is a new rule that you can only give to squads who have the Mark of Slaanesh. It gives the unit Feel No Pain, which isn't quite as good in 6th edition as it was in 5th, but still useful.

You'll see on the army list that I gave The Icon of Excess to the unit of Chaos Space Marines with the mark of Slaanesh, which was involved in the close combat mentioned above. Unfortunately I forgot to do it, which meant that some of the Chaos Marines who died could potentially have survived the onslaught of the two Vanguard Veterans. I'd still have failed the leadership check if I'd lost (I rolled 11) but if I'd made a couple of saves it wouldn't necessarily have come to that.

So, that's what I think of the new rules that came up in the game. As it's technically a draw but the match didn't reach the conclusion we were looking for, a re-match is on the cards, but some scheduling issues means that I have no idea when this is going to happen.

See you all next time!