Necromorial Day Weekend

    Howdy out there folks of the nightmare-o-net. It's Frank from Just a Rhino again. Now recently we celebrated Memorial Day Weekend, and if your Memorial Day was anything like mine it was FRAKING HOT! And instead of standing in the hot evil sun next to a hot grill me and the LGS crew decided to beat the heat with some INTERIOR GAMING!
    Yeah inside is the good side. And for the special holiday weekend we started off our Necromunda Campaign! Necromunda as you may or may not know is the fast paced game of English ladies! 
No wait that's soccer....or lacrosse...




Quiditch?


    I don't know, anyway Necromunda is a 'gang' based skirmish game, pitting your crew of criminals against everyone else's, in a mad fight for creds, territory and YOUR LIVES! (OMFG!)Your gang is comprised of your gangboss a few 'Gangers' and the ubiquitous redshirts called 'jeuves' who are the 'pledges' of your gang, doing a lot of the dirty work to eventually become a full fledged gang member. After each battle wounded gangers recover (or die, or lose fingers, or legs, or eyes, or other crazy stuff) and your gang leans on some squares for enough food to refit their weapons and feed themselves. Any left over cash can be spent by the gangboss on new gang members, weapons, or special RARE items which cover everything from A Power Sword to a FRAKIN' PARACHUTE! Also each member of your gang levels up over time gaining new skills and stats which sometimes can get out of hand. 
    But the game is always a total blast. The learning time for the game is anywhere between 30 secs for avid 40k players to 30 mins for a lot of others. The game moves quickly with each side running, diving, shooting and hiding in the deteriorating bowels of the giant hive-spire. Sometimes games end prematurely when some cowardly (or smart) gangs hoof it after loosing a few of their boys. This mechanic is actually one of the saving graces of the game.

Your Gang Can Be Grrls Like This.

    After you 'lose' 25% or more of your gang your leader (if standing) must take a Leadership test or you automatically book it back to your own turf. This seems silly when games can end literally before they start (See Shootout followed by one side auto-running due to having no standing fighters) but most of the time it cuts the games down to just enough turns to be interesting and frantic, but not so long that you're looking at your watch. The book keeping for the game sometimes takes longer than the game, but I'd say half the game is leveling up your dudes and collecting extortion money and buying better gear for your boss. 


    Although I'm saving the best for last one of my other favorite bits about NecroFUNda is that theres' a lot of very cool missions included in the rule book, it really keeps things interesting after a few 'gang fights' in a row, there's even a special scenario for rescuing your captured gang members. But my favorite has got to be Shootout: a Wild West gunfight complete with walking straight at your enemy and seeing who goes for their guns first, and then all hell breaks loose. 
     I said I'd save the best for last, and I did: It's Free! The whole game book and Extra rules and junk are all on GW's website ready for your to download.  And if you're an avid 40k player or member of a local gaming club or store you've probably got enough terrain to mash together the tallest buildings you have into a pretty clustered and fun table. Obviously this game and all the other 'skirmish' based specialist games (Mordhiem, Gorkamorka, Blood Bowl) is best played using the Campaign rules and running your crew against at least 4 other players gangs. 



Bottom Line, Give it a Try. Grab some guardsmen and some cardboard buildings and Get Rich...

...Or Die Trying.

Northern Wastes League!

Ever since I creamed Frank in the JAR Grudge Match Match-tacular, I've been playing a lot of Blood Bowl on Fumbbl.  Mostly because I like being better at things than Frank, but also because I actually like the game.  The endless nature of the Fumbbl divisions was starting to irk me, however.  Basically, there's two leagues that never play each other, each  consisting of hundreds (thousands?  Probably thousands) of coaches and unlimited teams per coach.  Every 3-4 months, there's a MAJOR TOURNAMENT, which you can enter and immediately lose, if you like.  I did.  It was fun, but it also put a harsh spotlight on how Fumbbl's divisions are nothing like real sports leagues.  If only there was some way to play Blood Bowl online in a reasonably-sized, structured league with seasons and championships...

Happiness is a Warm Gun

Hello all, fancy seeing you here. I figured it was time for another post since no one else seems to have anything to talk about. I have a feeling that may change with more and more rumors pouring out about 6th edition and the fact that it may be coming out soon (within the next two months is our current guess at JaR. Frank says this month). Personally I don't know why we don't know when exactly it is coming out. Of course I could have missed some big chunk of news and they've announced the release date, but a cursory google search didn't give me concrete evidence and I'm really not invested enough in finding out to go further than that! MOVING ON.

Last night Frank and I played the first in our round of teaching games. When I was first learning how to play 40k, Frank would just tell me what I needed to roll and I'd roll it. I didn't know why, I just did it. This became a HUGE problem when I tried to play other people because I didn't know what to roll. Luckily the other people I have played so far have been willing to help me instead of trying to screw me over cause I'm new at playing.

So last night was a lesson in learning how to figure out what I need to roll in certain places (to hit, to wound, close combat rolls). We played a 500(ish) point list. It turned out in the end that both of our sets of math were wrong, I was under by 10 pts and he was over by 20pts. I'm not saying that is why things turned out as they did, but I don't want to give away the ending.

So my 500(ish) pt list went as follows:

Captain Becky
-Lightning claws x2 (because it takes a special kind of asshole to have just one lightning claw)
-Jump pack

10 Man assault squad
-2 flamers
-power weapon

Devastator Squad:
3 plasma cannons
storm bolter

So here was how I felt after I wrote my list and was thinking about my strategy



Here is how I felt when we actually started playing.



Let me explain WHY. Frank played sisters of battle because he needs an excuse to use them after amassing an unreasonable number of sisters. Anyway, I don't know enough about sisters to give you his exact list but here's what I remember: 31 sisters total (I think) 2 regular squads each with flamer/heavy flamer (10 sisters a piece), a squad of (forgive me if I butcher this) retributers? 10 ladies with big/long distance guns. And a lady with a power weapon, she was his HQ choice but I really wasn't paying attention because I was watching all my guys get killed. So I had 16 dudes in my army and he had 31… not very good odds just by counting bullets *sigh*

So we rolled, he deployed first and I stole his initiative (YEAH!) so I went first which didn't turn out to be as awesome as I'd hoped. I fired 3 plasma cannons into his big guns squad, basically if I had gotten it right I would have had 15 plasma cannon shots against them, due to terrible rolling and the evil scatter die I think I landed 3, and one wounded. That was my luck pretty much most of the game, I missed the rolls that mattered. I saved Captain Becky and a combat squad of 5 to come in later in the game. The other half of the assault squad came in and ended up hiding because there was no way they'd make it anywhere to shoot or fight.

Frank moved up a squad of regular gals to the middle of our shortened board and fired some shots off, I don't remember exact sequences of events for a while in this part of the game because I was distraught that my plan was failing so horribly and I was rolling like crap. Frank will attest to this and that I'm not just blaming my dice. ANYWAY, most of my assault squad got killed and the devastators were all blown up after not doing my much good (so much for crowd control).

At this point two things happened, 1- I resigned that I probably wasn't going to win this game, 2- Since I gave up on winning I was free to just send Captain Becky in to crush some souls.

So I dropped her and her combat squad with 2 flamers in behind the second squad of normal sisters. After a round of flamers to the face followed by being eaten alive by Cpt Becky and her crew (eventually) in close combat, Cpt Becky realized there was still one man left in the other squad of assault marines and he was taking on 10 sisters by himself. He lasted through about 3 rounds of close combat before he was killed.

Cpt Becky and her last remaining marine from her combat squad went to the middle of the board to attempt to clean up what that other marine had started, after all these were the only people really left. So it ended up being Cpt Becky alone surrounded by sisters and a boss lady, with Becky and the Boss Lady both down to having one wound left, it became a roll off. Time after time we both rolled one save (since we'd only wound each other once because we both suck at rolling), eventually Cpt Becky fell and Frank won.

So over all it was fun but it is reinforcing the fact that I'm not positive I want to be playing space marines of any sort any more. But we'll see how it turns out when we try a bigger list. So moral of the story is: Don't play Blood Angels in low point lists.

So as I was surfing the internet today for pictures for this post, I kept coming across these My Little Pony pictures with the ponies dressed up as various costumes, and I missing something completely? I remember seeing something about bronies the other day but I didn't think much of it… Any way here you go