wargamesdiary   A diary of war games and board games

This Bannernob from the Armageddon boxset was painted by me (Link) using only the paints that come in the new Duncan Rhodes ‘Dark Arts’ paint set. I will note that these colours were a lot less saturated and had a darker colouring that felt perfect for grimdark painting. I really enjoyed the edition of inks, that worked a bit like a contrast paint. you could get varying tones and they covered a big surface well (on the banner I used red ink and highlighted and shadowed in blood red sky and flayer red) I also found that the brown ink provided a fantastic rust effect (as seen on his axe and stomach plate). The blight cream provided a good skull effect when dry brushed over with a light brown. I enjoyed the ‘old brown metal’ as a basic metal colour that wasn’t too bright. the other metals worked well, especially when rusted. this set came with multiple blacks and whites, which his first set lacked.

this picture compares the two sets perfectly. the big boss on the right is from the first set and the bannernob on the left is from the second set. this emphasises my point about the saturation difference.

these paints applied really well to the model and blended well. they are perfect from grimdark and warhammer 40k painters, but they lack the contrast and saturation for other games. the come in a really cool box and don’t cost that much for 30 paints. the cost per bottle of paint works out to about £3 which is quite good considering how may millilitres you get plus a ball bearing and a lid that actually closes. compared to the warhammer tone pro, thats a pound less for more mills and a functioning lid. the paints also come in multiple shades, and can be mixed with black and white for an infinite ammount of shades. I would definitely recomend this set to newer and older painters alike painters who don’t want to spend ridiculous ammounts on the warhammer official paints.

please comment if you will be purchasing this set or if someone you know has it. also comment if you liked the figures!!!

LINK

This game was very fun to play. A couple of times it went down to the last black card drawn, and unlucky dice rolls against the siege engines. We played it that there were 5 loyal cards and 1 traitor in 5 players, which added the element that we could be having false suspicions when there really wasn’t actually a traitor. Towards the end every player is sitting on one hitpoint, and if the traitor is exposed, there always seem to be 11 out of 12 siege engines on the board, and never enough cards to fight them. I also found that once exposed, the traitor was still very powerful, being able to steal a card, then add a siege engine or draw a black card. This led to us wishing we had exposed the traitor later on in the game.  We gained a massive help from sir Lancelot armour allowing our player to choose the nicer card. The only problem with this strategy was, when it came to the end of the game all the bad Morgan cards came back at the worst moment possible, right as we were about to win. Victory came very close but we lost by one sword in the end. We had gained seven and we were just hanging on to lose Excalibur. We lost and then the next card, was an Excalibur. We realised if we had put one less card into Excalibur victory would’ve been ours.

Overall this was a very fun game, but very difficult. We once played without a traitor, and we still lost.  I give this game a 9/10 for complexity and a 8.5/10 for fun.

Continuing the Rohan campaign Link played as Good vs Bear as Evil.

In this scenario Eomer arrives and attacks a group of Uruk and Orcs camped outside of Fangorn. Meanwhile Merry and Pippin are trying to escape from a hungry Grishnakh.

Lots of fun as the Rohirrim crash into the Evil forces in a mighty charge. Ugluk uses heroic Strength and kills his own Orc to kill the Rohan Captain in one round whilst on the western side Eomer kills Snaga in one round himself.

The Cavalry charge again with Eomer and Ugluk both calling heroic moves. This allows Eomer’s flank to charge first on the west but on the east the cavalry are pinned. Heavy losses ensue and Merry breaks free as Grishnakh closes in.

More fighting. Eomer’s heroic combat fails on the East but his cavalry hold their own and Ugluk is doing well on the west. Merry survives against Grishnakh when caught trying to free Pippin. He survives his fate roll and cost the Orc his last point of Might too.

Then Eomer comes crashing through the centre and rides over poor Grishnakh, probably not even noticing in the dark! Merry and Pippin make for the woods and the cavalry from the West tear through the remaining Orcs whilst Ugluk kills more riders.

Then Eomer and his band surround the foul creature and soon defeat the remaining Uruk Hai and Orcs.

Victory for Good well done Link!

P foolishly set up an Epic game in co-op mode in Challenging mode with him D and M against the 3 bots. Team got slaughtered!

Next day P and L gave it a go in standard mode which was much more fun and victory was achieved! Frodo defeated Gollum in the final round to win at the Crack of Doom! Meanwhile Gandalf the White saved Lorien.

Phil, Link, Mike and Darryl played. P came last and L and M tied with L claiming victory!

I’ll start off by doing what I liked about this game. It had very indepth tactics and fun play styles right from when you drew your template card. Drawing the rolling the dice I found very fun and I enjoyed how theres a benefit to going last, first or somewhere in the middle every turn. The tool cards really shook up the play of the game and the boards felt very immersive. Towards the end of the game is where things get very tactical and difficult, with lots of people backstabbing each other and the tool cards really coming in to play. But the end is sort of what I didn’t like about the game. It got very technical and all previous decisions you ended up regretting. You ended up kicking yourself multiple times and the game grew frustrating. But that’s whats also made the game very interesting, and I liked the forward-thinking aspect.  

In the balance of luck and skill to make a great board-game, this was slightly too much skill for my liking. It was like azul but with an added layer of complexity in the numbers and not being able to place anything similar next to something of the same number or colour. We found that if there was a bad tool card draw then the game became very difficult. I liked the use of objectives that added another layer of thought but again, they just bumped up the complexity even further.

I would definitely recommend this game to more experienced gamers over newer gamers, as it acts a bit like an expansion to Azul. Overall I give this game an 8/10 for very interesting game gameplay

Links new figures from the Armageddon box and more made it at last to the table . Almost done now . Blood angels completed and the orks need some finishing off but we had enough for 1000 points each .

Link played orks vs bear as angels.

So the battle began with the space marines keeping in cover whilst the orks advanced in the centre with koptas. The marines got lots of early vp and the orks held more in reserves too .

Then the blood angels were tempted out and Dante attacked the boyz on the left flank striking and charging out of reserves whilst the chaplain and his squad did the same on the right.

Soon enough the Gretchen and war track on the right were down and home objective captured . On the left the sanguinary guard and Dante did the same to the Boyz.

Meanwhile intercessors and captain accrued victory points on the right . they also took out the koptas who had destroyed the land speeder in the middle.

But then on turn 3 the tides were turning as Gutzmek arrived and destroyed the sanguinary guard and Dante aided by his sqiggbuggy and the Big Mek in the middle took out the chaplains guard too on the other flank.

The Stormboyz arrived to annoy the eradicators hitting with grenades but failed to charge and suffered for it . But then gutzmek arrived too and it was all over for the eradicators who had been hampered by terrain blocking line of sight throughout the battle .

Soon enough the orks were looking good and had all the objectives in hand . So we decided to call it there ! Well done Link.

P, M , D, A and L played two games with the higher difficulty of almost always being a traitor.

First game quickly went to P as the traitor but the second was an epic struggle with only A alive at the end vs M as an exposed traitor. victory again to the traitor!