It's all part of my sinister agenda, though. See, if I befriend people over new games, sometimes they mention they like an old game. This is what happened with a fella named Matt, who invited me to his Saturday club and made the fatal mistake of mentioning Mordheim on that first afternoon.
We played a couple of test games the winter before last, just to see if it was as good as we remembered. Matt's Skaven, which were "fresh" out of the original box he'd unearthed from his loft, and my Undead, which were more or less exactly as they were the last time they came out to play in 2008-ish.
These are quite long shots of our Defend The Find and Street Fight battles (I subscribe to the wisdom that anyone who plays "just line up and fight" in a skirmish game is asking for a close encounter with a live rat). While bad for showing off miniatures, they are good for showing off the terrain Matt printed and painted, and the mat Matt bought. He's a keener, this one.
(He won both the games quite handily, because it turns out great weapons on unskilled Vampires aren't very good. In my defence, I swapped it out for WFB sixth edition... where they're good...)
Anyway, that attracted some more interest, and THIS winter we were joined by Steve and Tony. Steve brought his own Dwarf Treasure Hunters to the tables, expats from a quite substantial Dwarf collection. Tony wasn't sure what he wanted to play, so I offered him a loan of the Undead warband. I had... other plans.
Remember how I was stalled in my path to glory by that Shadow Warrior warband in the last campaign? I wanted a go on that. I also had these metal Wardancers kicking around from when I tried to play Wood Elves for a year. Painting those up was a joy long put off (I do love working on metal figures every so often) and if I can keep them safe from the cat I might dig them out again and take another photo of them finished.
Playing them, eeeeh...
We played a round robin over three club meets, and my typical performance went something like this.
Swig elven wine or sound elven horn for bonuses specific to match-up.
Leader attempts diving charge or modest leap between buildings, falls, injures self.
Useless wizard successfully teleports into an ambush where he can be counter-ambushed, goes out of action, loses another limb.
Remaining elves valiantly shoot at T4 targets they can't wound, or Skaven where it doesn't matter because there's twelve of them and only three of us, then bottle.
After three repetitions of that cycle, here's where my warband are at.
Nivara, my leader, is rubbish: blind in one eye and subject to Stupidity, she appears to have lobotomised herself falling off a building in every game. Yavathol, second wielder of the stupid greatsword, died of axe poisoning after striking last against a Dwarf engineer who, to be fair, I was warned about. Lorelai, my wizard, is missing an arm and has absolutely stuffed their one remaining hand, and needs a new model and a new outlook on life.
The only light in the black is Hollena, the blondest of my three heroes, who made it out with three large chunks of wyrdstone stuffed in her leafy jodhpurs and may yet hire on a bunch of archers (I'm thinking metal Waywatchers) and return to the City of the Damned next time we get the ruins out. Or I might swap to Possessed. Lovely T4 W2 Possessed with lovely T4 W2 Beastmen mates.
