Amazones.com

Tonight Hari's amazons ventured into the ruins of Mordheim for the first time, making their way through the ruined buildings and the dark alleys. As they came to a dimly lit street corner, Dernoe, one of the more experienced warriors, suddenly stopped. A dozen meters away, turning his back, stood an old man clad in black robes. Around him lay corpses, but he did not seem to notice the pungent stench they exahaled. Dernoe squinted in an attempt to make out what the man was doing. He was gently waving his arms in small cercles. His head slowly rocked back and forth. He was mumbling something Dernoe could not understand.

Dernoe looked back. Her bandmates had taken postions all around her, from where they could observe the old man. Dernoe slowly and silently crawled forward, but then she froze in her tracks. The old man had turned around and stared at her with cold, evil, otherworldly eyes. Around him the corpses began to quiver. Then one of them slowly stood up. Dernoe stared in awe at the carcasses rising to their feet, one by one, like living men.

"Those are undead! she heard the warband's priestess cry as she drew her sword. Dernoe felt the lust for battle fill her heart.
-Push through them before they overwhelm us, yelled the priestess, this is a god-damn breakthrough scenario from page 87 in the rulebook!".


Here's the situation (it's very simple):

The amazones must break through the Undead lines and escape off the table via the "escape edge". The amazons win if they can get 2 standing models off the table. The Undead win if the amazons rout before that.

Hari gets the first turn. He split up his force into 2 packs of roughly the same strength.
He plans to occupy my zombies on one table side, while his warriors outrun my zombies on the other.

Hari's priestess.

The priestess and a henchwoman at the starting position. The zombies have picked up their scent and are closing in.

Hari places one of his warriors carrying this vicious "sun staff" on top of a building. She keeps sniping at my poor walking corpses. Fortunately for me, Hari keeps rolling too low and misses EVERYTHING!

I build up a wall of rotting flesh before Hari, determined to let him arrive at the other side "over my dead body" (literally!). Above you see the centerpiece of my defence.

Backed up by the rather mediocre firepower of 2 pariahs with bows. "Yesss masterrrr!".

The amazones hesitate a little too long. They stay behind cover while my zombies stumble towards them...

Here you see my "center" force advancing towards Hari's entrenched amazones. Although he managed to place his priestess on a ladder (to get a clear shot) he lost to much time in doing so. To make it worse for Hari, all the shots he takes at my vampire hit thin air.

"Braaaaaains!"

On the other table edge my necromancer leads another pack of zombies around a corner to intercept the second group of amazones.

At the center of the board, Hari charges my zombies. He hacks and slashes at them, but they just keep getting back on their feet. Later on I send in 2 fresh (additional) zombies and my vampire. That is the end of those two unfortunate amazones.
Still, Hari managed to take a LP from my vampire... impressive.

Now I close the noose. 2 zombies climb onto the sacrificial pit and charge the priestess (on her ladder!).

"Moooaaaargh! More braiiiiiins!" The priestess kicks and screams, but the cold dead hands of the zombies seal her doom.

Hari remained unnervingly calm during the whole time i massacrated his warband on one side of the table. Why? Well, he had a trump up his sleeve.

Hari smiles at me (which is a bad sign during a game) and sprints around the OTHER side of the house, thus putting a whole building between himself and my zombies with their pitiful 4" of mouvement. So much for my "interception" attempt... He now has a clear lane up to the saving escape edge for those 2 last amazons he needs to save in order to win.

Now, I must say that Hari could have made it if I had been able to cram all my zombies into the one place I had intended. Unfortunately for him, I had to abandon one little zombie in the back. It was that zombie that was able to charge the "homerunning" amazons, thus bringing their escape to an abrupt halt. To make it even worse for poor Hari, I rolled a 6 to hit, a 6 to wound (critical) and he rolled a 6 on the injury chart.
I don't know about you, but I am sensing a pattern... The number of the beast? The Dark Gods must have graced me today!

The sportsmanly handshake of the end. Good game dude.

A the end of the game, the priestess and the vampire went for a pint of Pat's finest. Or a mug of blood or whatever.

Man, I feel like a woman!

Ma joie est grande! Pourquoi? Parce que j'ai l'honneur de vous présenter la toute nouvelle bande fraîchement peinte de Stanzi. Elle mènera désormais une bande d'orcs et de goblins (et de squigs!).

C'est une bande, pour ainsi dire, unique car elle est composée d'orcs, goblins (et de squigs!) ayant renoncé à la violence. Et oui! Ils veulent divulguer leur message de paix et d'amour parmi les bandes belligérantes de Mordheim, et ils sont prêts à défendre leurs idéaux à grands coups de... fleurs? Oui enfin, des fleurs qui seront naturellement traitées comme des épées au corps-à-corps. Et qui donnent Force +2 au porteur. Et une sauvegarde de 2+. Et causent la peur. Et rajoutent 10ps au mouvement.

Bref, en tout cas voici les images, pour que vous sachiez à quoi vous attendre messieurs.

"Tremblez, méchants, car nous sommes les... les... gentils!" Clair que plus "gentil" que ca tu meurs...

Ci-dessus: le capitaine de la bande baptisé "Malabar".

Voici les deux squigs. Stanzi m'a dit qu'elle comptait les appeller "Chupa" et "Chups".




Et voici, pour le plaisir des yeux, une petite vidéo:

The roof is on fire, we don't need no water...

Une biengue triste nouvelle'a, qui risque d'entacher'a la bonne réputation de notre belle cité balnéaire'a... La "Campagne d'avril 2007" doit être repoussée.

Patrick a annulé car il avait trop à bosser, Hari idem car il passe son bac, et Nico, mon dernier éspoir, le dernier rempart, mon fidèle compagnon d'armes, a réussi à se faire inviter par un ami pendant les TROIS jours et demi libres qui restaient... Merci bien.

Comprenez donc mon désarroi. J'aime bien Mordheim, oui, mais pas au point de jouer contre moi même. Il a donc fallu repousser cette rencontre à un moment ulterieur qui sera encore à préciser. En clair: ca a COMPLÈTEMENT foiré. *Rideau*
Tant pis, ce sont des choses qui arrivent.

Tom's Experimental Lab

Plastic models, although great for converting and assembling, have always been a problem for newbie painters. Why? Because unlike their metal counterparts, they tend to melt when dipped into that acid-etching stuff used to remove the paint from metal or wooden furniture.
Plastics have always been some sort of a one-way tickets. If you screwed up the paintjob, then you scewed up the mini, and that meant 5€ you'd never see again.

There is no way to get the paint off without turning the poor warrior into a horrid, amorphic blob of plastic. So unless you are planning to buy a new possessed/mutant for your warband... NOT a good solution.

I recently heard rumours that ordinary "brake fluid" from cars should get the paint off plastic models without damaging them. In the interest of science, of all exasperated noobs and of satisfing my own curiosity, I decided to test this rumour.

I bought "Synthetic Brake Fluid" from the local petrol station and found myself a victim.

I poured the fluid over the mini hoping for some fizzling effects. Nothing happend.

Let's wait a while. I observed that the fluid grew darker ("Dark Angels darker" if you get the meaning). That means that at least some of the paint is beeing solvatised by the fluid. Great!

After 5 hours (and a little rubbing around on the miniature with an old brush) i took the miniature out.

It haden't changed much except for the colour which had gotten lighter on some parts. So I washed it and rubbed a little with my finger. Some of the paint went off. The plastic underneath looked as if new.

Unfortunately the fluid did not yield the results I had hoped for. After 30 mins the paint went off easily on approx. 40% of the miniature. Waiting longer did only slightly improve that (5 hours). I had to scrape the rest with a needle. Although it then also came off rather easily, it is tedious work to manually "clean" every detail of the figure (I did NOT completely clean the miniature for the picture!)

My conlcusion:

This method is NOT suited for cleaning large amounts of miniatures.

Although I think it might be comforting to know for some people, that their botched plastic warband captain is not forever lost. You CAN save him, if you invest a little time in the cleaning.
Still, I believe I must run more tests to see if this also applies to my beloved Vallejo colours.
The test-miniature I used also had many layers of old paint. Maybe that makes a difference...

If you never know failure, how can you know success?

La nouvelle planche de la table de Mordheim est bientôt prête, Thoumas ! J'ai gravé environ 50% des dalles pour le sol.


Pfiou ! C'est long !


Au premier plan, tu peux arriver à distinguer une zone que j'ai un peu ratée. Les dalles sont trop carrées et trop charcutées. J'essayerai de corriger ça à la fin en repassant dessus avec un crayon moins taillé.
Dis moi si tu as des conseils à m'apporter !

[EDIT]:

[RE-EDIT]:

Table terminée, ô maîîîîître des maîîîîtres absolu de la gâlâxie universelle !

Open Air

Nico arrived in Vienna April 15th. Yesterday he came to my house for a little game-testing of Gorkamorka. Here's a report of how things went during our "Open Air" event. Enjoy :)

Nico reads the scenario rules, measures distances, places scenery, defines zones, reads the rules again, shifts terrain, measures again, reads the rules, hops around the table, measures some more... "Done! Table is set up!"

Here's the situation. There is a fort in the middle of the table, occupied by Nico's team. My own team is trying to storm that fort (the ork way of laying siege) to get it's hands on the precious scrap lying around inside. Nico has to hold out until his reinforcements arrive.

Nico's team occupies the fort. I believe this pictures deserves a little explanation: Nico, finding the 40K ork models ugly, brought his space marines. We treated them as orcs for the purpose of the game, which worked really well actually.

My boyz have to storm the fort and get the loot.

The gate.

"If only i could get that marshmallow onto the stick..."

I manoeuvre my pick-up truck towards the gate.

The driver puts the pedal to the metal, slams in the thrusters, and crashes the vehicle into the gate, which bursts open. The vehicle is imobilized for the rest of the game... But who cares? It did it's job!

(I think we spent half and hour undestanding the rules for crashing/ramming damage... who organized the chapters in this rulebook?!)

Nico's ... marines (!?) try to fend off the orks that I sent to scale the back walls of the fort, thus giving Nico two fronts to defend. The problem is that aparently none of his guys did pack enough ammo... :)

"Get up those walls you maggots!"

My boyz and their boss are in.

Nico measures the shooting distance of his last warrior capable of shooting. He fires, misses, runs out of ammo (again!)...

... and scrams!

One of my orks approaches a marine (?!?!) from behind to take him out in a so-called "stealth kill". Only that orks tend to be the opposite of stealthy.

Ever wanted to see how orks cook? Here you can see 2 orks making mincemeat of Nico's captain (background).

My boyz are beginning to tire a little bit, but everything's going rather well for me... for the moment.

But then Nico's reinforcements arrive. Lacking a proper "Truck" we used one of my old 40K Ravenwing Speeders, which lends itself admirably to the task, having 2 crewmen and a heavy weapon. We ignored the fact that it hovers... and after all, it looks cool, doesn't it?

Meanwhile the situation has changed. I managed to push Nico's troops out of the fort, and am now facing a reinforced space-marine force (?!?!?!?) that is determined to get back what is her's. I desperately manage to kill another marine, before Nico mowes down my battle weary mob.

Admire the proud winner (right) and the not so pround loser (left). It was a very tight game though.

As for the result of the test: Nico, thought the game was nice, while not as good as Mordheim. He had most trouble coping with the "design" of the ork miniatures, saying that he couldn't really relate to the green-skins.

I thought the game was fun and I really want to play another one. For my part, I believe orks are precisely what makes the game so funny, since they are utterly unpredictable but tough. I particularily liked the rules for vehicles, for grenades, the fact that ammo can (and DOES) run out, that warriors get more and more tired/wounded with every hit they take and the combat system where players roll dice simultaneously and then compare results. Nevertheless I agree with Nico that Mordheim is - all in all - better, insofar as it offers a richer universe and more diversity.

I'd give it an overall score of 6/10. Worth playing again.

J'essaie de ne pas vivre en contradiction avec les idées que je ne défends pas.

Toute table de Gorkamorka se doit d'avoir, en son milieu, un fort (ork). Ma petite table à moi (bien qu'elle ne mesure que 1,2 modestes petits mètres de large) n'y fait pas exception.

Voici donc 9 photos de ce fort, indispensable à 60% des scénarios. Comme toujours, je serais heureux de pouvoir lire vos réactions dans les commentaires ;-).

à bientôt!

Naturellement j'ai veillé à ce que toutes les pièces soient détachables, permettant ainsi un grand nombre de configurations, et par là, la construction de plusieurs forts différents. Pour les photos j'ai placé les murs de facon à créer un fort plutôt carré.