Mordheim: seriously, can a brutha get a break?

I go to the game store every week to blow off steam, and the last two weeks have left with steam shooting from my ears...

I know, I know, its just a game. And I feel like a complete ass afterward. But one of my pet peeves is when I spend cash on new minis and then have to shelve them. I'm known in my group for being very hesitant to get into a new game because I'm annoyed if the game sucks and I have to put them away.

So I was all excited to have Dwarf pirates. They were the coolest thing. And after two weeks, I've played 5 games and had to start over 3 times. If you count the first list I put together, I have essentially started a new warband 4 times out of 5 games played.

That gets annoying.

K, here's how Friday went. Played Scott first, with my Dwarves. I did pretty well with the list (see the previous post) but my dice just sucked. We fought for roughly 3 turns, or 6 rounds of combat. I had about 4 models, each with two attacks. That's 48 dice. No kills. I literally rolled over a 5 twice when it came to wounding.

But that didn't bother me. Seriously it was no big deal. We had an Ogre show up and ally with the lowest warband (me) and she evened out the score. I ended up winning and had a decent number of heroes on the table. Only my captain and 3 henchmen were out of action.

Then came the post game: Got my captain back. Huzzah. Rolled for recovery my henchmen. Three 1s. Awesome, down 150 pts in the first game. Next came wyrdstone, 100 gold. Okay, I'm not feeling terrible. But I had to pay the ogre (both recruiting fee and retainer), which costs 110 gold. Couldn't do it. So she thumps one of my guys and leaves. Roll for injury on my engineer...dead. Now I'm down like 230 pts.

Son of a bitch. sigh. Starting over.

So the Skaven player wants to play me. His list is, I kid you not, 5 Skaven heroes and the Rat Ogre. He's restarted a twice as well because his whole list is the Rat Ogre. If it dies and doesn't recover, he just starts over.

I don't care at this point and frankly don't want to play but no worries. We roll the occupy mission with 5 buildings to grab, almost as many as I have models. Plus his sorcerer gets the spell that gives him free rats. At which point I know I'm not gonna win. So I figure I'll turtle in the back, fight a little, take my two casualties, and flee.

He races across the board and when I don't move looks at me goes "Seriously?" Ummm, Rat Ogre. So he screens his guys behind the 3 extra rats he gets. They come close, I charge, a dwarf to each rat. Six attacks, two stunned rats and one knocked down. Couldn't kill rats.

My heroes charge his guys, and I manage to kill one. Then in the ensuing counter-attacks, I lose 3 of my heroes. Yup, I'm down to 1 hero model. Fucking great.

Skip to the post-game: captain dies, slayer comes back, other slayer is out for three games. So I'm down 150 pts permanently and down about 220 pts for three games. Oh and only 2 wyrdstone, so I can't even replace my losses.

Fuck starting over. List gets crumpled into paper and tossed into the trash. My opponent turns to me and days "You know, I missed having (don't want to mention names) here. I missed having someone sulk from me across the table, thanks."

I didn't say anything for two reasons: 1) he was right, I was in a foul mood and I knew there's really no reason for it. 2) I knew if I responded, it wouldn't be with words. So I'll say it here:

Hey (no name), fuck you. I didn't complain when you whined about your (admittedly epic) bad luck. I didn't say anything when you took a cheesed out Skaven list. So I had a bad couple of days. Sorry it inconveniences you. Ass hat.

So at the moment, I'm done with Mordheim. One guy is playing lizardmen and has an army with something like a 200 rating, and another guy is just always going to have a Rat Ogre, so basically there's no way I'm going to have a chance to do anything but get slaughtered. Basically, I'm so far behind the curve that a high points cost warband like Dwarves won't be able to catch up. I have a Marienburgers list, but after Friday I'm pretty burnt out on Mordheim at the moment.

We're talking about paying a Bloodbowl league with the BBCS pitches, but I'll be honest, I'm really not feeling like it at the moment.

Mordheim: Well, back to the old drawing board. . .

So yeah, the Dwarf pirates list . . . let's just be kind and say it "didn't work."

3 games and restarted twice. Ouch.

The big problem isn't losing, I expected to lose every game. The big problem is that when they lose, I can get enough wyrdstone to build up slowly. Essentially, you're just always going to lose. After the second game, I was down to 3 models and one of them had a leg wound (so Mv 2). So my first restart and I played a third game: all but 1 hero went out of action. So when one model died and the other went out for two games, I was back down to 2 models.

Ultimately, I'm paying for a lot of stuff that simply isn't worth it. For example, the brace of pistols? Worthless as a shooting weapon, because you're almost always at long range & moving (so -2). Their only use is a first turn shot in melee. Frankly, I don't think they're worth it there either, but I want to use pirates.

Plus I used Clansmen instead of Beardlings for Henchmen, so that I'd hit better in both melee & shooting. Well, shooting I'll only hit on a 6 anyway, so no point there. And while hitting on a 3+ vs most guys is nice, it's not that nice.

Then there's taking lots of Dwarven Axes. The parry is neat, but it makes them pretty expensive. If I get master of blades as a skill, they become pretty brutal (essentially I can parry half of all attacks coming my way). But giving them to everybody (especially henchmen) just becomes too pricey. Still I should have a few so I don't have to search for them all the time.

The long and short is that at an average model cost of 100 gp per model, I was getting terrible returns on my investment. But I really like the idea of Dwarf Pirates. So I came home, sat and stewed (my dice were not kind to me either), and I'm gonna try it again next week with this:

Noble: 2 axes, pistol, helmet

Engineer: handgun

Slayer: axe & dwarven axe

Slayer: axe & dwarven axe

Beardling: 2 axes, pistol, helmet

Beardling: 2 axes, pistol, helmet

Beardling: 2 axes, pistol


The pistols still aren't worth it, and I could get another Beardling if I dropped them. But they're Dwarf pirates. First, half the models have pistols on them. Second, they're fucking pirates!

So the theory is that the engineer will hang back and snipe. This gives me some long range, plus an extra hero for wyrdstone hunting. Usually in a losing fight 2 heroes get dropped, so this'll give me 2 to search for stones plus the extra one Dwarves normally get. But maybe if I use the Beardling screen, when I drop two I can just run away with all 4 heroes and build up.

The pistols on the Beardlings are 100% for the first round of melee. I'll shoot as I approach, but not expect to hit a damn thing. I can tell in the rules: if you shoot (with a single pistol) and then get charged, do you get the pistol shot on that first round?

And the fewer Dwarf Axes is so that if one guy gets a skill, he takes master of blades and we swap weapons around.

We'll see how it goes. Again the goal is to be able to build up after each loss I take. Pretty low standards egh? "My goal is not to be crippled after each game..."