Kublacon Report: Day 3 (pt 2)

So after the BGFW tournament, I ended up missing the painting awards. We'd set up the tournament so that we could wakl into the hallway and see the awards, but I needed to deliver some food to my step-mom who was babysitting. Then we sat and chatted while Jocelyn fought going to sleep. By that time, the awards were over.

So I went down and picked up my entries. I didn't rank (Kubla is using the open system, where each entry is judged on its own merits and not on a First, Second, Third system), which didn't surprise me. I had just entered some of my nicer 'table top quality' stuff. I was a little disheartened, maybe I'll advise Wayne to include a "gamer" ranking next year.

Anyway, so I met up with Manny to do some playtesting on a game. I can't really talk about it much, except to say a couple things: One, the system needs a lot of work. Two, Sunday night at Kublacon is not the time to do playtesting. The best you can do is identify problems. Forget brainstorming solutions.

So after we finished up, Manny and I decided to play a game of Cardhammer. It was midnight and I'd gone to be at 3:00am every night up till now, why wuss out on night three? So Manny pulled out his Undead and I pulled out the Ogre Kingdoms list (4 Ogres, Healer Mages, Hydra).

Manny decided to try an all skeleton force. As you can see, he doesn't play Cardhammer much... ;-) It was something like 8 units of skeletons (spears & horde) plus 2 units of trolls. That's not enough points, so maybe there were some archers in there or maybe he drew a bunch of cards. It was late...

We played Border Defense with a giant forest in the middle of the field. We had a special scenario with assassin's war. This proved to be pretty powerful as there were a lot of units that were on their last wound when it came time to assign assassin wounds.

The forest pretty well divided the match: I had two ogres on the right facing a bunch of skeletons while on the left I had 2 ogres, the hydra, and healer mages facing both skeleton troll units and then a bunch of skeletons.

The right flank went about as you would expect: my ogres crashed into his line, killing skeletons by the handfull but their sheer numbers meant pinches all around for him. The end there was that he had something left as opposed to my nothing. By the end of the game, he had two units of beat up skeletons and I had a unit of ogres that fled, rallied, and then got the last wound taken off as they killed their attackers.

The left flank was where the fun happened, for me anyway. ;-) The first unit of trolls got pinched between the hydra and a unit of ogres. Unfortunately, this exposed the Ogre's flank to a unit of skeleton spearmen. This fight was to be my bane. My ogres, attacking their flank, could not kill the frakking skeletons! Between my healer mages and his Reanimate, those two would still be there slugging it out.

Meanwhile, my Hydra was slowed by the forest, meaning the Skeleton trolls got the charge. The fight was a slugfest, but my Hydra eventually won the day. Meanwhile, on the other side of the ogre-skeleton slap fight my other unit of ogres punched through the Skeleton line. In the end, the Hydra and Ogre unit carried the load and had to come back and help the flanked ogre unit.

Yeah, a unit of skeletons flanked and rear charged by a Hydra and ogres? Was ugly. But the insult? The unit of ogres that had been flanked was down to its last wound. So next turn Manny assigned the assassin hit to it.

At this point we called the game. I was going to get my healer mages and ogres off the table. However, the Hydra would be forced to run around the forest and run down the unit of skeletons over there. It had 1.5" on the skeletons, so the best Manny could do was delay.

We had a discussion as what the Hydra would do after he killed the skeletons. He was on Close and couldn't be direct controlled. So we saw no way I saw to steer him off the table. So we concluded that the Hydra just sat there, gnawing on the carcasses. Which mean I got 600 pts off the table, which was a draw.

A fun game, but oy some bad rolling on my part. So it was 2:30, and we packed up to head upstairs. The con was basically over at this point, but I'd reached my goal of games. From herein, it was all bonus.

Game Count: 14.