Brawling

I think playing the eight games of One Page Rules have helped my Old World. The thing about One Page Rules is what you destroy of your opponent’s army is just not relevant. There’s no such thing as kill points, or at least in the missions that we played in the eight games last weekend. That means that your entire focus is on how you can score points in the game. Where do your units need to be? What do they need to do? How far do they need to travel? And then dividing that by the number of turns. So if there is an objective that is 30 inches away and you can move 8 inches a turn. You know you can only get there on turn 4, so you need to have faster units or you need to just always be moving those 8 inches and having somebody else get in the way is going to be a real problem.

I was playing a game against a guy called Giles, as I looked at the table I realised I was going to score more points than Giles every turn of the game. And perhaps for the first time in my Warhammer career. I looked at the table and thought I don’t need to do anything else here. the pressure is on him, I can back off just a little bit and think about which of his units I’m going to destroy. How am I going to earn as many points as possible? And so instead of charging forwards to engage with him unnecessarily, I sat for a couple of turns on those objectives and I let him come to me. And he wasn’t really ready for that and so he ended up coming forward piecemeal and I was able to chew through his units one at a time.

Curiously, at the end of the game when we were having a bit of a match analysis conversation. He told me his army does really well when the opponent comes piecemeal to him. I can completely understand that. The thing about undead is that they’re able to regenerate models and wounds, and so if you don’t kill them completely, they just come back. So the last thing you want to do is engage the whole of the army, because they’ll just absorb the damage that you deal. Instead, you have to focus all of your damage into as small a point as possible and just wipe things out completely.

Perhaps I should also say something about the venue too. There are two really big benefits to events at the Black Horse in Thurnham. The first one is it’s about a four minute drive away from my house. The second is it is a much larger venue than I had realised, although the hall we’re playing in only really has space for 30 to 36 players at a push. The venue includes a pretty decent sized pub and a whole series of chalets which serve as the hotel.

I was impressed in the evening to see just how many cars there were parked outside of those chalets and how many lights were on. It’s clearly a quite busy little hotel and an excellent use of the space. I wonder what the origin was. It’s quite a steep little bit of hillside, so it may have been a couple of fields or something like that in the past. There was a bar in the room too, so we were able to get beer if you wanted during the day. And then the venue had wooden floors. It started off too warm, which is always a pleasant thing on a November day, but they sorted the temperature out and it was then very comfortable all day. So, you know, big thumbs up for the venue.

I finished the day with two wins and a loss. So I’m pretty content with because I think that’s better than the record at a few of my recent events. So let’s see if we can get another win and then I can finish the event in a better position.