The Dark Age of the Wrath of Kings

If I ever post black-and-white shots, it's because I'm rolling with unpainted minis.

Been a hectic month and change since Cold Wars, but I did manage to get in a couple solid evenings of gaming. A few weeks back, we started out with getting going with Dark Age, and concluding with a lovely skirmish-level game of Wrath of Kings. These two are the games of the hour with the posse.

Sadly, paintjobs aren't there yet, but we're getting started. On the other table, the first game of the night featured the watery forces of Hadross versus the piggy armies of Teknes. (If you haven't read up on the backstory, it's pretty neat. Check out the faction overviews here.)

Marc's Kukulkani are rather fierce, on the other hand.

My first game of the night was running through some Dark Age versus Mark. He's an actual champ at the game, an even has a model of his own in the game. So while the savage beating I took wasn't unexpected, it was highly informative.

The Kukulkani aren't just easy to misspell, they're also an interesting combination of heavy hitters and fearsome magic. My Outcasts struggled to even get any hits in. I did manage to get a better sense of my strengths and weaknesses, however, which is something that's easy to do on paper/internet forums, but that pales in comparison to real-world experience.

We were running 350 point armies, in preparation for an upcoming tournament. I had designed my army more towards running through secondary objectives, which left me a little short on the hitting power.

The tagline for the night: "Mistakes were made."

My second game of Dark Age featured a fight against Aaron's amusingly warped Dragyri. He was trying out running no less than three Death's Devices, which are as hardcore as they sound. Equally fun was the wall of slaves that runs in front of them. Again, I didn't get much accomplished, but I learned a little more about my future tactics fighting such juggernauts.

The two statues at the bottom of the pic are Crooked Dice Argonauts, here used as objective markers for my Motivation.

Now on to Wrath of Kings. Game three of the evening showcased my Hadross versus Maurice's Teknes. 

My motivation (think scenario, but just for your troops) was 'Land Grab,' which required me to get into his side of the board and bust up some objective to show him who's boss in this town/village/etc. Speed isn't Hadross's strength (taxi-crabs aside) but he started the day with many more troops than me, so I knew it'd be wading through his battle lines no matter how I cut it.

Slimy Sevridans slip forward.

The Teknes motivation was 'Capture the Prisoner,' and he selected Iron Eyes as his target. I deployed her a bit... ambitiously, I confess, and she dropped fast. From then forward, I was trying to catch up the pigs spiriting her unconscious body back to their side of the board. That is a tough one to fight back against.

My MVP was easily the Orsund Cavalier, who took up position in the middle of the battlefield and spent the rest of the day beating to death anything that came within reach of his massive tentacles.

Three games. And we could have easily done four! Admittedly, they were small games of Dark Age, but the system is brutally fast. And Wrath of Kings is simply a breeze. We're loving the system, here's hoping we don't wear it out too soon. I'll need to get a more detailed batrep up for this game, because the mechanics are a treat.