Best of 2013

Merry Christmas!

This year has been pretty dramatic.  We had a step change in terms of wargaming and apart from all the painting and modelling, I managed to get in some very regular games, with some really memorable snippets.  Let's look back over the year at some of my favourite projects, games and funny moments...

• Tale of Two Gamers was the Battlefleet Gothic campaign me and Kieran ran early in the year.  It was great fun to play a Specialist Game - we've always preferred the friendly, non-competitive and vaguely 80's cult ethos of these games, but this was the first we'd ever played properly.  It was a significant milestone in also being the first fully-painted, fully-terrained game I'd played ever, and being a valuable lesson in planning and running a campaign.  It was never conclusively finished, so we may end up carrying this on one day...

• The Death of Captain Nero.  The first 40K game of the year, and again it was distinguished by being fully painted as my Palladians took on Coldsteel Dan's Blades of Fire.  It was a cracking, back-and-forth game which included the most climactic, dramatic and cinematic duel ever.  Sgt Daxos of the Marines took on the famous Capt Nero dueled to the death in the ruins of the Imperial Palace - the result, looking back, was not really in any doubt but it was a suitably great clash in a fantastic game.

• Necromunda Campaign - like the Battlefleet Gothic game earlier in the year, this was a nice little campaign weekend.  We got five players together, worked on a gang each as well as Kieran's fantastic terrain and had five games in two days.  My own Cawdor Gang managed to scrape a respectable third place, and it was a really great weekend where we learned the lesson that some planning goes a long way - the informal, goodwill-driven 'let's just turn up' approach does not work as well.  I love these small-scale games as they capture the human element of the 40K universe that has been lost in the massive rush for Strength 30 weapons that have a blast radius larger than the Necromunda board.

• Trench Raiders is the First World War wargame I wrote - Kieran has been working on a platoon-level game, and after our Necromunda success I was keen to do another skirmish game that fed into my historical interest.  Trench Raiders has been a screaming success (if I do say so myself), mainly because it requires so few models and the terrain is all flat, that it can be packed in a box and deployed for a game in minutes.

• Battle of the Tallax Slums.  The first game in the Fourth Edethorian War campaign, this was a real step-change in the way we game.  Me and Kieran (with his legendary scratch-built terrain from the Necromunda weekend) spent a lot of time creating the battlefield - rather than taking it in turns to place a piece down, we tried to create a realistic city with close-in streets, gantries, overpasses and alleyways that made for an absolute blinder of a game.

• Battle for Erbinan.  I popped round to Zzzzzz's place for a massive Apocolypse game - despite my usual preference for smaller-scale games this really opened my eyes to how a large scale game can still be fun, friendly and fluffy.  I had a great day and it was fantastic to get the Palladian Guard out there, kicking arse and cutting mustard (and taking needlessly high casualties...)

• Battle of the Palace Steps.  In terms of sheer epoch-shattering, genre-rending tales of heroic deeds that resound down the ages, the recent Battle of the Palace Steps takes the flippin' biscuit.  I struggled to get across every twist and turn but I'll do my best to summarise the best bits that were included:

• A three-way battle between myself, Ollie's Storm Wolves and Coldsteel Dan's Breakers
• It had lines of full-dress Palladians defending the steps of the Imperial Palace
• Wave after perennial wave of poorly-armed rebels getting steadily closer
• A raid by legendary Warrior-Space Marines, cutting their way through (literally) hundreds of rebels
• Falling machinery crushing rebel dignitaries
• Etc etc...

Quote of the Year

"What's the boominess of that grenade?"

Coldsteel Dan, inquiring (entirely seriously) the strength of a fragmentation grenade.

Man of the Year

Capt Lucius Nero (desc.) 

HI, AC and bar, AI and bar, EO and four bars, PPI and four bars.

Thankyou, everyone, for reading and commenting this year.  If you have your own favourite moment then please share it below!  And I hope everyone has a great Christmas and that 2014 is going to be another cracker.

Thanks, always

Ed