Fantasy, Tatoo, Fantasy

I've been playing a lot of fantasy lately. My buddy Steve has a dwarf army he's been collecting for a couple of years and he finally talked me into playing. My army was at the club for a while (Southern New England Gaming, SNEG for short, http://www.snegaming.org/) and I was a little too lazy to get it. Long story short, I went and got it a few weeks ago and have been playing at least once a week since.

Once, a long time ago, I had all the cool stuff for a Dark Elf army: A Dragon, a Hydra, a Manticore, the Cauldron of Blood, so on and so forth.

A funny story about my Dark Elves. Once upon a time, the magic items weren't so restrictive and there were lots of cool toys to give your Sorceress. I was playing my friend Shaun and he had a Chaos Marauder list that was just plain scary. Lots of Khorne worshipping marauders, a couple of Chaos Warrior Units and some Trolls, led by a Chaos General who, on the first turn he charged, could wipe out two ranks of Dark Elf warriors in the first round of combat.

As my friend set up his army he gleefully described the carnage he would wreak upon me, as his army would advance behind his General and his bodyguard of Trolls, essentially cleaning up after the Frenzied General.

And that's exactly what he did. He rolled over me without so much as a wound to his ARMY as I fired everything I had at the general and failed to even scratch him. Well, that's not entirely true. I did wound the General a couple of times through mass fire of two repeater bolt throwers, but he had regeneration so he managed to regenerate them. Yeah...

So, over a couple of games I was routinely crushed without his general finishing the game even wounded. It was frustrating...

So I re-read the rules over and over. Finally after a couple of weeks of research I saw that models with regen can't regen wounds caused by fire. In fact, once a model with regen was wounded by fire they lost regen all together. This was outstanding because one of the magic items I had just read about was the Staff of Flaming Death. If a model was wounded by the Staff, it had to take an immediate Panic Check. Hmm, I thought. The rules for Frenzy stated that after making an attack the Frenzied character had to roll over the number of attacks they had just done in order to not tire and lose an attack. Once the Frenzied character started losing attacks it usually kept doing so until they were down to something manageable. A plan started to formulate in my small brain...

I would throw my two warrior units at the general and and hope that he would lose a few attacks in the process (a pretty good bet). Once he started attacking I just had to survive until he ran out of steam and then frenzy went away.

The next game we played I took the staff of flame and sent my warriors right at the general. The plan worked like a charm! The chaos general started losing his attacks and finally tired out completely around the third turn. By now, most of my army was gone. My sorceress was hanging out as the general charged at the last bastion of defence I had, a small unit of Corsairs. Even without frenzy the general was more than a match for the corsairs and he ran them off.

The sorceress took aim and fired her flaming staff at the general (who was no longer frenzied) and caused a single wound. The general failed his armor save of 2+!

Now came the important part. The general, no longer protected from psychology tests by being Frenzied, took his Panic Check and failed! He broke and ran, straight into the middle of his army! On his next turn, because of the proximity of his troops, he needed to take a leadership check for all of his warror units and one of his marauder units. They failed and ran. The general raced off the table (he was mounted on a chaos steed) while the units that failed the check turned tail and ran.

Because the general ran off the table, the units that weren't in range of the general at the start of the turn now needed to check, since a character fleeing off the table was considered destroyed and when the army general was destroyed (or fled off the table) then the whole army took a break check.

The remaining units took their test and failed, fleeing off the table.

I laughed, he cried, we packed our stuff.

The next week he challenged me to another fight and I accepted. I played the exact same army as did he. Things were looking good for him until the fourth turn, when, you guessed it, Flaming Staff to the general's noggin, chaos army runs away.

My buddy never played that army again...hehehe.

So, now I play against dwarves primarily and I have had mixed success with the Dark Elves. It's been quite an adjustment from 5th edition to the latest (7th, I think).

It seems that the Character Hammer of years past has been replaced with Unit Hammer, and that is pretty awesome. I have an army of Corsairs that I put together a few years back and painted. They have been doing pretty well. I've got some Cold Ones that I need to assemble, along with some warriors.

Once they are done I'll have about 2500 points of Dark Elf Doom for my dwarf playing friend...

Ahh, the evil I shall perpetuate upon his short bearded stunties...