Shadowmancer's Weird World of Wargaming

[Shadowmancer]

Hi all

As some of you guys out there know I am a miniature wargamer. What this basically means is that I use models to simulate a war situation within the given parameters of a wargame.

This opening post is going to be explaining a bit about what wargaming is, what I have done with it, what I am planning on doing, my thoughts on some things that are happening within the world of wargaming.

Wargaming is a hobby that involves miniatures. I will probably refer to a thing called the hobby more than not. The Hobby is any combination of what makes up the wargaming experience. These things are generally able to be split into three aspects.

Modelling: Building the miniatures, converting them sculpting them. This is the basics to make the things that define the game and the world that people play within.

Painting: This is the painting of the miniatures whether to what is considered basic tabletop standard of three colours and based. Through to award winning miniatures that make people's jaws drop.

Gaming: This is the playing of the game itself. There are many different games that exist out there. The gaming aspect is a major aspect of the hobby for certain people, so much so that there is a ranking system out there where you can compare tournament results to the rest of your country.

There is a fourth aspect to Wargaming as well this one is more separated from the other three and that is the background. This is from the company that writes the games generally. The exception to this is historical wargames where you then get History books being your background. This is why I put it as a fourth category that isn't as important.

People focus on different aspects of the hobby as a whole whether painting or gaming or modelling or all sorts of combinations of all of them.

As to myself, I have been wargaming for about 10 years now. I got my first issue of White Dwarf in June of 2001. First Models in about August/September. And in this entire time I have no completed armies at all. Quite disappointing but is quite funny as well. I have played Both Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40000, one being fantasy and one being science fiction. I am looking at starting another few games as well. Warmachine/Hordes, Flames of War and Dystopian Wars being chief among those that I am interested in picking up.

This is a long post and what I plan on covering in the next posting is probably going to be a battle report sort of thing between me and one of the top guys in the country in a game of Warhammer 40000 (40K). I have a game lined up against him tomorrow. Looking forward to playing him. I have played other members of the top 10 for 40k before and Looking forward to it. I will be running my Dark Eldar. Not sure what he is going to play but it should be good.

My plan is at the very least to leave a list at the end of the post to give those that know how to play something to think about and critique. Im not going to do it this time because I do need to explain more about the games before I do a list for it. So for now I just leave you with a picture of a mini that I would love to buy and paint

 

[Shadowmancer]

As I said yesterday I am going to do a bit of a battle report of a game I had today. But to do that I am going to give a basic overview of the game system that I played.

First of the game system I played was this one right here.

The background of this game is that this is a dystopian post-apocalyptic future where Humanity is on the brink of existence and is assailed upon all sides from aliens, traitors, the devotees of the Dark Gods and from themselves. Humanity within the Imperium of Man is devoted to a singular godlike figure who is sitting on a golden throne as good as a corpse. Under his name march 1000 times 1000 genetically modified child soldiers who are his angels of death.

Sounds grim-dark enough for you. That is a quick summation of what Warhammer 40k is from a story point of view. As to what 40K is about as a game. It is a tabletop miniatures game it is a skirmish type game where all the models are part of a squad but are separate from each other at the same time.

This game is a basic I-Go-U-Go system where each person has a turn until the end of the game. There are three phases per player turn. The movement phase where you do the moving of your units. The shooting phase where shooting occurs (well duh!) and then the assault phase where units charge into close combat. There is a fourth phase that only happens at the start of the game and this is one of the most important aspects of the game and that is deployment.

This game relies on a dice mechanic to determine the results of both shooting and combat.

This is a good basic outline of the game.

Spoiler

​

Now onto a rough guide of what the game I played was.

I was playing the Dark Eldar

against a friend and he was running

The mission that we rolled up was a Capture and Control mission with a spearhead deployment. This means that the board is split into table quarters and each player has a deployment zone in opposite corners. Capture and control is that each player has one objective deployed in their deployment zone.

I got the choice of deployment zone and chose one that would benefit me. where I deployed my objective holders and a few of the floating gun platforms that make up the main firepower within my army. I put the rest into reserve. I destroyed a land speeder in my first turn and moved my vehicles into cover. In return my opponent shot at the vehicles and immobilised and destroyed a couple of weapons.

Second turn I brought on 3 of my other units. I proceed to assault and destroy a land speeder. My opponents second turn he destroys a couple of my vehicles. and has a good portion of his army that he reserved. From then on it was a case of both of us causing damage upon each othere, to the point where the only result that would be coming out of it was a Draw, which we agreed would be the result and called the game there.

It was a fun game and I think I know how I should of played it to bring myself to a better chance of victory. And that would be with different choices for what went in reserve in the first place. And how I deployed the reserves as well.