Battle Report: Song of Blades and Heroes

A few of my buddies and I got together for our SoBH game on Friday night. (11/13) We only had 3 people this time due to schedules, so our usual 2v2 was out of the question. We didn't play too late either, everyone was beat, and had big weekends with their families.

Game 1: Frostgrave Adaptation

We adopted some Frostgrave rules for this one to see how they would play out. We modified it a bit since our treasures had no actual value to post-game. So two people placed 3 treasures and one placed 2, to try to prevent a 3 way tie. The game went well enough, though it took a loooong time to get through all 8 treasures. I wouldn't play it like that again, simply because it took too long to get through, and we were losing interest midway.

War for treasure... represented by dice, since I forgot anything cooler 

Plus, though part of the game, it made for a bad flow in a 1v1v1: on turn two I scored a gruesome kill on one of the guys with a concentrated shooting, and it ran all but 2 of his models off the board. So essentially, he was out of the game in turn 2, but still had to play the rest of the game (or watch). 

Dollar Store Halloween Gazebo, repainted... gotta love the cheap stuff.

Just not fun for a group night with the guys. Really can't do anything about that, but like I said, that particular scenario was loooong, so it just compounded the issue. In the end, The treasure count was 4 to 3 to 1. One of my friends, is really starting to hate concentrated shooting, and group moves in general.

My skeletal archers ready to make their move. 

Game 2: Capture the Node

Nodes represented by dice. 

This game played really well, and was a ton of fun. We played a node defense game, with 4 nodes. Each node gave a point if you had it at the start of your turn, uncontested. Pretty basic stuff. Each player placed a node, and then the fourth node was in the direct center of the map. This game moved quick, and was competitive. 

Bird's Eye View

The middle node proved to be difficult to hold

The same player suffered a gruesome kill again, and found himself out of the game despite building up an early lead. He is learning that rushing in, isn't always the best strategy. I would recommend this scenario to anyone. The game ended with

by concession, since one player had built up over double the points of anyone else.

Node defense with light cover

One of the questions that came up; and this is basically a judgement call--- was if the model that is controlling a node is transfixed, or entangled as was the case---- should they get points. We ruled no, but I am curious to hear what people think.

Lastly, I gave a test run to poison as written for Advanced Song of Blades and Heroes. It was posted the other day for play testing. I ran it with concentrated shooting using the rules as best as i could remember. The end result was that in conjunction with concentrated, it is pretty fair, and really good. with 3-4-5 shooters, you are rolling a LOT of dice for basically hoping for that 1/3 chance of poisoning. It almost always hit in that scenario, and i found the odds of it occurring good enough for what I am investing point-wise. 

One "tick" of poison is plenty in that situation... stacking it would be just completely overpowered. Taking a model from Q3 to Q4 can be devastating.... let alone Q4 to Q5. I still feel that poison for an individual model isn't always worth it... and if I was going to use melee, I would just use drain. That said, a C3 model with Good Shot and Poison is going to be good enough to "hit" which means you are going to get a lot of poison rolls. I plan to try this with a Legendary Shot personality, so that I can effectively spread poison more rapidly.

A look at the field as it progressed

To give an indication of what I ran:
My goblin leader was Q3 C2 with leader and tough
3 undead archers at Q4 C3 with Good Shot, Shooter: Long, Undead and Poison
2 Spiders at Q4 C3 with Animal, Shooter: Long, Good Shot and Poison

My warband performed very well, but that said, I didn't win either scenario. if it was just all out battle, I would have won easily I think... but that is no fun.

If anyone has any questions let me know.