Warcry

July 2025 retrospective

Hey everybody,
July has been a funny old month, in many ways. The dental problems I had at the start of the year have returned, resulting in getting the tooth extracted yesterday. What a joy that was. Hopefully it’ll calm down shortly, anyway! I think the elephant in the virtual room has been the fact that Games Workshop has made a stealth-return to the blog, as I’ve been writing more about Warcry in the last few weeks, as well as a bit of a celebration post for Age of Sigmar turning 10 at the start of the month. After six years, I’ve also fully-painted the original starter set for Warcry, which is nothing short of amazing, I feel! I’ve never done this for any of the big boxes of models that we’ve had in the past, so I feel really good about it.

Of course, I have yet to play a game on it, but hopefully that’ll all change soon.

At the start of July, I’d made some vague plans where I wanted to play Marvel Champions more, and I wanted to get more painting done this month. Well, I have pretty much succeeded on both of those fronts, having got the Warcry set finished, as well as the Fomoroid Crusher for that game, and the Bloodsecrator for the Sigmar celebration. I’ve also been able to finally call an end to my efforts at painting the Wrecking Crew for Marvel Crisis Protocol – something I’d started way back at the start of the year. I’d decided I wouldn’t play them until I’d got them painted, so I’m pleased to say that these lads are now finished!

I think I’m getting back into the whole painting thing, which is good because I still have a tremendous backlog! I definitely want to try my best to keep going here, because it’s always better to get games with painted models, after all.

There’ll be more to say on this next week, though.

In terms of gaming, though, July has been pretty good. I’ve been predominantly playing Marvel Champions, which has become something of an all-star for me once again. I’ve had some fantastic games, and have launched a kind-of campaign against the Red Skull again where I’m using Winter Soldier with a rotating cast of other heroes. I’ve already played him and Cap against Zola and it was awesome, so I’ve played against Crossbones with Spider-Woman, and it was another amazing outing as both heroes are extremely powerful, but going up against Absorbing Man with Hawkeye wasn’t quite the same! I think I’ve said this before, but Absorbing Man is usually decried in the community, however with the wrong sort of heroes, he can very easily scheme his way to victory.

I’ve also been using Zola’s Algorithm, the obligation card from the campaign set that gets shuffled into the hero decks. It’s just an annoying stumbling block, which has an Acceleration icon on and you need to exhaust your alter-ego and spend a mental resource to discard, so I thought would be thematic. Well, I drew both Bucky’s and Clint’s copies during that game, and of course it happened when there were two copies of Avalanche in play, so I was adding 5 threat to the scheme at the start of the villain phase!

This is something that I really love about Marvel Champions, though, the way that you can adjust the difficulty with so many different levers to pull or push. I haven’t really been doing all that much with the campaign cards, aside from playing the Red Skull campaign in 2023 (I think). When I played the Guardians campaign last December, I forgot all about the campaign cards, so I think I’m going to try and give that another try using those, but in general I think it might be worth exploring more of those cards anyway. I know the X-Men boxes include a few interesting things, so I’d like to see whether there are ways of using these things outside of the campaign itself.

What else has been going on?

I had a game of Star Wars Legion, using the FFG rules from the game’s initial launch, and it was an absolute blast – definitely feels like a good move getting into that one, though I haven’t yet made a move to start painting those models. I haven’t yet managed to get in a second game, but I’ve also been devoting more to Star Wars Unlimited, as I am really enamoured with that game right now. I’ve made some initial forays into the unofficial solo mode for that game, getting the challenge decks printed off and so on, so hopefully it won’t be too long before I can put my collection to good use there!

Star Wars and Marvel are very much the cornerstones of my gaming right now, but during the height of the heatwave we had here, I stayed up until midnight playing games and included the classics Runebound and Elder Sign, that last being my 50th game! I am still to get back to the Arkham LCG, but I suspect it won’t be too long before I finally make the effort to get back to The Forgotten Age for a second run-through, as I’ve definitely been thinking about that more in the last week or so.

I really enjoyed the late night games, even if it was hotter than I’d like, so I might look at doing something like that again. It’s usually par for the course when playing miniature wargames of course, but it’s sometimes nice to just launch into something thematic and see where the night takes you!

So, July was pretty good, if I’m honest! Loss of the tooth aside, some great games were had, and I’ve managed to get quite a bit painted from the backlog! Let’s see what August brings…

Warcry starter set – fully painted!

Six years ago, Warcry hit the shelves and I began building up some Iron Golem models. Progress was extremely slow with building the rest of the box, of course, as the box released into the utter carnage of me moving house and my eldest daughter being born. However, over the years I slowly got to try the game, and was pretty much hooked. I’ve bought a lot for Warcry during the red-topped first edition of the game, and back in February last year, I finally started to get the terrain painted…

Well, that’s great of course, but what about the rest of the box? The starter set competes with Necromunda: Dark Uprising for being the best value big-box GW has ever put out, as not only was there a table full of terrain, but we also got two warbands, and two groups of Chaotic Beasts to spice up the game. The Iron Golem were some of the miniatures that had initially drawn me in to this game, so I painted those up around the same time as the terrain.

The Untamed Beasts, while definitely one of the most enjoyable warbands to play, had to wait until this summer before I got them done!

In the last few weeks, I’ve finally gotten the beasts done, which was a task I had been putting off for far too long. In the end, I decided to paint them in a bit of an abstract way. In my mind, these beasts are manifestations of Chaos, so I wanted to have the suggestion of colour, rather than painting every detail. The Furies are a sort of deep crimson, while the Raptoryx have shades of Slaanesh, hence the purple hues…

And so, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, the finished box! For the first time ever, I have fully painted a Games Workshop big box, and I absolutely love it!!

Okay, so the Exalted Chariot isn’t part of the box set, but I thought I’d put it in there for the hell of it!

I’m extremely happy with how it all turned out, and with the addition of two other warbands from the first wave fully painted, I’m thrilled to have so many options for fully-painted games!!

Warcry: Cities of Sigmar

Hey everybody,
Warcry has been somewhat on the ascendant here on the blog once more, hasn’t it? I’ve recently been on a bit of a painting streak to get the original starter box fully painted, so there will be a post coming out later today with all of that goodness to show off. In addition to getting the Fomoroid Crusher and the Untamed Beasts finished, I have also started to get some paint on the Khorne models in my collection, with a view to running them as a warband. I have a lot of Khorne things, so there are quite a few configurations available to me there.

However, a couple of weeks ago, I was watching a video on Youtube from Dana Howl, where she was talking (I think) about the Warhammer Old World stuff, and at a couple of points during that video, she had one of the models from the new(ish) Cities of Sigmar range.

And I kinda fell in love with it.

Cities of Sigmar was of course a thing back in (I think) second edition of AoS, where Games Workshop took some of the plastic models for the high elves, dark elves and dwarves, and made them three different “cities” factions. Up until that point, there were loads of tiny factions that attempted to re-use some of the old Warhammer Fantasy models, but a couple of Start Collecting boxes were issued – Anvilgard (dark elves), and Greywater Fastness (dwarves). It was alright, but by this time we had new Chaos, the Stormcast models, and all the Nighthaunt stuff, so these older models were definitely showing their age.

All of that changed late in 2023, as Age of Sigmar wound down third edition, and the release of a new model line of Cities of Sigmar. This range is more generic fantasy/historical army types, and it looks pretty superb. In Warcry terms, the Cities of Sigmar is split into three subdivisions – the new stuff is referred to as the Castelite Hosts, but the dark elves and dwarves have reverted to their old, AoS1 names of Darkling Covens and Dispossessed, respectively.

It’s the Castelite Hosts that have drawn my attention, however, and I have become really intrigued by getting a few units to use in Warcry. By my calculations, a box of Freeguild Steelhelms would get me a 700-point warband of 9 Steelhelms (60 points) led by a Sergeant-at-Arms (100 points). The Alchemite Warforger (125 points) is an incredible-looking model, and one that I have off-and-on had my eye on since the preview in 2023, while the Freeguild Command Corps gives plenty of one-off hero-type models such as the Arch-Knight (120 points) or the Whisperblade (80 points). There is definitely options by buying those three kits – the Steelhelms, Command Corps and the Warforger – though at £92 MSRP, that might be a bit steep!

The Steelhelms are the models that have most attracted me to this faction, though, and I like the idea of them being more of a trained militia rather than the fairly chaotic warbands that I usually look at playing. The Sergeant-at-Arms has the ability to give +2 toughness to fighters within 3” as a [Double], which I like. Feels like a real shieldwall-type force. The Warforger, as a [Triple], can add +2 to the crit value of a melee attack for fighters within 6” as well, which would raise the Steelhelms’ crits to 5 damage each. Very nice.

This probably isn’t going to be something that I’ll be rushing to do, of course, but after having my imagination fired up by seeing the models, I wanted to get some ideas down so that I have a foundation to work from in the future… you know, because I’ll have so much time to work on this stuff…

Warcry: feel the wrath!

Hey everybody,
After getting the Bloodsecrator painted up for the Age of Sigmar tenth anniversary special, I’ve been inspired to keep going with painting up the random bits and pieces that I have still to paint, and have settled for the time being on the box of Wrathmongers that I’d picked up years ago for Warcry. It was back during the pandemic, when I was on a real high for Age of Sigmar in general, and was busy getting my Ossiarch Bonereapers painted up; I built the Wrathmongers but didn’t really do much with them.

I’d like to get these five painted up by the end of the month, though that doesn’t really sound like a lot of time when you see how much work they need! Of course, I’ll be checking in here with updates once they’re completed.

Now, I’m not about to launch myself into painting up a Blades of Khorne army, but rather I want these models for use in Warcry, because I’m one of these people who will be continuing to play that game!

I have a lot of Khorne models, and a lot of Slaanesh as well – the Slaanesh is probably closer to being an army than the Khorne stuff, though. I had initially picked up the Start Collecting Khorne Bloodbound box when I was on that initial AoS kick back in 2019, when I’d moved house and seemed to have landed myself in a bit of an AoS community. I have some fairly fond memories of that summer, despite the fact I moved house with a heavily-pregnant wife at the time! Looking back on these models and getting them painted is particularly exciting, as a result.

So I’ve been looking at the Khorne factions in Warcry, and have quite a number of options open to me:

Exalted Deathbringer with Ruinous Axe (185)
Not much here beyond the basic Khorne Bloodbound ability. He does have access to the generic hero [Triple] that gives +1 to attacks made by visible friendly fighters within 6” if he manages to take down an enemy fighter – inspiring the troops around him. He makes 4 attacks at S4 which deal 3 damage on a hit, and 5 on a crit, so that is perhaps possible if he’s going after weaker, or softened-up fighters.

Bloodsecrator (160)
As a banner bearer, the Bloodsecrator has the [Quad] ability to give +1 attacks to friendly fighters within 8” of him. He’s only making 3 attacks though, as S4, but deals 2 damage on a hit, and 5 on a crit, so he does have some potential there.

Wrathmaster (210)
As a [Quad], this fighter can make a bonus move and a bonus attack, and gets to add half the value of the ability to the strength characteristic of its melee attacks until the end of the round, so that’s potentially 6 attacks then another 6 attacks, which have the potential to be S7, dealing 2 damage on a hit and 4 damage on a crit!

Bloodreaver with Reaver Blades (65)
The most basic of fighters, these guys make 4 attacks at S3, dealing 1/3 damage. They definitely feel like you need them in a bit of a swarm.

Blood Warrior with Goreaxe and Gorefist (100)
The slightly more elite fighter, you’re paying extra for slightly better durability in terms of hit points, but also the attacks are slightly better as well.

Wrathmonger (140)
More elite again, these guys are slightly slower but they are very chunky, and have an increased durability as well. They’re making 5 melee attacks from range 2 though, which is pretty big, S4 and dealing 1 damage on a hit, but 4 on a crit. They have access to the same [Quad] attack as the Wrathmaster, their natural leader.

I forgot these guys actually came out before AoS…

The warband that I have decided to go for, then, consists of a Wrathmaster as the main leader, with a Bloodsecrator as a sort of lieutenant, then a Wrathmonger and a Blood Warrior with Goreaxe and Gorefist, followed by six Bloodreavers. It’s an eclectic mix, for sure, but the main thing in its favour is that it consists of some of my favourite models in the range, and it doesn’t hurt that it comes in at 1000 points exactly. I already have ten Bloodreavers painted, as well as the Bloodsecrator, so I think my plan to get the five Wrathmongers painted next will put me well on the way to having another warband fully painted for Warcry!

This is starting to become a bit of a habit…

Fomoroid Crusher

It’s been a few years now since I started work on this big lad, but today, he is finally complete!

He is one of the monsters available as a sort of hired mercenary for any warband, but does have some very interesting rules. He is a meaty 260 points, but brings 35 hit points and has a fairly good melee attack that can deal 3 damage on each hit or 6 on each crit (though this has changed to 4/8 in the digital update a few years back).

Obviously, he’s got a lot of chunks of rubble as part of the miniature; he has the [Double] ability to throw masonry at an enemy fighter within 8” – you roll a dice if the Crusher is within 1” of an obstacle, and on a 3-4, you deal 1 damage to the enemy, but on a 5-6 you deal damage equal to the value of the double used. As a [Triple] he can do a Rampaging Charge, at the end of its move it can pick an enemy within 1” of him and deal damage equal to the value of the triple used. And finally, as a [Quad], when the Crusher takes out an enemy, he gains 1 wild dice to be used in the next round.

I’ve never used these mercenary models in games, as I tend to just bring the fighters that a warband can bring. However, I am very excited now that I have him painted, so I think I might be looking to include him in games going forward!

Moving into July

Hey everybody,
Yes, we all love these sorts of posts, don’t we? The month is fresh and new, so lets make plans that we desperately hope to keep to for the month! I’m really terrible at this, but I think I need to try to get myself back on track and see if I can get some accountability here or something. Plus, I think laying out my plans like this can give me something of a checklist, for extra dopamine!

High up on my list this month is to play some more Marvel Champions. I’ve recently taken to jotting down ideas in the Notes app on my phone for hero/villain pairings, and currently have over a dozen ideas for games to try out. Some of these pairings, particularly the heroes, are classics that write themselves, but I would like to get a few of these crossed off. I do want to play more with Silk, as I think I am somewhat starting to understand how she works now and what can be done there. However, I don’t think I gave the last mutant wave a decent try, as I only played with Bishop and Magik from that wave It’ll definitely be good to see what the others are all about, Nightcrawler and Jubilee et al. I might also throw Wolverine up against Apocalypse, and see how that shakes out…

Taking a look at my gaming plans for 2025 post from the start of the year, I had intended to play more Arkham Horror this year, but as seems to always be the case, it just doesn’t find its way to my table all that often. It’s a really good game, so I don’t know why I seemingly have this block about playing it! It’s definitely a table-cover type of game, and I think I’ve previously clocked it around 45 minutes for set-up. However, I have the token silo now, so you’d think I’d be excited to try it out with that! We’ll see. I would like to see if I can get some more games in, though – and this is true of all the Arkham Files games. After a flurry of games with the LCG earlier in the year, playing through the Dunwich Legacy pretty much in a day, I haven’t touched it since, but have been considering getting back to it over the last few days. I’m pretty sure I did build some decks in preparation, so I think I might try to play some more Arkham as the summer moves on, as well.

Moving over to painting now, first off I want to get the Warcry stuff finished. I don’t think there’s too much left for the Untamed Beasts, but I would like to try to get the chaotic beasts finished before the end of the month as well – I think these could be done fairly quickly, certainly the furies. As I said the other day, Warcry will be six years old later in the month, so I’d like to have the full box set finished off by then!

Painting the Untamed Beasts has definitely got me back in the mood for painting stuff, and I think I want to try to keep that going and see how much more I can get finished off now. I have a lot of stuff still to do, naturally, but since I’m no longer painting mass-army games like Warhammer, I’ve been finding it a little… looser? See, painting the Untamed Beasts, even though there’s only 9 models (one of which is a lion), it’s been good to get back into that kind of production line style of painting. Normally, I know, army painters would bemoan the fact they’re on a conveyor belt of painting the same thing 10 times or whatever, but I think after 8 or 9 years of painting like this, I’ve trained myself to do it. Painting models for MCP or Shatterpoint, where you may only need to do something once because the other guys don’t have the same colour trousers, for example, can sometimes mean I’ve been floundering. Sure, I’ve been able to group models in such a way that I can simulate it to an extent, but it is definitely odd to think I’ve been missing the production line!

The other day, I got my Ossiarch Bonereapers army out to have a look at once again, and I forgot that I had already primed the cavalry models, so I think I might try to get those finished this summer, as well. Ossiarch Bonereapers was my lockdown army, and I had a lot of fun painting them up in the weeks and months leading up to my youngest being born back in 2021. I used a lot of contrast paints on them, so it’s quite a straightforward paint job once I get going with them – I just need to try to remember how I got them all painted in the first place!

May and June definitely saw some upheaval in the hobby space, due to all of the building work that we’ve had going on here. Now that things are winding down (somewhat!) I think it’ll be good to get back into the swing of things. I’m very much looking forward to seeing more of my miniatures painted up, of course, especially the Age of Sigmar stuff, as I am still very much interested in that game. In looking through all of my Bonereapers, I have remembered that I still have Arkhan the Black built and waiting for paint, as well. I’m not 100% sure how I’ll be painting him, given that he has a blue/black scheme for the armour, but my army is otherwise red. Maybe it’ll just mean he’ll stand out more? I suppose we’ll see. I may need to wait a bit before I start work on him, though, as I want to be sure I’m doing him justice!

More generally, though, I’m hoping to have a very productive month – so hopefully publishing this post will not doom me to failure there!!

June 2025 retrospective

Hey everybody,
Well, we are well and truly in the summer here in my little corner of the UK. That means, of course, that it is horrible and humid, with I think just one day where we actually had a decent bit of sun but the air did not need to be cut with a knife. The garden is of course looking lovely for it – and so wants to kill me with hayfever! And as we enter into week six of the two-week construction job here at Spalanz Towers, I think the end is indeed in sight! The flooring will be put down tomorrow by a separate company, whereupon the builder is going to pop back in and do some final bits, and that’ll be that! I’m very excited now that the end is in sight, although I am still quite sore after a three-day weekend of painting and decorating – my body is not used to such things, especially in such weather conditions, so I am definitely feeling my advanced years after that!

But enough of such banalities as real life, what have I been up to here on the blog?

Well, the big thing this month has been the sudden arrival of Pokémon here at spalanz.com. I blame James entirely for this, as he got some cards from McDonald’s and it spiralled from there! I have to admit, though, that I’ve really enjoyed getting to learn more about this game. As I have already mentioned, it put me in mind of the time, 10 years ago, when I was discovering Magic for the first time. The nostalgia was real, that’s for sure, I suppose because there has been a lot going on that has called back to 2015 in my head. It was around that time that I had rediscovered Studio Ghibli as well, of course, so the Japan connection, as well as getting into another CCG, was quite strong.

Pokémon took over for quite a while, but I think it has reverted a little to the background, though I am quite happy to have this stuff as I think it’s something that could appeal to the kids over time.

I’ve been a little schizophrenic as regards gaming, though, as I’ve covered off quite a number of different things during June. Lord of the Rings LCG has come back on the radar, as I’ve started to play my way through the Dwarrowdelf cycle – something I have done many times in the past, but not something I have done for many years now. So that’s been a lot of fun, as I’ve built some new decks for the adventure and plan to tweak them as I go. I had the Folded Space insert for Dune Imperium as well, which prompted a game with that.

Perhaps the biggest news was the first proper game of Star Wars Unlimited at my local store, where I took my Cassian Andor deck and promptly lost, but had a lot of fun doing it! I’m hoping to get more games in as time goes on, anyway, and will of course be reporting back here as they happen! I treated myself to a playmat for the game, after all, so I feel like I’m invested now!

Marvel Champions has seen a big comeback for me in the last week or so, as well. With the arrival of the final two heroes in the Agents of SHIELD wave, I have so far been enjoying the Winter Soldier a great deal. It seems that this wave has really got my interest back – I wasn’t fed up with the mutants, of course, but three consecutive waves of X-Men did start to feel like it was drawn out a bit, I suppose because it wasn’t all that long after I got into the game that Mutant Genesis came out, so while at first it was fun to catch up with all the “new to me” stuff, the only real new releases I’ve known have been mutants.

We’ve got a lot of exciting stuff on the horizon for Marvel Champions as well, with the Loki scenario pack around GenCon, then the Civil War box due in September… best start saving the pennies!

However…

Remember I talked about nostalgia, earlier? Well something else happened ten years ago – ten years ago next month, as it happens. Age of Sigmar launched. I know it was a hard birth for the game, but it’s something that I have nevertheless really come to love and feel a great deal of positivity towards – I’ll get into this more in a post for the actual tenth anniversary in July, but for the last week or so, I have once again been painting GW plastic.

Warcry is an amazing game, and I think every single time I have played it, I have really enjoyed myself. As it happens, Warcry will be 6 years old next month as well, and after getting all of the core set terrain painted last year, I think I’d like to get the rest of the box finished so that I can have that small victory!

I can’t deny that I’ve found it difficult lately to get the motivation to paint miniatures, and when this kind of situation arises, I’ve found it always works to cast about for something – anything – to paint. While there’s no telling when I’ll next be playing Warcry, to say nothing of Age of Sigmar itself, I think it’s been really useful to get back to the hobby through any means necessary.

I did touch on this in a post the other day, but I think it’s worthwhile pointing out again that my break with 40k that I talked about earlier in the year isn’t a break with Games Workshop as a whole, as much as perhaps it has felt like it! Necromunda is still a top-tier game system, for instance, and I think James and I will possibly be playing it again at some point soon. I suppose it’s just a case of trying to keep myself moderated… but I have to admit, it’s been very exciting to return to painting these models!

Slipping into Sigmar..?

Hey everybody,
Back at the beginning of April, I made a post about how I was getting out of Warhammer 40k. This decision was primarily made around how I’d been feeling about 10th edition, which came out in 2023 and, after 5 games, I just wasn’t feeling it. I had so many armies though, and back in 2024 I sold off about half of them to finance getting into Marvel Crisis Protocol (and Shatterpoint), and over the course of the past twelve months I haven’t missed them at all. Indeed, I’d been drifting away from 40k for so long, that it all just felt inevitable, really.

However.

Next month, Age of Sigmar will be turning 10. This fact kinda blows my mind, but has also made me really nostalgic for those times, as I was one of the few people who seemed to be really excited by the new game, especially the new models. The new setting was kinda meh, but nevertheless there was just something vibrant and fresh about Age of Sigmar, and that has been the same for me pretty much ever since. Whenever I’ve thought about the game, or revisited my collection of models, I have always just felt somehow excited about it. Which is a bit of a shame, because nobody around me is really as keen – there is a very competitive scene at a local hobby club, but after playing there I don’t really want that.

This is a bit of a tangent, but as part of this decision about 40k and all, I have come to realise that I want my hobby gaming time to be fun, and not sweaty and grindy. Life is already too much sometimes, I don’t want my gaming time to feel like I’m doing a tax return, or something.

But Age of Sigmar. Yeah. Great times, truly some of the best models Games Workshop produces. I’ll have more on this next month, for the tenth anniversary.

Without a real outlet for playing Age of Sigmar, though, I have instead turned my attention to Warcry. This is a truly great game, and perhaps one of the tightest rulesets GW has ever written. It feels like a real shame that they have seemingly left it behind, as the second edition “Ghur” setting, with the meat trees and rope bridges, apparently didn’t do as well as they had hoped. This may have been in part due to how they pushed the game, because it was released along the same lines as the new Kill Team, with big boxes released in a “season” format that didn’t go down as well as the original starter box, or the Red Harvest expansion.

It would be a real shame if Warcry was to be discontinued, though ultimately I think I’m still happy with my own collection of the game. I don’t have it all, which is remarkable really, but I have a good number of the bespoke warbands, plus cards to make up a fair few more. I have some of the monsters stuff, and I have all of the Tome of Champions bits that involve narrative campaigns and the like.

Indeed, I think Warcry is the only game system that I own where I have a fully painted table to terrain for it!

I’ve been struggling with motivation to paint for a while recently – perhaps in part due to the ongoing building works I’ve alluded to in several posts – but I have recently picked up the brushes again as I’ve been trying to get my Untamed Beasts painted. This is a warband that I have previously really enjoyed playing in the game, but after I’d primed the models a couple of years ago, I felt less-inclined to play it due to the fact that it’s hard to make out the models when they just have a flat black primer on them. I’m therefore hoping that getting these things painted will not only get me back on the horse, so to speak, but also it’ll get me working through the backlog of other unpainted minis in my pile of shame!

My week with Marvel Champions – and more!

Hey everybody,
I’ve recently been having a lot of building work here at Castle Spalanz, and with all of the dust and general upheaval inherent in that, I’ve not really been feeling in the mood for any games lately. However, as the work is winding down now, and there are just a few additional bits left before stage one is complete, I’ve once more been enjoying playing some games.

Yesterday, I had some excellent games of Marvel Champions. I lost both of them, but it felt really nice to get back to that game after what felt like a bit of a hiatus! I picked up the latest hero packs last week of course, but yesterday saw a bit of a return to the olden days of the game, as first I took on Klaw with Black Panther and Thor! Black Panther is a hero that I don’t particularly seem to play, and I think it’s mainly because I’m not the biggest fan of his kit. For a while, I didn’t even have a deck built for him, but his current iteration is very much a Leadership “leftovers” deck, as I’ve used the rest of my aspect cards in other decks. In the main, it seems to revolve around adding upgrades to the Iron Man and Ronin allies, and I feel like there’s a bit of a disconnect with the hero and the deck, somehow.

Thor, of course, is always fun to play, and while he definitely suffers from the early design philosophy of “big” heroes needing a smaller hand size, I think he still works well. The game was a ton of fun, though it didn’t quite go to plan and Klaw was able to scheme his way to victory – nevertheless, I felt really pleased with myself for being able to whittle him down to just 9 health while The Immortal Klaw side scheme was still in play – that’s a lot of damage he’s taken!!

The next game was Scarlet Witch and Spectrum vs Venom. I have had a fair amount of trouble with this scenario, because I can never quite work out what I’m supposed to do – do I put forego the damage and get the bell tower ringing, so it damages Venom that little bit extra? Well I spent my first round getting 6 tokens on the tower, but then over the course of the villain phase Venom just removed them all, through a combination of boost effects and damage. So it felt very much like I had done nothing – although I will admit that my heroes were also undamaged as a result. For the rest of the game, then, I just ignored the tower and tried my very best to deal damage to the face!

Scarlet Witch is a really interesting hero, the way the Chaos magic thing is implemented is really fun. A lot of her card effects require you to discard cards from the encounter deck, and she can deal quite a lot of damage with boost icons that way. However, she’s thinning the encounter deck to do so, so it’s that sort of knife-edge as to whether you want to keep throwing hex bolts if it means you’re going to be adding an acceleration token to the main scheme! Of course, that’s exactly what I was doing, but anyway! I have previously not bothered with Agatha Harkness either, as I tend not to care too much about such cards. But the ability to draw cards in alter ego was just an absolute delight, and I think this game really showed me how interesting she is to play, overall.

People go on about Spectrum being a terrible hero, but I really disagree with that. I think there’s far too much snootiness in the community at times, and people forget that not only is it a game, but it’s a game about big dumb superheroes doing big dumb things. Spectrum is a lot of fun to play, with some really swingy turns depending on what she has going on. I have her in Leadership with a bit of an Avengers team build going on. She has the 6-cost Captain America ally in her deck, and during this game I got to play him! Spectrum’s “thing” is her energy upgrades – three upgrade cards that you start with face down, but when you switch to hero mode you get to flip one face up. Each one gives you a stat boost and an effect, and she has a number of different cards that interact with them in different ways. I have seen some huge plays with her when I’ve played her in the past – I’ll probably do a post all about her at some point as I think she’s a really good hero and doesn’t get the recognition she deserves!

Alas, though, Venom also destroyed me. A misplay with Scarlet Witch led to her untimely demise, and while Spectrum did get a couple of fairly decent turns, she couldn’t stem the tide and Venom completed his scheme, as well.

I’ve got the new heroes sleeved up now, and ready to roll. I’ve taken to jotting down ideas for hero/villain pairings, as I have so much stuff for this game that I’ve been finding it tricky to decide what exactly to play! I want to try out the brother/sister pairing of Magik and Colossus soon, though, and I also think Phoenix/Wolverine could be interesting to try out. I still have a lot of unplayed heroes from the third mutant wave though, and now the latest batch that came with the SHIELD wave, so I need to crack on and explore those, as well… so little time!

It’s not all been about Marvel Champions, though, as I’ve also been playing more Lord of the Rings LCG. After my post last week about starting the Dwarrowdelf cycle again, I’ve played the second scenario there, The Seventh Level, which I think is generally regarded as being on the weaker side. There are two quest stages, during the first stage one of your heroes has the Book of Mazarbul, which means that hero can’t attack but also doesn’t exhaust to quest. Sticking this on Eowyn was great, and my Rohan deck made pretty quick work of the orcs being spat out of the encounter deck. It was nice to play through another quest for this game, for sure, but it does feel a bit like I’m gearing up before the main event of the cycle…

I haven’t been changing my decks up all that much so far, though I have decided to add in the Saruman ally to my Rohan guys, as I feel it might be thematic. We’ll see!

Finally, I’ve made an effort to pick up the paint brushes once more, and have been painting the Untamed Beasts for Warcry! I’m not going to say too much more on this for now, as I’ll have a post coming later in the week with more, but I am hoping to have this warband finished by the time I’m writing my June retrospective post in a week’s time!

Something big is coming…

I absolutely love Warcry. It’s possibly my number one favourite game Games Workshop produce. First edition, released in 2019, was a sleeping giant, now that I look back, with a release schedule that may have been adversely affected by the pandemic, but it was something quite beautiful. Eight Chaos-themed warbands, with a multitude of original terrain released to play games that were quick and frighteningly brutal.

I recently watched some YouTube videos from the good folks over at Eons of Battle, where Jay was showing off his Ogor Spearhead box, and it reminded me of the time when I was intending to build an army of Ogres. They’re old models, but they’re so wonderful and full of character that it got me thinking…

Thankfully, I guess, I don’t know anyone who plays AoS, but I started to look instead at Warcry. I didn’t pick the cards up first time around, but I’ve been able to find them online for the princely sum of £1, and so I am now pondering my next move. In the game, Ogres are kinda expensive, starting at 200 points. I would therefore probably be able to get a warband together from a single box of the big lads, which is nice! The roster also has gretchin, Leadbelchers and Ironguts; I’m veering heavily towards the latter because I don’t think ranged weapons balance that well in this game.

We’ll see, though.