Chicago Skirmish Wargames

 

  

Ultimately Josh's Dark Angels prevailed, spiriting away the alien device before the Necrons could seize it for their own nefarious purposes.

Across the board, my Necrons were flushing a platoon of terrified Guardsmen from their bunker complex. Here we learned a perennial lesson about skirmish games -- heavy armor (or metal bodies, in the case of the Necrons) -- is a serious force multiplier. Mike's Guardsmen didn't have enough heavy weapons to effectively fight off my robots, so they inexorably squeezed the Guardsmen as the game unfolded. I only had 5 robots but they proved quite potent, especially when taking advantage of cover!

Oh! But this was a 3-person game. Another Mike, playing his Daemonhunter warband, was advancing across the board as well. He exchanged fire with my Necrons, found the match-up to be a rather bloody affair (for him), and turned his attention to the poor Guardsmen.

 
His warband figures are mostly Dark Elves that have been converted to hold a variety of sci-fi weapons. This young lady is a Dark Elf Beastmaster, heavily converted of course.

Across the table, Tim was running a Tau warband composed of Skinnies from the Starship Troopers game line. He also had some 28mm scale Daleks in his warband, which were quite awesome. Check out his warband below.

We also didn't end up with many pics from the warehouse sector battlefield. Here's one, showing Josh's Dark Angels defending a refinery from a two pronged assault by both of the Mikes. Yes, that's my washing machine in the background -- 'tis the blessing and the curse of playing in the basement.

One of the last games of the night was a scenario from the ITEN rulebook called "Fort Apache," where Karl's Squats attempted to defend a ruined building from my advancing Necron warband. We went a little crazy with the pictures because his Squats (a new warband that's he's been painting up) looked so good lurking in the ruins. This is an almost-finished piece of terrain that I've been working on recently.

He managed to slaughter most of my robots before we called the game for the night. Karl had figured out how to use the "torrent of fire" rules in ITEN to his advantage, which helped make my heavily armored robots not quite so dangerous. I still ended the game with my fair share of Squat carcasses on the battlefield, though.

What followed was a lengthy discussion on ITEN as it pertained to our upcoming post-apocalyptic campaign. We spent a lot of time talking about whether or not we should limit heavy armor (like power armor for Space Marines, or metal bodies for Necrons) since it proved to be such a force on the battlefield. We also discussed the idea of creating a custom equipment list to limit the number of zany plasma guns and refractor fields in our post-apocalyptic campaign. We agreed that ITEN was a serviceable ruleset that we could build a campaign around. Hurray for that! Now let's get the campaign going!

-- Patrick, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member, with extra photos by Josh and Karl