His list:

• Fiona
• Press Gangers (min)
• Sea Dogs (max)
• Dirty Meg
• Mariner
• First Mate Hawk
• Lord Rockbottom
• Master Gunner Dougal MacNaile

My list:

• Sorscha
• Destroyer
• Juggernaut
• Kodiak
• Iron Fang Pikemen (max)
• Iron Fang Pikemen Officer & Standard Bearer
• Greylord Ternion
• Widowmakers

(looks like I went over by 2!)

I won deployment and had him go first. Not a whole lot happened on his turn. He moved most of his stuff down the middle, with the Mariner, Dougal and Meg moving more or less down my left flank. His Mangler seemed to be keeping to my right. My turn, I merely moved up and I think I tried firing the Destroyer’s bombard into the Sea Dogs, but it missed. Sorscha, Juggernaut and Kodiak moved around his right flank while the Destroyer, IFP and Greylords moved down the middle with the Widowmakers hiding in the woods on his left (after I realized they have Advance Deployment!).

His next turn he tried Influencing several of my IFP to attack each other and managed to kill just one. The Mariner fired on the Juggernaut, causing minor damage. Sorscha was on the edge of the woods on his right flank and took some pretty serious damage. The Juggernaut got Stalled by Meg. Fiona did her feat. The Widomakers managed to kill one or two Sea Dogs, the Ternion reduced the defense of the Mangler by 4, the IFP charged the Mangler and some Sea Dogs, damaging it pretty seriously and killing several of them. The Destroyer fired into the Sea Dogs, killing more of them and they fled. The Kodiak charged the Mariner, causing some damage.

The third turn, Joel set the Juggernaut on fire (while still Stalled) and moved some Press Gangers into the woods where Sorscha was hiding. He then used one of them as an arc node to kill Sorscha. Unfortunately, the wound roll on her was not enough to kill her. In my half of the turn, Sorscha moved up, did her feat and attempted to damage Fiona. The Kodiak left combat with the now-frozen Mariner and squished Fiona to finish the game.

Of course, there may be some places where I got things in the wrong order above, but that was the gist of what happened. As usual, it was a really good game and it was refreshing to play a different faction from Cryx.

In my previous post, I listed the army list I was going to be using. Here is Joel’s list:

• Fiona the Black
• Alexia Ciannor and 5x Risen
• Steelhead Halberdiers x6
• Sea Dogs x6
• Bucaneer
• Mariner
• Mangler
• Dougal MacNaile
• Bosun Grogspar
• Lady Aianna and Master Holt

I had originally thought Joel would try to focus on Orin Midwinter right from the start, but he really didn’t do that until later and when he did focus on him, he succeeded in killing him.

I lost the die roll for deployment so I ended up going first. He and I both just advanced our army on our first turn. Most things were doing a Run action. My strategy was to move forward to a certain point and stop waiting to see what Joel would do. I intentionally kept the Mangler back a bit with the intention of him becoming the hammer later in the game.

Probably the first combat was between our two units of Halberdiers. I think he killed a couple of mine, giving Alexia a couple of tokens to use for Risen his next turn. The Halberdier units each hung around for quite a while fighting each other and eventually my Mangler jumped into his unit and killed a few.

The Talon, guided by Meg, charged the Mangler and Stalled him a couple of times. The first time, he was able to get rid of it the following turn. The second time, however, he was unable to get rid of it. The Mangler did finally kill both the Talon and Dirty Meg. Luckily, they were able to distract the beast enough that it didn’t get into the bulk of my army.

I was trying my best to find a way to get a good shot off with the Mule, but that didn’t come until later. I ended up wasting my Obliterator shot from the Renegade on Alexia as I rolled two ones to hit. I should have at least boosted it.

The Vanguard charged and really put the hurt on the Mariner. The Mariner ended up with several disabled systems and didn’t do any damage to the Vanguard from that point forward.

The Renegade, after shooting his wad, so to speak, was trapped in a group of Risen so I ended up trampling through them and Alexia to clear the LOS for the Mule to take shots at Alexia.

The Mule did take some shots at Bosun Grogspar, who was base to base with Fiona and did end up dealing enough damage for him to need to make a Tough roll that Joel passed rolling a 6. the AOE did hit Fiona, but with a POW 8, it wasn’t going to be able to do much.

Twice in the game, Joel created and charged with Thrall Warriors into Magnus, doing little to no damage. Magnus killed off said Thrall pretty easily afterward.

In the end, Joel’s army had done 7 points of damage to Magnus and mine had done 0 damage to Fiona. Based on units and ‘jacks lost, I ended up losing the game. It was a good game that really could have ended up with a dead Magnus or a dead Fiona.

A few things I am finding with the game:

Alexia is still pretty powerful with enough infantry on the board. Just using them to screen or block LOS seems to be really good. She’s not near as bad as back in MK I, but still definitely worth taking and is a threat to the enemy.

AOEs, unless you are able to directly hit the thing you want dead, are pretty underpowered. Several times the POW 15 hit on models in base to base with Fiona would kill the one model it hit directly, but would fail to do any damage to anyone else.

Honestly, the more I play MK II the more I’m remembering why Warmachine is not my favorite game. For now, though, I’ll keep playing for fun when there’s not much else to do.

My list will look like this:

• Magnus, the Traitor
• Steelhead Halberdiers x6
• Stannis Brocker
• Mule
• Mangler
• Renegade
• Vanguard
• Dirty Meg with Talon Jack Marshalled
• Orin Midwinter

Now that I know what some of Magnus’ spells do and with the effectiveness of Orin (who I expect will get a lot of attention from Joel’s army due to last game’s results), I hope to do much better this time. I swapped out the Nomad for a Mule just to get some more ranged attack action since last time his Freebooter(?) kept lobbing AOEs into my troops.

To really make my army choices complete, I need 4 more Halberdiers and a full unit of Devil Dogs, but I am at a point right now that I’m not sure I want to invest more cash in Warmachine. We’ll see what happens the more I play.