The Animosity V UK Meet-up

Another awesome get-together with the Animosity crew happened on Saturday. I had a very rainy drive down to Warhammer World, but it was totally worth it.

We gathered in Bugman's before 11am for coffee and some food, our tables were booked for 12. When we booked them we had asked if it was possible for them to have Warcry boards and "urban ruins" scenery and they gave the impression that would be fine, but the scenery was mostly old AoS ruins on our four AoS sized tables. Luckily Leilatchu managed to source some Warcry boards, from "the office" or some other mysterious location, so we were all good (I had taken one with me and a storage box of the scenery I had made for the campaign - I would have brought more if I'd known!).

Using everyone's Discord names, the attendees were:

1. warbosskurgan (me!)
2. maps_
3. malthan.
4. leilatchu
5. rapturousrex
6. doominator407
7. Raschier
8. Beithir | Nick
9. cupboard_of_shame
10. minirelapse
11. lonvagabond
12. redangel97
13. the_thinking_gnu

Our first round of games was random pairings - I handed out two sets of cards numbered 1 to 6, and left people to find someone who had a matching number. After that everyone was free to find an opponent who had also finished their game, or they could take a break.

The Battleplans we used were not fixed: Deployment and Victory were generated with regular Heart of Ghur Battleplan cards. Twists were generated using the suggestions in the Players Guide to the Fated Blade; i.e. an edited selection of Twist cards from the same deck, with all the cards that didn't feel right for the Realm of Shadows removed.

Malthan also organised a mini pit-fighting side-tournament (using an updated version of the 1st edition rules from an old White Dwarf). This ran along-side the free-form Warcry gaming and was a lot of fun. Malthan and Leilatchu gave the players in the next bout plenty of notice and they happily swapped bouts round to fit the timing of the other games in progress. There were random events happening every round to spice it up too.

Round One

Seed 1, 12:00 - Raschier vs Maps

Seed 2, 12:45 - Leilatchu vs Malthan

Seed 3, 13:30 - Rapturousrex vs Redangel

Seed 4, 14:15 - WarbossKurgan vs The Thinking Gnu

Semi-Finals

15:30 - Maps vs Leilatchu

16:15 - Rapturousrex vs The Thinking Gnu

Final

17:15 Rapturousrex vs Leilatchu

Battle commenced, heads (and dice) rolled! Pretty soon there were 6 games on the go!

I didn't take as many photos of people as I had meant to, and the ones I got are not great.

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And purely because I love such things, this is the Realm of Shadows themed dice set I used on the day. Top to bottom rows:

Initiative Dice: Necromunda, Van Saar

Wild Dice: WH40K, Aeldari

Battle Dice: Middle Earth SBG, Dol Guldur

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Game 1

My first game of the day was against Sam (cupboard_of_shame)

Sam's Warband: Desciples of Tzeentch: Arcanites

Deployment: Bloodbath

Victory: Drive them Back

Twist: Rainstorm of Ghyran

Result: Win

The asymmetrical scoring of this Battleplan worked heavily in my favour as I had a bigger warband than Sam. I think that Sam might have been able to score more VP if he had chosen a different board edge as his territory, but I'm not certain about that.

Sam scored 5 victory points to my 2VP in Round One, but then I rushed everyone forward and it was 12:8 VP to me at the end of Round Two. In Round Three I doubled my total VP by piling almost all of my warband into Sam's territory and the final score was 24:11 VP.

We should have played Round Four but I had already asked for my bout in the Pit Fight to be pushed back and after a quick check of the models left on the board, if I had been tabled and scored zero VP in the last round, and Sam had scored the maximum possible without losing any fighters, the game would still have been mine as he didn't have 14 models left. Sam graciously conceded and I think almost immediately jumped straight into another game. He was an absolute gent and a joy to play against.

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Game 2

My second game was against Matt (the_thinking_gnu)

Matt's Warband: Flesh-Eater Courts

Battleplan: Arena of Daeth

Result: Loss

This was a really close game. With only 250 points and a maximum of 3 models I took a gamble and used a Kruleboyz Shaman (with a Divine Blessing of xxxx, for an extra Wild Dice at the start of the game) and a Pot-grot. I hoped that the Summon Mists and Brew Elixir abilities would make the shaman sufficiently durable to survive against the attacks from whatever my opponent's champion was, long enough to do some damage in return.

It nearly worked! But only nearly.

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Game 3

My last of the day, was against Nick Beithir | Nick.

Nick's Warband: Soulblight Gravelords

Deployment: Battle Lines

Victory: Cut Off The Head

Twist: Dusk

Result: Win

The first leader down would decide the winner of this game. Both of us were a little cagey, trying to trick the other into charging leader vs. leader, so our combat-monsters would only have to withstand one activation of attacks and be able to return two. When I realised we both had the same plan, I fed a series of Gutrippaz into the meatgrinder, each chipped away at the vampire's wounds. Then Kommodore Deffgit charged in and managed to take down the wounded vamp.

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The narrative versions of these 3 games is collected here.

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After my games I got a bunch of people to play one of the Animosity minigames. 

(Each turn of the campaign has a 3-day GM phase that has nothing for the players to do but wait to find out what happened, so I gave each Coalition a minigame to help pass the time. There are 4 different mechanical games, two of which have two different flavoured "skins". I made sure they all have a dice element (using a Discord dice-rolling bot called Dice Maiden) and some degree of player agency so they aren't just based on luck.)

I took the cards for the two minigames based on Shut The Box with a twist. I called the mechanics Risky Search. The first cards are for the Mooncalled's game, "Mushroom Quest". The second are the Blackwing Corsairs' game, "Pick Clean The Corpse".

They both play using the same rules, only the card names and art are tailored to the Coalition flavour.

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It was a really good day altogether - playing a lot of games of Warcry with old friends and new? What could be better! I can't wait to do it again.