Friday Update

Nothing to report on the painting front I'm afraid. Tomorrow will see me finishing the two armoured vehicles and  hopefully making good progress on the Hasslefree figures.

Monday night's game of Gruntz against Simon was a cracker of a scenario. Sadly, I forgot to pack my camera so you'll have to wait until Simon actually downloads the ones he took on his iPad. I think we made a good test of the playable limits of the rules points-wise.

The scenario was a bit involved. I started with an infantry platoon with some attached support elements (250 points) occupying a bridgehead position which they had to hold until a larger mechanised infantry platoon (350 points) arrived - from Turn 4 onwards I would dice for each vehicle in the platoon to see if it arrived on table (6 for turn 4, 5+ for turn 5, etc). Simon had 400 points of mixed infantry, light armour and VTOLs on table.

We did discover a couple of things:
1) Mortars are incredibly effective against infantry, especially when the target is in the open. They're not bad against vehicles either.
2) Vehicle specialists (in my case some hover Mobile Autonomous Weapons Platforms) are very good value

I managed to get lucky with the reinforcements - the first vehicle arrived on turn 4 and it was the missile armed APC. My big mistake was that I forgot to give it the Ack-Ack perk - stupid really, as I had enough spare points to add that. the other 3 APCs came on in Turn 5. I also did well with the activation cards for the troops disembarking from the vehicles so they were able to activate pretty much instantly. Which was handy as the three standard APCs were each carrying a squad and a missile specialist, the latter promptly doing some serious damage to Simon's VTOLs.

We only had time for another turn, but it was quite clear that my reinforcements were on course to destroy Simon's force. Just as well as my bridgehead platoon was very close to being wiped out when the mechanised infantry rode to the rescue.


Last night was something a bit different. I went out for a meal. Not just any meal though - this was a gaming/blogging related meal.

Miles visits London every few weeks for work. On this occasion he actually remembered to let us know in advance and we arranged to meet up for a meal, joined by Ray and Lee. As those two were travelling up from outside London, we went for somewhere near to where they'd be coming in - a Greek restaurant on Coptic Street.

As you can imagine we had a very pleasant evening - good food, good company and lots of chatter about gaming and painting projects.

It was a real pleasure to meet Miles at last and, no, the pleasure was nothing to do with him insisting on paying for the meal.

Edit:

I've snaffled the pics of Ray's and Miles' blogs:

From Miles:

Me. Ray, Lee

From Ray:

Lee, Miles, me