Summer Rampage Week 1: Picnic by the river

I played my first game today as part of the Summer Rampage League against Broken Zealot's Menoth. I brought my Grim Angus army, and we played the Menoth scenario. The objective was to be the only side with warbeasts or warjacks in a 12" circle in the middle. We played on a board with two big woods, one on each side, a nice river running down the left side of the board, and a few hills and low walls. The only terrain that really came into play were the two large-ish forests.

The Trolls deployed first, and Menoth went second. Amon came with a Castigator, Crusader, Revenger, full zealots and monolith, Gorman, three wracks, and a full choir. We played five turns with the mission victory conditions, caster kill, or VPs, whichever came first.

In summary I was able to do a good job controlling the board with Grim and his movement spells. For the first time the Gobbers didn't do to much, mostly because I had them on the wrong side and they were blown up by the zealots early on. The Impaler didn't really do all that much either. He got a couple of shots off, but once again no critical slams. It's been several games now where he hasn't really done very much. His animus did prove useful though, where Grim was able to snare gun the Castigator.

Grim was definitely the star of the show, throwing out cross country spells, shooting to throw bait on the Crusader so the Mauler could charge, man trapping to knock down big heavies, and snaring the Castigator to keep him out of melee. You name it, he did it all. I'm really loving Grim for his versatility in missions like this.

The Axer was quite good again, he was able to absorb a fair bit of punishment, slam around some warjacks, and just be an all around nuisance for the Menites to deal with. The Champions, sadly were on the wrong side of the board so didn't get too much done, but thanks to cross country, they were eventually able to get into melee with the choir, and wiped them out. One champion also got into melee with Amon, doing about ten points of damage to him (after concert bonus and a huge melee damage roll).

There were a couple of times that I made some blunders. One was deploying the Champions and gobbers badly. The other was one turn where I forgot to use Grim's feat to keep the zealots from bombing him and it almost proved fatal. Grim was reduced to 5 hp. Thankfully his super high defense (18 in woods) saved him from taking a single direct hit, otherwise he would have been crisped. He was also able to use his feat on a later turn to prevent zealots from approaching him then, so in the end I suppose it worked out anyway.

All in all, I have to say that it was a very enjoyable game, and the win went to the trolls, though just barely and by a sliver via victory points. I had four points and the Menites had two. Plus, the Mauler was on his way out on the last turn, with only about 5-6 damage boxes left. Had he gone down, the game would have gone the other way with a 5-4 win for Broken Zealot.

I'm definitely looking forward to another game next week. As a side note, I almost got a bonus point for killing off all enemy solos...but one wrack remained at the end of the game. Doh! :)