Friday 16 January 2015

Getting my geek on - Black powder & Beyond the gates of Antares

Well its been a action packed week in the land of the Anton!

Last Sunday Ed whom is buggering off to the mighty RAF asked a few guys if they fancied a game of black powder.

I thought it'd be rude not to and so we got a few models out and shoved them around the table for a few hours....


Ed looking quite chuffed with the whole lot on the table, 


the mighty French painted by myself a fair few years ago! 


More cav than you can shake a stick at! 


The British lines, The highlanders would prove to be a pain in the arse later on! 


The whole lot


A fair bit of French! 






So after a dodgy start where the right flank stood around eating garlic and the British sat around making tea, we eventually started passing command checks and moved stuff about! 



the French hit the British lines like a steam train and the British held for most of the day and after a series of dodgy rolls the French lost unit hand over fist and we called it a British victory.


Overall the day was excellent and most of the models were Ed's that he's spent the last 4 years painting and I have to give in a big thumbs up for managing to stay focused on this for such a long time, I'm luck if I stay focused on the same system for more than 8 months as I'm a gaming whore!

Also A big thanks to Dave over at Black Dragon miniatures who put up with us for the whole of the day! 

The game has certainly sparked my interest in black powder which has surprised me to be honest and myself and my fellow madman Mr Smith have made a gentleman's agreement to pick up some 10mm Napoleonic and give it a crack as we both feel that 28mm is too big for a normal sized table.

So keep your eye out for that slow grow project that I'll be doing over the next couple of months.

So not content with a 5 hour session on Sunday, I'd arranged a beta game for Antares,

Previously way back in April/May 2014 myself and Nick played a fair few games of the alpha rules and providing feedback to Rick with regards to his system.

Since then I'd not really looked at the system as I'd been distracted with various other projects and real life. So I was really looking forward to this and been asked to bring the colourful jungle along.


As one of the guys from the Loughbrough dice devils wanted in on the action I did the gentlemanly thing and gave him the choice of army and I ended up with the Bromites normally the guys who I'd end up facing! 


One of the squads going for the objective! However they failed the command roll and mooch around for a couple of turns due to being pinned


however these guys came on like a steam train and were on one! 

 

  overall view of the table after turn one,


more reinforcements come flooding on


the rock dogs and the pack leader decide to go for it and start attracting the fire from the guys opposite


Missing a few guys but still going for it!




part way though turn 4,
 

the rock dogs are still in the game, god knows how as the were reacting by doing down due to the amount of fire pouring in at them, and didn't break!

You'll notice though that the golden droid has been snatched by the Algoryn's


and I didn't quite get the one that I was aiming for....

so a victory to the Algoryn's in this case.

It was an interesting game as it felt alot more complete than the previous alpha rules and it was nice to see the suggestions that Nick had put forward actually in the game, at the moment it is available for free download off the warlord site,

free-antares-public-beta-pdf-download

additional missions and a cheat sheet have also been uploaded,

rules-scenarios-for-beyond-the-gates-of-antares

so if your sitting on the fence with this one give it a crack you've nothing to lose, I'm certainly looking for my Sci-Fi fix after not really feeling the love for 40K 8th Ed and I think this along with Warzone will be my go to system.


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