First up on Friday was another outing for the Gods in Mythic Battles with Mick and I trying out another combination of Greek heroes and monsters.
I went with Atlas who at 8 points is the most expensive deity with a force designed to try and kill the opposition whilst making them spend the ever precious Art of War (AOW) cards. With the games mechanics requiring you to spend AOW cards to make second activations and use many special powers an opponent without any has very limited options.
Odysseus was added mostly for his 3 AOW cards he generates and Icarus as cheap source of cards to throw away for Atlas's Bearer of Heavens passive power.
Mick went along a similar line with Aphrodite costing AOW cards to attack and then backing her up with some solid heroes and a nasty monster. As Echidne was Mick's first draft choice I was careful not to pick any monsters in order to limit her effectiveness as much as possible.
One mistake I think Mick made was he choices only generated an additional 3 AOW cards to the three you get at the start of the game compared to the six generated by my force.
We played the Styx map which features some rift areas that monsters and deities cannot end there moves in, but heroes and troops can.
The game started with Mick quickly getting all his force onto the board whilst mine took longer to deploy.
I advanced across the board and used Echo to put the pinch on the opposition. Atlas got stuck into the opposition and he dished out some good damage and managed to kill Atalanta early on.
After that he and Achilles killed a couple more of team Aphrodite whilst Aphrodite absorbed a couple of omphalos.
After that we had to speed the game along as Mick's son arrived and he needed to make a get away. The end result was team Aphrodite being wiped out and Atlas ending with only a few vitality left, so as with last week it was a close run thing.
On Saturday my brother arrived with his Kings of War Salamanders and we had our first battle with the new armies. As he has already gotten to press with a battle report I won't repeat a blow by blow account.
It was great to get the big armies out onto the table again and as I earlier purchased a two feet extension to the table we could go beyond the 2500 points we used upto 3500 points on a day we have more time to play.
We used the battle cards from Mantic which provide a random set of objectives for each side and then adds a mystery objective at the start of turn 4. My objective was to push over the centre line with more unit strength than the lizards and then needed to capture the hill just outside my deployment zone.
With having the speed advantage across most of the table I was somewhat able to pick the fights so I was looking to gang up on the big hordes to start off with and then take advantage of the confusion in the enemy lines to kill off some more and push over the centre line.
The crunch came in my turn two with my triple charge failing to break the Salamander right wing horde after causing 21 wounds and then rolling snake eyes to let them stay on the table.
The central horde of Placoderms was also vulnerable to being routed but another poor roll for nerve saw them stay on the table.
As the right hand Salamander horde had Fury this allowed them to join in the counter charge and in one turn my entire left flank was removed from the table, ouch!
I did manage to take off both those hordes in the next turn ( only turn 3 ) but the battle was effectively lost as I had too few troops to battle on.
In the fourth turn the rest of my infantry was wiped out and even though my flyers had removed a couple of units it was not enough a victory went to the Salamanders.
Even though the final table looks very bad for the Herd the battle really turned on the snake eyes roll and I can't help but feel it could have worked out very differently, but such is the nature of wargames sometimes.
Overall it was a brutal battle and I suspect that if either of the two armies get on a roll then the battles will be over well before turn 6 arrives.
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