James Wilson Codes

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve always enjoy my games against Adam.
 Tonight it was Ophelia 2. I picked Kastore 2, as it worked well against Ophelia the last time I played the matchup. Also, generally, he is good for squishing Gremlins.

However, my plans were almost immediately thwarted. Very early on, Adam used Rami LaCroix with the Clean Up Duty upgrade, and his Sniper ability to do 2 quadruple blast damage to my whole crew - as well as give them injured, and with the Glass Shards trigger managed to effectively corral my crew with Hazardous terrain. I was sad. This kind of put me on the back foot a bit - I managed to move most of them through the Hazardous, and into the Urnbearer’s Pools of Blood aura to heal, but that just meant that they were two health down, Injured, and didn’t get to proc any extra movement from it.

Adam also fired that Clean Up Duty a number of other times, although it wasn’t quite as brutal on those occasions.

Taking a deep breath, however, I carried on with my plan of pushing Kastore up the board and going on a rampage. This worked, I managed to destroy a Swine Twirler, and a Young LaCroix and move Kastore down near Ophelia and Sammy. In Turn 2, he managed to charge again, and nearly killed Sammy, before using Visceral Rampage to retreat closer to my own territory. I wish I had used his third action to kill Sammy instead, because the little guy kept turning my Scheme Markers into Flying Piglets! It also would, as Adam said after, have allowed me to pressure Ophelia, who would have been retreating from the big scary angry vampire.

However, I thought I had a plan to get Sammy. The Cavern Nephilim was hiding behind a building, and ignoring LOS, tried to use Echolocation with Focus to take his remaining health. It would have worked, but I forgot he was a henchman and he stoned the damage. I tried it in turns 2 and 3, and dropped Scheme Markers, and I had the opportunity to declare Ensnare and forgot! Adam did pause for me to do so, spotting that I might have picked it, so it’s all on me.

I wish I had got Sammy - he was a right pain, summoning flying pigs!

Kastore ended up Staggered - and I had a choice - take a 2 health heal from the Marathine’s Living Weapon or ignore it via Gwyll’s Cling to Death, proc Faith In The Flesh and get close enough to Charge Ophelia on the next turn. I chose the extra movement, and Ophelia came out Blasting. Adam did flip well, but poor Kastore died. One of the worst parts of Kastore dying is removing the Marathine from the board. I feel like it just clatters to the floor.

Another thing that Adam played really well was the Merris Bomb. White Eyes was close to killing her, and had run away to the centre of the board to try to heal and regroup. Adam charged Merris in, I wasted cards trying to keep the Urnbearer alive, then he planted Merris straight into the Urnbearer’s Pools of Blood Hazardous aura, and triggered her Demise (Flaming +2) ability to blow her up. Great play, not sure if you could pull it off in every game, but it worked well here and I applaud it, even as I weep. How thematic and narrative as well. A gremlin suicide bombing a beautiful goth demon blood fetishist is not something that would happen in many games, I’ll wager.

The score was 6-1 in the end. It felt like a game of 3 Acts - Ophelia’s crew blasting me, then Kastore coming back and Rampaging, and then finally being overtaken.

I'm quite proud of how I scored my 1 point. It was the first point of Let Them Bleed, and involved using all of my resources to get White Eyes to do his maximum damage, then use Unnatural Speed to place away and not make the extra Made To Kill attack (which confused Adam) for fear of killing the first model (it was Raphael and Rami, but I can't remember the order) and forcing through max damage.

I tried to prevent Adam from scoring the final point of Let Them Bleed by using Gwyll's Essence Transfer to kill herself and keep White Eyes at full health. I then read the Scheme properly and realised that it wouldn't work because 'no more than one model with full health' - I think Gwyll was too damaged to heal herself up, sadly. I think having White Eyes on full health did help with the above shenanigans, however.

The game was still lot of fun, though! I did take Athorak so his Wardstones could save me from shooting - but with a number of models ignoring LOS, that didn’t really help. Talking to Adam after, we thought that maybe Kastore being even more aggressive would have helped, to keep Ophelia on the back foot, and take out a few more models.