Sunday, 16 February 2020

Kobold Debut

What better way to celebrate the eighth anniversary of this blog than by debuting my newly painted BattleSworn kobolds?

That's exactly what I did this morning.

I pitted them agains my Moria Goblins, who fielded 4 x Fighters (including the Leader), 3 x Rogues, 2 x Shooters, 1 x Cavalry (a wolf) and 1 x Brute/Giant.

The Kobolds were 4 x Fighters (inluding the Leader), 2 x Chaos Warriors, 4 x Rabble and 2 x Rogue/Shooters

I'm trying out scenarios from 'Challengers of the Great Beyond', and used one of the versions of the McGuffin scenario we're testing. Each side has three counters in terrain areas on their side of the board. If a figure moves over a counter it is removed, but no character can start on or touching a counter. When the fourth counter is removed, roll a D6 - on a 5+ the counter is an artifact and all other counters are removed. The fifth counter is the artifact on a 3+ and the sixth counter is always the artifact. The artifact must be carried off the side's board-edge to win.

This was the setup. Both sides defended the counters on their own side of the board, but had plans to grab ones on the opponent's side as well - the plan was reveal one or two on their side then use moves to reveal the last few on their own side, hoping to get the artifact. The game is a tense balance between choosing to remove counters, and getting your opponent to do it so you can try to ensure that the artifact is one of the counters on your side of the board, plus trying to bid such that you get to move the artifact off the board with reactions at the end, as these are harder moves to block.

I ran the kobolds (naturally, and used the solo mechanisms for the goblins).


The goblins sent their wolf round the flank to threaten a counter in the kobold's rear. I use a different version of Cavalry to that in the rules. Firstly it only costs one slot, secondly you can have up to four and thirdly they move differently. Instead of ignoring the first terrain change (which has the curious effect of making cavalry good in rough terrain), they can make a single direction change during their move, so long as they don't enter combat. Normal BattleSworn movement is always in a straight line.


The kobolds responded by attacking the wolf.


And first blood to the kobolds!



In the centre the two kobold Chaos Warriors (representing their 'elite' warriors) rushed into some rocky ground and used reaction moves to grab the counter their from under the goblins' flat noses.



The goblin Rogues also went after a counter, but ended up caught in a duel with the kobold's archers.


Things looked desperate when the cave troll charged in as well.


But the kobold's kaptain performed an intercept charge and distracted the troll.


By this point two counters had been revealed. The goblins used their turn to reveal a third, and then roll for a fourth, which turned out to be the artifact. All they had to do was get it off the board.


Anticipating the find I had run a couple of kobolds over to the goblins' edge, ready to intercept any attempt to move the artifact off the board.


A couple more joined them.


But let's not forget the actual fighting - the troll knocked the Kaptain away, but the two archers finished off their opponents, losing one themselves.




Two kobolds were now in a position to stop the goblins escaping. In regular BattleSworn this would be a a good position to be in. And in terms of actual figure positioning it was.


But 'CotGB' also uses card-based initiative bidding, so you only get a limited number of each bid value. And I'd used up my high, reaction, bids earlier in the game. Now I was stuck bidding '1' which allowed me an action, but gave the goblins plenty of reactions. My first attempt to attack the archer with the artifact was intercepted.



As was my second. And the goblins could move the archer with reaction moves both times, so he escaped.


The goblins won. They had taken more casualties, but got the artifact and had escaped thanks to my poor hand-management.


Despite the loss this was a fun game, and the kobolds looked great. The scenario seemed to work OK as well, offesring some tricky decisions about timing of moves and whether to take the initiative or not.

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