Day Out

A good day of Bushido at Common Ground Games yesterday.  Got to play against Mark Watson's Silvermoon 'Buto-herd' and show John Sinclair's Temple the ropes.  Did a bit more test profile testing, but don't really have more to add than my feedback so far.  I used the test profile(s) in the game against Mark, and didn't in the game against John, and I felt remarkably less active in the second game.  Really looking forward to Wave 20.

Behold Master Akari while we're here:

The first game was quite intimidating.  Fighting a trio of buto is just scary with the sheer amount of health they bring to the board.  It's really a case of staring at them and thinking "how the hell am I going to kill all that stuff?"  The answer is: start with Old Zo.  Then kill everything that isn't a buto.  Finally, work on killing some buto.  The Death-Chicken didn't put up much of a fight, after seeing it maul the Wraith, I was a bit surprised it just keel over and die when I attacked it.  Clearly Kenzo was made of sterner stuff.

The game against John Sinclair was a real eye opener for me, as Shisa and the Grey Pilgrim combined with Ekusa's Aura of Serenity is a giant pain to deal with.  None of my models can attack or use special defences, John had no such problems with his soulless models.  It's certainly a way to get some easy outnumbering going as none of my models can dance around with side step defence anymore.  It is rather subject to bad match ups against certain Cult lists though.  I didn't use any test profiles against John as he's just not as experienced at the game as most of the Glasgow players (we're notoriously hardcore about our game(s) of choice).  Unfortunately for John I opted for an early scenario rush style of list, and we were playing Ryodo.  So I just rushed into the middle zone, pretty much ignored my own zone apart from a couple of token defenders, and then threw as many of my mobile models into his zone as possible.  Then it was just a case of maintaining a scenario point lead until the Temple models eventually collapsed from poison.

Round One: FIGHT!

There were some entertaining games had by the other people there, Martin's Savage Wave against Dave's Prefecture was hilarious, with Martin having a very secure 3-0 win magically turning into a 1-1 draw.  Dave's ashigaru list is interesting to see, it has no samurai at all.  I couldn't tell you how Jim's games went, most of mine lasted longer.

John Sinclair had a much cooler way of making tokens than what I've been using - the condition tokens I had made are just really big, I'd rather have something a little more compact.  John used white 16mm tiddly-winks and custom printed circular sticky labels, and they look much better.  So I'm going to order some tiddly-winks and see how printing my own sticky labels works out.  I'm probably going to keep my tired/exhausted base rims however, you can see one on the Wraith in the picture above.

Eight is the Magic Number

I should really include more pictures in the blog.

Speaking of pictures, time to show my two Bushido boards (both of which need some repair work...) and the terrain I've been making.  I have a lot more terrain, but a good chunk of it is for a Warmachine/Hordes table, and thus completely unsuitable for Bushido simply because of the size of it.  A 4" forest in WM/H isn't anything to write home about, in Bushido it's a major obstacle.  BEHOLD!

Swamp Board with the majority of new terrain

Temple Board without any terrain.  I left it on the car roof once

No games of Bushido for me this last week I'm afraid.  Too bad, so sad.  Still waiting on the gigantic order of the Savage Wave and Wave 19 stuff to arrive - it's going to be exciting stuff.  Whilst I was previously very keen on Satsuki and the possibilities of running more shisai, this has fallen to the wayside a bit as the current test profile(s) are really exciting for the Ito Clan.  I'm finding it really hard not to put them in every list I'm going to use.  Or write massive spoilers about them.  Wave 20 is looking very sexy for everyone so far.

There was a really exciting game a couple of weeks ago now between Jim's Cult and Mark's Silvermoon the other week.  I have a newfound respect for Old Zo and his Tax - and yes, we make a lot of jokes about Tax as we're self-employed (and thus pay almost no tax in real-life) - as it's a very powerful counter to the kami models of the Cult.  They usually boost their melee/movement for 1 Ki, and can often gain it back in a melee exchange.  With Tax active however, they really hurt themselves to do this.  We got to see the début of the Death Chicken (Okete-san), which killed the Wraith.  No joke.  Talk about a return on the rice investment.  Mark has also embraced my mantra of "your opponent needs success level 8 to have a chance of one-shotting a buto or oni" so will usually roll attack dice even if his buto is down to a single dice.  And it's really brutal.  We got to see Mo Ises (Mo Eee-say?) hit Tautola for 7 damage from a single attack, only to get utterly smashed by the buto's return attack.  So yes, Tautola was hurt, but Mo Ises was just plain dead.  This is how I envision oni should be played.