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.

Wave 19 Available

Wave 19 is now available for pre-order, and all the cards are available for viewing.  Pretty sure Cult got the most out of the wave with Tenbatsu and the Penanggalan.  For the Ito, Satsuki is finally released to the general public (after being in playtesting *forever*).  She's slightly better than her playtest version - she doesn't just remove a poison token and cause damage, she causes the remaining ones to 'stack up' as if it were the end phase - so you often get a double dose of poison.  Certainly the potential to make poison bombing someone a lot more powerful.  My main problem is that I have so few targets to hit with a poison bomb in most games, but this may have more to do with my usual opponent playing Cult and almost everything being soulless.

Playing my Ito much more aggressively seems to be working out, I've started deploying and moving my models so that I'm nearly always gunning for the enemy zone/objectives very early on - why go for a mid or close objective when I get quite easily get all the way across the board?  It forces my opponents to deploy in a defensive manner and I can usually just wander around the rest of the board at my leisure.  I wonder if this is how Temple is meant to be played too, I'll have to get my Temple models back out and spruced up for some testing.

Jim has taken the plunge for the Savage Wave (saving me the trouble) so it will be interesting to see how that works out.  It's a bit of a non-traditional list of purchases though, it's more of a Yusha style warband rather than a bunch of fighting oni like Bobata and Zuba.  I really want to see what normal kaihei hounds do, it feels a like you're missing out on something when you take Yusha simply because he can't bring along his pack of kaihei yet.

All my terrain for my next board has arrived, I'm planning something a little more urban this time, with plenty of bamboo too.  The gorintos from Master Crafted are working out really nicely, I'm probably going to order a couple more batches to make some 'walls'.  The bamboo from ebay is rather flimsy, but I think that's the not quite the right word to describe it.  They don't look bad, they aren't going to break, but they're very bendy and flexible, I was expecting something a little tougher at holding it's shape.  However, given how often my terrain gets nudged and bumped, I think the plastic bamboo will hold up really well over time.  I just need to figure out how much I'm going to use and in what sort of formations.

I've got quite a lot of terrain just lying around that hasn't been painted/built/based, so I'm spending this week doing all that sort of thing.  So far I have a good gorinto formation, and I just finished an old 50mm base that I'd planned to stick a warjack from Warmachine on ages ago.  I instead turned it into a 50mm objective for Botoku, or just a generic 50mm piece of scenery.  I've also got a bajillion barrels, sacks of grain, giant water barrels, so there's a lot to keep me occupied this week.  Once I'm finished I'll be a happy chappy however, as a good board really sells the game.

Wave 19 Concept Art

Various - Kurouma Tenbatsu

Prefecture of Ryu - Akio Takashi

Temple of Ro-Kan - Ashinaga Tenaga

Cult of Yurei - Penangglan

Ito Clan - Satsuki

Silvermoon Trade Syndicate - Hanami, Queen of Flowers