Oathmarks

Second solo game of Oathmark. This time I playedthe  scenario "Oathmarks", in which the attacker has to destroy two out of three sacred points of power or oathmarks (I used peebles from the beach my daughter picked up and painted when she was little) from defender in less than eight turns. I played it in a 4 x 5 feet table.

For this game I raised the armies up to 1.000 points and introduced cavalry. The civilised cities (Romans) sent a punitive party to show the raiders a lesson from their previous failed attack. Attackers had 2 units of 20 spears each, 1 unit of 10 archers and 1 unit of 10 cavalry for 1.090 points. Raiders (Chaos) had 2 units of 20 soldiers each, 1 unit of 10 wolves, 1 unit of 5 heavy cavalry and 1 level 3 spellcaster with the general spell Fireball and the human spells Blade Mastery (+1 fighting to a unit) and Mud (rough ground) to delay the attackers, for 1.074 points.

On the left the civilised cities army and on the right the barbarians defending. The scenario forces the defender two deploy two units in the centre, so I deployed 1 unit of soldiers and the spellcaster behind them.

On the first turn only one unit of the attackers and two from the defenders activated! The sorcerer could cast Blade Mastery on the unit in front of him.

Attackers quickly pushed in the middle and charged. They successfully defeated the enemy in combat by inflicting more casualties and leaving them disordered.

The spears on the right advanced a little next to the wood, to cover the flank of the fighting unit in the centre who had already pushed back its enemy six inches backwards; the enemy wolves also positioning themselves for a flank attack. Down on the right the cavalry got higher ground; but enemy heavy cavalry was already facing them to support their soldiers defending the "mouse" oathmark.

The push in the centre continued and...

when the defending soldiers were forced again to fall backwards, they collided with their heavy cavalry allies. Now the rulebook states that for these cases, the collisioned unit must always move backwards as much as it needs to make way for the retreating one. I think in this case it would have been more sensible to step half inch forward to make them room, but I followed the rules and moved them backwards up to the other extreme, putting them in a very bad spot.

The spellcaster casted a fireball and killed one cavarly man, so I moved them behind the hill to avoid more fireballs (I could not charge down the hill as they failed their activation). You can also see behind how the defending heavy cavalry manoeuvering again in the middle to reach the attacking enemy cavalry on the hill at the bottom.

On the next turn, defending side activated first and charged cavalry, thus negating them the +3 bonus in charge for melee; but even so they couldn't hurt much them due to their high defensive value (12).

In the centre of the battlefield the attacking spears unit got the opportunity to destroy the oathmark, but miserably failed its activation. Meanwhile, tired of waiting for the wolves to charge, the other spears unit charged them instead.

The defending unit could not shake off disorder but a Fireball from the magician behind killed two more enemy spears.

Seeing the enemy cavalry already in trouble and engaged with the soldiers, the heavy cavarly turned towards the enemy in the centre who was about to destroy the oathmark, but then the attacking cavalry shaked off the enemy infantry and charged them from behind!

In the melee there were one heavy cavarly and two cavalry casualties in total. Then the defending soldiers moved behind the eneny cavalry and got them trapped.

Attacking cavalry turned to face their enemy at their backs, and then the archers fired at the enemy heavy cavalry but all the arrows bounced back. After that, the heavy cavarly flank charged the enemy spears in the centre who used Shielding and Brace to minimise the impact.

Right on turn eight the spears on the left managed to reach the pink oathmark and destroy it, atfer massacring the wolves, but this did not stop the attackers to loose the match as they neeeded to destroy two oathmarks to win in eight turns. They could have won if they would have destroyed the oathmark in the centre of the battlefield when they got the opportunity, but failed that activation.

After every turn and every activation, the game offers you a lot of decision making and it is bloody fun! I am still learning to use the cavarly properly but I would say they rule the battlefield; their +3 to charge as well as their armour (12 or 13) make them a fearsome opponent.
Also, I didn't have time to cast all the spells the wirzard had as he failed activation and spellcasting on a couple of times, so I don't know up to what point it would be useful to deploy a level 5 spellcaster as they are not precisely cheap.
I can't hardly wait to have another go with bigger armies (I'm frantically painting) and a different scenario (there are six to try).

Painting from the quarantine 4

Time ago I bought on Ebay some 54 mm. soft plastic toy soldiers from Technolog to use them as The Fallen from the Varangur army for Kings of War, but I never painted them. But now with the new sexy thing called Oathmark, I decided to paint them to use them as Ogres Linebreakers for my human army.

Will they break enemy lines? I bet they will!

I painted six thinking of such unit but then I realised maximum per unit is three of them, so I will have two units of Ogres after all.

Below you can compare size with one Chaos Warrior from Games Workshop.

Oathmark! First blood.

This morning I tried Oathmark for the first time, after frantically reading the rules. I played a small Pitched Battle game to get the feeling to the rules, with a marauder party against the civilised cities militia in a 4x4 feet board.

The raiders were two units of twenty soldiers with one champion plus one unit of Orc's wolves for 651 points, whereas the milita consisted of two units of twenty spears and one unit of ten archers for 640 points.

 Civilized cities to the left and marauders to the right already deployed for battle.

Situation of troops after the first turn, using the optional rule "Forward Unto Battle" in wich you move without rolling for activation to speed up the game.

Second turn and you can see in the picture the effect of archers on the left flank, firing over a friendly unit and killing three marauders with one salvo. The Wolves sneaking on the right flank and behind the hill.

Another four casualties from shooting (I had forgotten about shielding). "Romans" waiting in the hill.

Marauders leaded by a champion charged uphill but were rejected.

On the other flank spears charged the already decimated barbarian unit. It looked civilised cities were goint to win the day. The red marker is for disordered units.

I was keeping the wolves to attack the archers, but after seeing how the main unit of marauders had been repelled, I decided to charge them on their flank.

Spears cancelled Wolves charge bonus with their abitlity "Brace". After melee both units were disordered.

I found out that disordered units cannot charge, so I rallied the wolves and moved them past the spears, threatening the archer's flank.

But they shot first and killed two wolves, and then they activated first in the following turn and pivoted and fired again, killing three more. They finished the last ones in melee when the wolves charged them, at the cost of one archer.

After another round of slaughtering melee combat, the main marauder unit fell back and spent two consecutive turns failing its activation and seeing how his allied were exterminated.

They finally charged the spears and routed them, whereas the other spear unit on the right killed all the marauders.

As it was the first game and I was getting used to the rules, I decided to play up to the bitter end. So the two last surviving units rallied, turned around and faced each other for the last stand.

Marauders had one full rank and a champion whereas civilized cities had two full ranks, so in my view anyone could win. But after two turns of fierce fighting, the civilised and more disciplined forces were favoured by the dice gods and won the day, being the barbarians massacred up to the last men.

I am just a lazy gamer so I'm letting a proper review of this new ruleset to other more industrious fellow gamers, but I wanted to say that I am delighted with this new ruleset as it plays fast and fun, but with a lot of tactical decisions to make every turn. 

Activation works really well, movements and manoeuvres are easy to do, combat is fast and effective. The only thing it bugged me a little was having to roll for morale everytime a unit suffered a casualty, but this wasn't so important en the end as test rolls are easy and fast to do.

 By the end of the game I didn't have to check the charts for combat, shooting or morale as they are pretty straight forward.

I look forward to have another game as soon as possible, and I do hope it gets translated into Spanish someday so it will get popular here and then I will have opponents to play against.

Painting from the quarantine 3

I have these Chaos Knights from Gamezone for Warhammer from ages, but I stopped playing and never painted them. Now I have finally painted for Oathmark.

They are full metal jacket and reminded me of the film Exalibur, so I went for a realistic metal armour like in the pictures below instead of using different colours. I also used black for the clothes but this did not match specially well with the metal as it looks as if it is not painted but like primed in black. I should have gone for dark red or purple instead.

Anyway, now they are finished and I won't look back as I still have a lot of minis to paint.

Painting from the quarantine 2

Another unit finished. This time warriors for SAGA plus a standard bearer. I gave then the same fast painting treatment as the levies except for the LBM decals.

My copy of Oathmark has already been shipped so now I am going to paint something totally different, a unit of Chaos Knights.

Be safe.