Warmachine Prime MkII

I've been threatening to write about this for a while now, so here we are at last. The main catalyst behind the choice of time is that I 've had a couple of games over the last week and they (thankfully for the cash I've "invested") have been a blast - tonnes of fun. Fast action, attacking play, strategic stacking effects, cool models - just great.

For those of you not familiar with the game, its basically a steampunk with magic skirmish size wargame. Each force is centred round a magician ("warcaster") with the rest of the force made up of Giant steam powered robots, small units of soldiers and individual character figures. It is produced by Privateer Press.

Anyway, several folk at Lothian Gamers have decided to start playing and I was sucked in. It's a good crowd of players and one of the nice things is that we are all starting from scatch, so every game everyone is learning something new and cool about their own and each others forces. I (and a couple of others) have picked the faction Cryx, who are the game equivalent to the undead. The main reason for this is look of the mini's. I quite liked the background of a couple of the other factions but the figures weren't as nice.

I followed the recommendations of others and started off by buying the Cryx Battlebox, which provides a starter force (One warcaster, 3 small robots (jacks) and One large jack). The starter version of the rules are included in the box so I left the rules off but also bought the faction guidebook. In hindsight I should have just bought the stat card pack for Cryx, as the cards hold all the important information anyway and the book, lovely as it is, mostly only adds fluff and a variety of set force lists which you wouldn't be using early doors anyway. Additionally you require the stat cards to play the game (keeping track of hits, spells, etc), and as the new edition, MkII, was only released this year there is a chance that any Ebay bargains will have the old cards and therefore be unplayable.

So that's all for now. No battle reports yet as we are all still in learning. Lessons learnt by me so far are pretty ubiquitous to wargames in general. Don't split your forces; get to know your forces strengths, abilities, spells and how they combine; don't run your heavy jack up to the enemy as you can't use your attack and it will be crushed before your next turn; and ignore your opponents jeers as you organise your force behind the scenery as they won't be laughing when you flank them.
Painting updates as they happen...