Holiday Club Special

The holidays of the ending year are upon us!

To celebrate this, the miniature gaming club I once founded in my smallish hometown (and nowadays runs under a different overseer) held a Games Day today. Everyone was invited to watch, play and talk of Age of Sigmar and its many aspects for free, using the miniatures we overseers and some helpful veteran clubbers provided.

We had a great deal of people (at least in the scale of this town's population) attending the event: there were several games running simultaneously, with veteran players floating around the tables to offer aid and advice in case they weren't pulling off an introductory game themselves. Dice rolled merrily all day long and a lively chatter filled the room as people avidly shared their war stories and the epic feats their characters had performed on the field of battle!

We had Skirmish games, regular ~1000p games and even a 2v2 multiplayer battle during the day, showing the visitors a wide spectrum of possibilities and conflict scales Age of Sigmar could be used for as a miniature wargame. The space we played in was the local community/youth centre, with more than enough well-lit and well-maintained room to hold us all comfortably. This is all thanks to our club's warm collaboration with our municipality's youth activity organization, as they let us use their estates on a weekly basis to run our gaming club.

You can read more about our club and its founding here.

I got to play an introductory game against one of the newcomers, with him taking control of my Aelves while I played my Stormcast. The scenario was a pretty simple one and the armies had been roughly balanced beforehand, to speed up the set-up phase of the game and to let people just enjoy the experience of cooperative storytelling of a miniature wargame such as Age of Sigmar.

We had six numbered objective counters spread out on the table and we rolled a dice at the beginning of the game: models could flip the objective markers to reveal their number once they moved into base contact with them, and once the objective with the rolled number on it was found the victory would go to the faction that had more models within 6" of it at the end of the fifth battleround. We rolled a 2 and the battle could begin!

My Stormcast were forced to take the first turn of the first battleround by my well-rolling opponent, and the objective marker my forces managed to reach was not the one that had to be found. The Aelves, however, used their turn to strengthen their positions on the field while flipping the single objective that had been spawned on their deployment zone. To everyone's surprise, that particular objective was number 2, the one the game could be won with!

The rest of the battle was simply my Stormcast running to the opposite corner of the field, battling White Lions, Dragonblades, Reavers and actual Dragons along the way. They never reached even the halfway mark, with most of my forces withered away in the running battle that took place in the middle. At the end of the 5th battleround there were 10 Spireguard, 5 Reavers, a Loremaster and only a single badly wounded Lord-Relictor on the field, marking a crushing defeat for my Stormcast!

We both had a great time, especially my newcomer opponent, who was quite amused by the fact that my much much slower army had to slug its way through to his side of the table under heavy downpour of arrows and dragonfire. We even had several epic hero duels as my Stormcast heroes sought to slay the rampaging dragon, but most of them simply got eaten. In the fourth battleround my Lord-Relictor fortunately managed to slay the beast with a summoned bolt of celestial lightning, exacting vengeance for his fallen brothers!

All in all the event was successful and everyone had fun. Many were intrigued to delve deeper into the hobby and find out more in case they some day wanted to buy into it themselves, to build, paint and play their own unique army to tell some epic stories with!

With this holiday-special-game-event-special-post-special I bid you all happy and peaceful holidays!