Necr-OGRE-munda

Last night I took my first step into a larger world* and played Necromunda with three of  the other OGRE boys (Erny, Snickit, Whiskey Priest) and two more decent seeming chaps (Al and Peter?) who aren't online as far as I know. It was a blast! Especially as I had no real idea of how the game worked apart from about twenty minutes scanning through the rules file that used to be freely available to download from the GW website. Hand-to-hand combat and the pinned/down rules took me a while to get the hang of, but... the company was good, the miniatures were lovely, the scenery was proper old-school cardboard from the boxed sets - one set of tower sections had even only been punched from its frame that morning. Such old-school goodness!

The playing surface itself is a vinyl mat that Erny had printed by a company whose name I've forgotten. Looked good though, eh?

To get me gently introduced, and as we had one table available, the four OGREs took a corner of the board each. Snickit with Eschers, Erny with Orlocks, Whiskey Priest with Scavvies and me with Guilders. I was so outnumbered it was crazy, but then I had blow 300 of my 1,000 starting credits on a lascannon. More on that later...

Heroically leading from the back, Luthor marshall's his troops...

... while WP's scavvies are so hideous they blur any image recorded of them

A shuffle outwards towards their two nearest neighbours (me and Snickit) saw the mutant horrors soon in combat with the Eschers...

... with Mungo and his huge pipe taking the lead. This was a good introduction to the concept of "pinned" and "down" for me; once Mungo hit the floor he couldn't get back up, something that would befall my cyborg/pit slave, Gregor, later in the game.

This lovely lot headed my way until WP realised I had a lascannon and veered off to play with the Escher girls. Not that it did them any good! By strange chance there was a perfect, albeit narrow, line of sight right through several layers of terrain and Nico pretty much evaporated an unfortunate Scavvy. Nasty! (Turned out later in the post game that despite several gazillion joules of concentrated photons being dumped into his mangy frame, a slight limp was the only lasting effect)

This saw the end of WP's gang as they promptly bottled it (and ran across to the next sector where they encountered another Escher gang), leaving me to reorient towards a scarily well dug in bunch of Orlocks:

Gregor didn't have much luck shooting from his hidey-hole and soon ended up Down, while my autogunners rapidly ran out of ammo to no avail.

This was when my son's camera ran out of batteries and I cursed him for his poor battery management. Seven year olds - can't trust 'em!

Sensing his moment, Erny's boss led a charge from cover and made it across the open ground unscathed along with two juves. One of them got lit up in spectacular fashion by Nico's lascannon and the other promptly legged it to cower behind a nearby bulkhead. Meanwhile, Bobby Fettler got himself prone and pinned at the foot of a ratskin on overwatch who was keeping him on the ground as a target for a half-blind juve to farm some points from.

A brave charge from Nico's brother, Dean, saw him drop down a ladder take a potshot at Papa Erny... and miss. The resulting counter charge (with power sword) seemed to have been an utter failure as Dean got stuck in with his trusty knife, only to be put Out of Action at the last gasp [we'd missed that Dean had two flesh wounds so Papa Erny was already off the table and I was chalking up the points of a wounding hit after rolling something like four sixes in a row when we realised - a quick reverse and Dean was off for an early bath]. Revenge was swift however, and a knife in the back did for the briefly victorious Papa Erny, whose comrades promptly fled the field.

Re-aligning to face the Eschers, I briefly entertained hope that I could pull off a sneaky triple in my first game... Nope. Erny's ladies put all but Luthor down in one turn of shooting of the gang who still had ammo. So I bravely legged it to live another day.

I really enjoyed it and am looking forward to another game, possibly in the Ferrograd sector...

Until next time,
Rab

*Surely any reader of this sort of blog will get the Star Wars reference, right?