WFB – All Aboard the Clapham Omnibus

I live in London now. This is presumably a good thing, although I haven’t had the chance to do masses of exploring just yet, as it’s still busy busy busy research season and I have nine days to produce something like eleven thousand words of material. No pressure, then.

However, last night I did manage to sneak out and pay a visit to some nice chaps who claim to be the Clapham War Gamers. Rain very nearly stopped play (ten minutes into the walk, the heavens opened and I spent fifteen further minutes cowering in a bus stop) but I just about made it in time to play some WFB against a nice enthusiastic chap of Teutonic extraction (hi Max!) and his nasty Skaven (boo, Skaven!).

WFB8, Step By Step – PANIC!

Rounding up the basic rules is the mechanic for Panic, Satanic or otherwise.  A very simple system that fits across two pages.  I swear it used to be longer than this, but since I’ve never bothered to learn it – my Vampires didn’t care and neither did my Chaos after I Slaanesh-marked everything out of spite and a desire not to run away from the inevitable shooting casualties – its brevity is probably for the best.

A unit only takes one Panic test per phase – pass or fail, it doesn’t matter, one per phase. Fleeing units and units in close combat do not take Panic tests at all.

The timing of Panic tests is dictated by whatever causes them – some are immediate, some wait ’til the end of the phase.

If two or more units from the same army have to test at the same time, the controlling player – NOT the player whose turn it is, in the second breach of the core principle – chooses the order.

Tests are taken:

- immediately if a unit loses 25% or more of the models with which it started the phase.  I imagine this is the most common one in the early game: enemy Shooting phases, either Magic phase, or in one’s own Movement phase against enemy ‘stand and shoot’ reactions seem like the most likely causes.

The stand and shoot abstraction of ‘imagine they charge in, get shot, and then run back to where they were, THEN panic’ is flagged again.  They really want us to remember that one, probably because (while tidy) it’s a bit bizarre.

 

- immediately if a friendly unit is destroyed within 6″

Could happen at any time, especially in Combat phases.  There’s a potential cludge with units that break from combat and are caught – after all, are they destroyed in contact with the enemy, or at the end of their flee move? – but the next instance fixes that.

 

- immediately if a friendly unit breaks from close combat within 6″

Measured from the unit’s position BEFORE it flees – page 65.  Ah, so that’s how you avoid the whole mess of units fleeing – test before they have the option of being destroyed.  The Combat mechanics on page 56 state that, when Caught, ‘the fleeing unit is completely destroyed where they stand‘ (emphasis mine), so there’s no wangling an extra test for units within 6″ of the end of the fleeing unit’s flee move – the unit is ‘destroyed’ in base contact with the enemy that broke them, and anything that was within 6″ of that has already taken a Panic test in this phase when they broke.

 

- immediately if a unit is moved through by fleeing friends

‘For simplicity, resolve the movement of the fleeing friends before taking the Panic test’ – page 63.  The mechanical order’s tighter than it appeared on the first readthrough.

 

In all cases, units flee directly away from the closest enemy unit, UNLESS the test was caused by heavy casualties, in which case they flee directly away from whatever caused the most casualties.

I wonder how a unit that’s panicked by casualties induced from a friendly Wizard miscasting flees? Presumably away from the closest enemy unit, but it doesn’t say so.

 

Here endeth the basic Warhammer rules, apparently. I’ll be braving the deadly waters of the Advanced rules later this month, but I want a break from this dry text-wrangling for a while.

WFB8, Step By Step – Combat!

Or, as my mate Dale used to call it, KUMQUAT!  He was special.  And not in a good way.  In an ‘unpleasant surprise, keep items of furniture between you at all times’ kind of way.  Good Skaven player though.  Anyway, like Dale, Warhammer close combat rules are big, beefy, and have a tendency toward the bizarre.  Fortunately they’re the second to last section of the basic rules – it’ll be Panic tomorrow/Thursday and then I’m taking a break for a bit before plunging back into the Advanced rules.

Again, this is is a section that would probably benefit from some pictures and I’ll provide some as soon as I have some painted WFB models to take snaps of.  I don’t exactly miss owning three armies whilst not being able to afford food, but it was convenient…

WFB8, Step By Step – Shooting

The play may be over, but the walkthrough of WFB.8′s fiddly bits continues unabated!  Short one for today as I’m working: combat is quite a long section and I’ll need to concentrate on that to do it justice.  For today, let’s talk about pointing our fingers and shouting BANG in the Shooting Phase.

WFB8, Step By Step – Magic

This week, I do not have much time on my hands – every evening is taken up with either rehearsals or performances of the play what I’m in, and so what time I do have is trapped time, when I’m sitting around waiting for cues to shuffle on and pretend to do stuff.

Trapped time is good reading-and-thinking time, though, so I’m spending the week battering my way through the WFB.8 core rulebook.  It’s proving impossible to approach like a completely new game, but I’m going more slowly than I ordinarily would, looking for things that are a bit weird or a bit exploitable, that I’ll have to have references to hand for, lest I be accused of cheatering when I forget them – or remember them.

It’s a wall of text.  I’m sorry.  It’s taking long enough to read and write up this stuff without spending more (limited) time hunting for pictures.  At least this one’s shorter…