2024 Hobby Log

In a stunning turn in events, I played games two weeks in a row! Last week’s slightly traumatising Legions Imperialis game was swept away by a fantastic game of Kings of War Armada.

Woodstock and I haven’t had this game on the table since the global campaign last year but my fish were giving me the evil eye every time I walked past the cabinet and with this renewed effort to play more games it was an obvious choice. Woodstock brought her lovely painted Basileans. We rolled up a scenario and then decided we didn’t like it and went with Flotsam and Jetsam.

A Basilean merchant ship got into trouble in the shallow seas and disappeared without a trace… well, not without a trace. It left behind 10 tokens or varying unknown points values from 0 to 2. Did it run into a underwater reef? Fall foul of a wicked storm? Attacked and sunk by a giant squid captained by a man called Papacito? Who can tell?

Papacito, his squid and it’s friends happened upon the scene completely innocently at around the same time as the human rescue fleet arrived. Being creatures of the sea, they are fiercely against human detritus polluting their waters and began to clear it up.

After a turn of both fleets mostly swiping up junk from the sea, the poor aquatic creatures got a little disorientated and accidentally let off their weapons in the general direction of the Basileans. They tried to apologise but stupid humans don’t speak fish. Instead they viciously attacked.

Unlike this stinky orcs that the Trident Realms went up against last year, the giant (for a crab and yet Tiny in game) crab put in a valiant effort to its grapple and boarding actions. The true star of the grapple, unsurprisingly, was Squiddy. Those magnificent tentacles can strike at 4 inches instead of the usual 3 and managed to take out a ship in one turn. Sadly the tidal wave remained largely ineffective.

A couple more turns and things were fairly evenly matched but in turn four Squiddy took several broadsides and ended up being pushed over its nerve value. The next activation came around and Papacito surrendered despite being at the outer edge of the 10 inch enemy range. They dropped the three loot tokens they were holding and by the end of the following turn it became apparent that the creatures couldn’t recover enough tokens to outscore the Basileans.

It was another great game which reminded us both how much we want to play it more. I definitely need to paint up a fleet that gets broadsides as raking fire is a big thing to not have access to. I love the look of the Trident Realms on the table but I could see me dipping into the Basileans that I have to hand to get them painted up.