Playing Warmachine

As you could imagine, I do actually play some wargames. And I mean quite regularly – we meet weekly to talk and play some games, it’s only due to my laziness that I do actually play once every two or three these meetings. Part of the reason is that my IG case weighs almost 14 kgs.

There are some different wargames though – and even though we never actually ventured into the historical stuff, some steampunk magical action found a soft spot in our hearts. Partly due to the awesome Warjack models, and partly due to the detail the rules delve into. Sadly, we have put our Warmachine and Hordes models on the shelves, as there was an edition change lately – and as these are essentially two stand-alone game systems that can be mixed freely together, and there is an equal amount of both Warmachine and Hordes players, we had to wait for both of these systems to be revised.

The systems are written with competitive play in mind – and that’s another thing that put us off from this wargame lately. Not that the rules are bad – they are very well written, actually – it’s just that unlike in Warhammer, here competitive play focuses on combos and tricks. You have to know every nook and cranny of every faction and then of every ‘Caster of every faction, and then every unit of every faction and how they stack together. That’s just too much for a bunch of lazy beer-drinking players we are.

The time the models spent gathering dust on the shelves made us realise that despite all of this, we actually really like these systems – and that’s because of the little cinematic things that are foreseen and allowed in the rules.

We had a couple of games yesterday, and my game reminded me of all the things I love Warmachine for – pumping a heavy Warjack full of focus, trampling over some puny infantry to get to grips with another iron behemoth, grabbing it, lifting off the ground and tossing through the enemy models, knocking them off their feet and crushing under the tumbling iron warmachine. Trying to get this done again only to get both of my Warjack’s arms chopped off , leaving it trying to bash and headbutt its way through to the enemy Warcaster…

And here are some of my own Warmachine Mercenary models: