BB Game 4 and a Bone Giant

A couple of posts ago I wrote, "I'd hate to spend a bunch of time working on  a Bone Giant that was useless with the next book," so of course, I ultimately decided that I should spend my time this week working on a Tomb Kings Bone Giant.  This model was a definite salvage job.  I got him as part of a trade I made in which I sent a bunch of excess High Elves off for someone's broken down Tomb Kings.  As part of said trade, I got a whole lot more value, but some of the models were broken, missing pieces, or poorly painted (sometimes all three at once).  This bone giant was in the box, and during my initial refurbishment phase, I just tossed him in the bits box.

For my kids, the bits box is a source of wonder and excitement, and they come running when they see me get it down.  The broken down giant skeleton in particular captured their interests, and they kept bothering me to paint it.  After some prodding, I finally did it, and here are the results:

Being a salvage job, I didn't have a base for him, so I'll have to work on that later.  I've been thinking out putting my Tomb Kings on resin bases, so he might serve as the prototype for that project.  I had fun painting the model except for the legs.  No matter what I did, those leg wrappings came out looking like 1980s era leg warmers.  I tried white, bubonic brown, and ultimately red, but it didn't matter.  He was just destined to look like he's channeling his inner Olivia Newton John.  Now that he's finished, all that's left to do is keep my fingers crossed that the new book makes him more useful.  With less than one week to go until the new book comes out, I'm getting excited to see how the army is going to play.  Here are a few more shots of Olivia the Bone Giant:

Anyway, my fourth game at the Bash was against the player who ultimately won best painted.  He had used a lot of unit fillers, which I am not sold on.  However, his army told the story of an Orc invasion of a Dwarvish mine and each unit featured a little diorama of Dwarfs and Goblins locked in mortal combat.  It was a very cool idea.  His army also featured the Arachnarok Spider, giving me my first opportunity to play against the new big monster.


Indeed, by this point at the tournament I was 1-2, so winning any generalship awards was out of the question.  It was time to have fun, and fun for me in this game meant killing that spider.  So after deployment, I took my hardest unit,  the phoenix guard, and chased it down.  Phoenix Guard are not meant for monster killing; however, they are very hard to kill.  I wanted to see what the spider could do against them.  Ultimately, it did quite well.  It tosses out lots of attacks and is very resilient.  It won two consecutive rounds of combat by itself against a block of infantry, which is pretty good for a monster.  However, leadership is its Achilles heel.  The first time it lost, it fled (his general had gotten pulled away from it).

Ultimately, it escaped from the Phoenix Guard and preserved its points.  Somehow though, the rest of my army defeated the rest of his, and I came out with a win.  It was a fun game, and I really enjoyed playing the new Orc and Goblin book.  The old book seemed to have too many game slowing rules; however, the new book seems to maintain the quirkiness of the army while streamlining some of the effects.

Hopefully, the next post you see here will represent a bit of a change of pace.  There is a tournament this weekend at Sci-fi Genre in Raleigh (very fun and well run tourneys -- I highly recommend them), so I'll have results from that.  However, as I mentioned earlier, I'm starting to get into historical games a bit, and I will probably get some games in next week.  This means that instead of painting more bones I will be working on painting up some of the most fearsome enemies of Rome.  I should be able to post some test models soon!