Elemental My Dear Arun - Round 3: Break the Line

 

Round 3! This time we’re playing Break the Line, similar to Symbols of Authority in setup but you have to move the markers into the opponent’s table half at 2” a time. If you get them 8” or more over the line they are worth two, and as is common you need more markers than you have scored VPs to score VPs.

The schemes (and my initial thoughts) are:

Research Mission – This seems okay for marker based crews. Scheme marker, corpse/scrap marker, one of your crew’s markers in the same place and you can score the first point. Three models alive on the enemy table half and within 2” of a different marker type also feels doable, so long as your opponent doesn’t bring a ton of marker removal.

Detonate Charges – Two scheme markers within 2” of the same enemy model, that seems like a False Claim dream but keeping Sly alive to the end of the game when they know that’s what you’re going for doesn’t seem likely. Just bringing him at all probably signals he needs to die before he can make it happen.

Vendetta – This depends a lot on what you’re actually fighting but I quite like the idea of having a grudge match in theory.

Hidden Martyrs – Baiting out your opponent is always an interesting mindgame but I don’t know that I trust myself to do this well. The potential combo with Vendetta is interesting though.

Assassinate – Killing Leaders is difficult but there’s going to be a big fight over the markers, so maybe it is worth thinking about.

Also, holy hell this map is horrible.

I think the massive piece of blocking terrain splitting the middle of the board would make it pretty difficult to play Ophelia2. Keeping her in the middle to try and get the most out of Raiding Party is not going to be easy, and there’s lots of places where arranging the pushes that make the Young LaCroix useful work is going to be challenging. I could possibly try Ophelia1 again but my gut says this isn’t her time to shine.

Similarly, Angler and its large amount of large bases didn’t look like it would be a good time, so by default I felt that Mah was probably the best way to go. Declaring her into Outcasts, I was a little worried I might face Tara or Jack Daw at which point I just go ??? and try to wing it, but I figured at this point I should be trying to go in with my own plan without trying to pre-guess my opponent’s, particularly since I was wrong in both prior games!

And I was wrong here, too, as my opponent (Vanilla Dice Mark) declared Barbaros, making this my second game against a Henchman master.

I went back and forth a little on what to run into Barbaros. Again, I figured we’re probably looking at Mature Nephilim and supporting stuff. It was tempting to try and squeeze in the Rock Hopper to turn off Black Blood, but I wasn’t able to squeeze it in with everything else I wanted to do. I definitely didn’t want to play Mecha Meemaw if I could avoid it because of the huge base being a real nuisance on this map, what I did want was Big Brain Brin and a Soulstone Miner so I could do the turn 1 bury trick and have it unbury hopefully near an uncontested marker at the end of the round.

I also recently got my hands on Jebediah and he’s an excellent piece. Danger Planet did a full video on his tricks over here.

Originally, I was going to take Beau Fishbocker again because he’s just generically useful but the more I thought about Jeb the more I realised I wanted Sparks (to potentially Command Construct for a third gatling gun per round, shielded and extra healing) and a Ghillie Suit on him so that he doesn’t have to try and tank quite so many charge attacks. I think of the tools I have available, Jeb is the best to deal with both Barbaros and the Matures as he can just scoot himself out of combat and then start blasting, if he survives the initial swing or can line up the shot on them first. So, my final list wound up looking like this:

B4k0n (Bayou)

Size: 50 - Pool: 4

Leader:

  Mah Tucket

    Twelve Cups of Coffee

Totem(s):

  The Little Lass

Hires:

  Soulstone Miner

  Big Brain Brin

  Bushwhacker

  Jebediah

    Two Gremlins in a Ghillie Suit

  Sparks LeBlanc

  Bushwhacker 2

With two bushwhackers, Jeb and Mah that gives me a pit trap on every starting marker. As Barbaros is the enemy leader, assassinate seems like a good call – 9 health isn’t much even with armour and a point of regen. Research Mission should also hopefully be scorable with the number of markers I expect to be around.

I don’t really know what to expect from Barbaros beyond the Matures and the man himself, though. Mad Dog seems like he could be very scary into Jeb, maybe a Drachen Trooper to get rid of my pit traps? Probably we’ll be seeing the corrupted hounds, too. If I’m lucky, maybe a Bushwhacker will be able to get a good bead on it and try and shut that down before it starts.

Taking the top right deployment, my initial thought was to have Jeb, Sparks and one Bushwhacker as the team for the lower right part of that deployment, with the rest of the crew in the top left and the soulstone miner able to flex to an unguarded point. We’ll see how that works out.

As it turned out, I was correct to worry about hounds, but there weren’t any out of keyword picks to worry about. The list my opponent went for was:

Rnd 3 Crew (Outcasts)

Size: 50 - Pool: 5

Leader:

  Barbaros

Totem(s):

  Hodgepodge Effigy

    Effigy of Fate

Hires:

  Mature Nephilim

  Mature Nephilim 2

  Corrupted Hound

  Corrupted Hound 2

  Corrupted Hound 3

  Gwyll

  Black Blood Shaman

Gwyll lets Barbaros choose not to heal and instead always push another model near him 2” which is potentially really good. That sure is a lot of Mature Nephilim and big damage tracks coming in at me too. I honestly have no idea who is favoured here. I think a lot of it is going to come down to whether I can play cagily enough to get my guns into his Matures before they tear apart my somewhat squishy crew. I’m definitely feeling good about Assassinate and Research Mission.

And now that I’ve played…

I WAS NOT PREPARED.

Or, well, maybe it’s better to say that I had the right idea but my execution was off. With the four markers scattered pretty much equal across the midline with mine in the top and bottom for bushwhackers to watch over, I pushed Team Brin too far up to the top left and trusted Jeb to kill a Mature and then start going into Barbaros.

Unfortunately, Jeb did not succeed in killing a Mature. Two focused shots to negate the concealing terrain it was in and a truly stacked hand still only dropped it to 4 and at the top of the second turn, even getting the initiative to try again, he failed to finish the job and left it at 2. Things went badly wrong from there.

Barbaros went into Sparks, who I’d positioned too far forward, at the end of turn one. I wanted him to ride up with Jeb to be in range to provide more healing more easily, he should have hung back and used his Yer A Robot from a safe distance. Alas, a red joker on the damage flip took a huge chunk out of him and he died before he activated turn 2, taking a good chunk of stones and my main support piece in the bottom right with him.

My strategy of ‘drop pit trap markers all over the place’ did cause my opponent to have to play around them with positioning but the Mature in the bottom right was able to end Turn 2 engaging Jeb, the Miner and the Bushwhacker whilst in engagement with none of them and, just, not in a pit trap. Eurgh.

In the top right, Mah was able to yell at the Mature to free up the Bushwhacker to move that strategy marker, but that was it. The Bushwhacker enjoyed some very lucky flips to not die to the Mature, which was good because otherwise it’d have been Brin alone standing up there trying to do… something.

Round 3 my card luck ran out and even stoning for cards I didn’t have much to work with. I had Jeb ride out and start shooting Barbaros, but by this point the dogs had been able to do anything they wanted – turns out, they’re insanely fast and because I had the miner engaged with the Mature in the bottom right. I completely underestimated the amount of healing he would be getting from the Emissary, and all of that damage was undone by the end of the turn. The Bushwhacker was able to drop a scheme marker before being engaged again and didn’t die (again, due to some lucky flips) so I was able to secure the first point of Research Mission, but Mah needed to spend the entire turn running back down to try and get to Barbaros – who chose to run in and engage her instead, though he didn’t do much damage through her stones.

By now the dogs had two markers back in my deployment and I clearly wasn’t going to be able to move the other two myself thanks to the Matures. The only question left was whether I was going to be able to kill Barbaros and score at least 1 point on Assassinate or not. Out of stones, and with the mature positioned to force Jeb to have to walk after a ride to get a shot into him, the answer was no. I didn’t have a mask to cheat to reposition him, which might well have made the difference, but bad things happen!

And really by this point the game was sealed. I was unable to deal with the pressure from the Matures and also stop the dogs doing what they wanted; the strat was a done deal from then. We talked it out and I agreed that I wasn’t going to stop my opponent killing Mah over two turns and I wouldn’t have enough pieces left to score the second point of research mission by the end of the game. Vanilla Dice Mark had the better plan for dealing with what I was trying to do and executed it perfectly! His schemes were Assassinate and Hidden Martys, selecting two of the dogs, which is the only reason he didn't score a full 8 - I was too busy trying to deal with everything else to murder the dogs.

Still, there were a lot of key learnings to take away from the game and I still laughed a lot seeing everything play out, and talking through the decisions afterwards was very useful.

1)      Losing Sparks early was critical and I could have used the shielding more aggressively. For some reason in my head the range on the ability was 2”, it is actually 6” so he could have sat back in my deployment zone and charged Jeb up just as well whilst being ready to move forward and do it again round 2, rather than ending round 1 badly hurt and engaged with Barbaros.

2)      I should probably have swapped the teams. Jeb and Sparks would have had an easier time in the top right whilst Mah and Co could’ve made better use of the tighter quarters in the bottom left with pit traps.

3)      The Miner should’ve started trying to engage and kill dogs rather than joining the bottom right.

4)      I should’ve tried harder to deal with the Effigy before it became the Emissary, probably using a Bushwhacker. Or, failing that, deal with the Emissary as soon as it levelled up. Though, even if the emissary was down, Gwyll could also heal Barbaros and didn’t achieve much else so maybe that wouldn’t have made a huge difference.

5)      All of that assumes that I wanted to split my forces. Which, potentially, I shouldn’t have. If I’d started more centrally and moved out slowly, using my guns to winnow the dogs down and the Miner/Bushwhackers to try and focus on scoring my first and second turn strategy points, that may have worked out more favourably as I would’ve had a greater ability to focus down Barbaros or the matures. Then again, Gwyll could also have gotten some juicier blasts off.

In terms of crew selection, I think I stand by my choices here. Jeb being Disguised meant that he only had one attack go into him for the whole game, and if Sparks had been played better he would have been a real menace. He was still easily the best performing piece in my crew. Brin kept card quality very high for the first two turns and was a nuisance to shift. Black Blood didn’t really wind up mattering – I think it did one point to a Bushwhacker – so the Rock Hopper wouldn’t really have helped much. With the exception of Sparks, things either died in one activation or simply did not die so the second Bushwhacker was a good call over Beau.

Final Score: 7-2 (Loss)

So… my worst result thus far, which is funny because this was the game I was most confident going into! It was also probably the game which taught me the most about my own crew (though Mah is the master I’ve played the least). Turns out, it doesn’t really matter what you take if you play it badly!

Round 4… looks even more confusing to me! So it’ll be exciting to see what the heck happens there.

HONK!