Myself and Gavin played our first game of Open Combat. Open Combat is (as the name suggests) an open system that allows you to spec up models any way you choose. This allowed us to build characterful Night Goblin and Wood Elf warbands. Here’s my warband:
The point system (for calculating the Renown of a model) is very straightforward. Each stat point adds one to Renown as does each weapon or Skill/Ability. For my Wood Elves I went with a Glade Lord, 2 Wardancers, 3 Waywatchers and a Dryad. With seven models that gave me some decent stats; all had pretty good attack and speed. I put Sharp Eyed on the Waywatchers (a reroll on the Obscured Target test), which I thought was useful as rolling one die is always risky! Risky? Yeah, in Open Combat a roll of 1 can result in a ‘fumble’, handing the initiative back to your opponent. It’s not too bad as the Leader has three rerolls to use over the game, but there are times when the dice go south! Check out this attack roll by a Waywatcher (in melee!) on Turn 2:
I used a reroll on those!
Gavin tweaked a couple of rules to suit the Gobbos. For magic attacks he decided to use weapons like Slings and Bows as magic bolts with the Mind stat being used instead of Attack. This is quite characterful as the Mind stat can be reduced, thus making the magic less effective. For the Squigs he gave them some random movement distance. Essentially Squigs move D3 for every full 2 Speed the model has; in the case of our game they had Spd 6, so rolled 3D3 before moving. This was great fun!
Anyway – watch the video to find out how the game went. I can definitely see more Open Combat in my future. It’ll be fun to try a campaign at some stage too.
Until next time,
Owen