The Gauntlet

Greetings, Heroscapers.

Once again the stuff of real life has kept me from dallying too much in the realm of fantasy.  Today, however, I am taking the time to update my blog with another installment of my adventures in Heroscape.

This winter has not provided us with many snow days, so our play dates have been few and far between.  Yesterday, though, God provided us with a bit of a winter storm that cancelled schools throught our region, giving my friend Charles a day off of school and cancelling an afternoon meeting for me. 



Finally, we had what we'd been waiting for.  Let the games begin!

The board I built is called "The Gauntlet" (for somewhat obvious reasons).  It's a board that was inspired by Ben's Omaha Beach board that he built for his World War II project.  It is a beach landing, where a scenario game would have one army starting out in the water and trying to get through the gauntlet to the other side while being shot at from the high cliffs on either side.

Here are a couple of Virtualscape images (sea side and land side) of the board:

The first time playing on the board we tried the scenario I described above with orcs as the Gauntlet's defending army...2500 points worth of orcs, trolls, and ogres!

The ladders on the pillars, while not strictly helpful to the defending orc army, provide for a better game, and add some much-needed stability to high towers of tiles.

In addition to the archers on the high cliffs, there were swarms of Blade Gruts and Ferral Trolls hiding in every corner  and crevice of the Gauntlet.

When the boys played the scenario out a couple of weeks ago, the orcs overpowered the invading army pretty quickly.  I don't think they even really got off the water, even though we did away with the stopping in water rule (assuming the water was very shallow).

So after lunch, they decided to draft new armies, and start again with everyone starting on low ground.  It turned out to be a pretty good fight...better than I would have expected, actually.

Then yesterday, we played on it again with 5 players, two starting in each corner of the water, one in the crevices on either side of the Gauntlet, and one at the back of the Gauntlet.  It was a good game and a great way to spend a snow day afternoon.

One of the things that make the board even more fun and playable is that we gave every non-flying figure a special power called "Leap".  "Leap" says that the figure "may ignore elevation for up to one space when moving over a space of lower elevation between two spaces of higher elevation." 

Basically, it means that non-flying figures could jump from tower to tower and cliff to cliff over the sand spaces inbetween.  When leaping from a lower tower to a higher one, you still have to account for the increase in elevation, but for the space inbetween the towers, you assume it is the same elevation as the tower you are leaping from.  It's a pretty useful power and makes play on this particular board.

Actually, it turned out to be a very good board, and much better at multi-player free-for-all kind of games than I originally expected that it would be. I love being surprised by my boards.

Eventually, I will get around to putting up that Ullar Shrine.

Until then, happy Heroscaping!