The traditional festive Triumph and Treachery and Drinking game.
This year Spandex was indisposed on account of having moved to Surrey and therefore taken up golf and Brexit.
Kenton (from Lenton) was however available to step into his rat shaped shoes.
Steve and I decided to make it a kind of prequel to Karak Eight Peaks, so we each took the relevant special character. Steve had recently painted Belegar and already had Skarsnik in his collection, so he had a go at drunken speed painting Queek the night before. He wasn't quite finished.
I took the pointy black hat of Skarsnik and Steve took the Dwarfs because he's the shortest. 1200 points plus 300 points of allies.
The hordes of Skarsnik (plus Ogre allies)
Belegar's dwarfs with Nordland sell-swords.
Rats. Fahsands, of 'em.
Once set up was over we remembered Skarsnik's special rule that stops deployment and that spiders could move before starting. So we fudged that a bit.
Then we cracked open the beers and cracked on.
The spiders unleashed the fanatics. Which proved ultimately fatal for them and a waste of their points.
But it did slow down the rat ogres.
Kenton attempted to fire the warp-lightning cannon. He did it wrong because the rules are ridiculously complex.
So I let him have another go.
He rolled a misfire and it blew up.
Ho we (I) laughed.
Th Ogres bravely faced off against the organ gun.
The Nordlanders backed off.
Despite pledges of allegiance from the rats, the dwarfs trudged toward them.
And even appeared on the hill (where the exploding war machine had once been)
Steve's rat Ogres have Minotaur bodies.
Eventually the big guys got it on.
The fact that the trolls have a save and the rat ogres don't meant the battle went my way.
Meanwhile Queek assaulted the tower where my archers had spent the entire game squabbling.
The mercenary ogres killed the Nordlanders, then barrelled (ho-ho!) into the organ gun.
Queek and his ratty lads forced the gobbos from the tower. (Stubborn on Skarsnik's LD8 and I rolled a ten)
The trolls grabbed the gobbo archers and made them run off.
Meanwhile Belegar made very short work of various rats.
Oh, this is when the trolls charged the gobbos.
Their pursuit dragged them out of Skarsnik's leadership range. Skarsnik then decided to squabble.
Belegar prepared to charge the tower, expecting to bring doom to Queek. But a well placed treachery card meant he could only declare Skarsnik as an enemy!
This fight was evenly poised. Until the goblins threw their nets on themselves.
As a result Belegar smashed them aside and claimed enough victory points to snatch the game at the death.
That was great fun. Our drinking was relatively moderate which meant the game flowed on and despite a lunch break at 'Spoons it played through in about five hours. the 1200+300 seems to be a sweet spot for games of T&T - though in this case the fact that two of the armies had no magic (only the rats had anything) also made it faster.
We're now planning on maybe re-doing La Maisontaal for our traditional Easter Good Friday Massacre.
