
Things are a little bit quiet on the Old World front it seems. As the New Year has rolled in, it is time to talk about the game of giant moving rectangles and frantically ranking up figures.

Before I go over our last game day, I should probably talk about the force I took out with me. We played 1500ish points and so I assembled this:
- Flying Demon Prince with Runesword and Mark of Slaanesh
- Exalted Champion with Demonsword
- 10 Chaos Marauders
- 27 Chaos Warriors with Command
- 5 Marauder Horsemen
- 5 Chosen Chaos Knights with Command
- 10 Chosen Chaos Warriors with Command
Overall, I feel that this list is in a pretty good situation. In pretty much every game, Chaos is going to be on the assault and this list provides a central push and a flanking force. The main force is three waves – Marauders to absorb enemy fire on the way in, Chaos Warriors to slam into the largest enemy unit it can find and then the Chosen Warriors to either act as flank protection or to flank whoever the Warriors have locked in place. The Horsemen and the Chosen Knights do the same thing on one of the flanks, ideally being able to push into the rear of the enemy.
When it comes to characters, the Demon Prince effectively acts as a super flanker assassin, using fly to leap the battlelines and start shredding enemy war machines – despite his power, instability is a real son of a bitch that means anything that has any form of combat resolution bonus is going to quickly eat through his 4 wounds. You may notice that he has lost the Demonsword he had during testing in favour of the much more reasonable Runesword – still a powerful boost but without the potential drawbacks of a hissing demon inside of it that cares not where the damage flows. Instead, the Demonsword ends up with the Exalted Champion who is leading the Chaos warrior block. This is, for all intents and purposes, a trap – the Chaos Warriors are able to enter into a combat that flows back and forth becoming an anvil, except for the fact that the anvil in question has a circular saw attached to the front to it, and every so often chops apart a friendly. A unit of 27 armoured warriors has enough protection to occasionally prevent a nasty accident, making it a far more useful deployment of such potential.




As I mentioned at the time, I hadn’t managed to get everything full painted before game day. As you can see in the army above, my distaste for painting horses extends to even putting partial paint jobs on them – I just hate them so much. That said, even getting a few pieces painted up did help to make the force look a little more cohesive as well as selling me further on how it’s going to look in the end. Getting paint on the Demon Prince (one of the first figures I bought for this army) definitely helped unlock the mental block around painting such a focal model. The Chaos Chosen on the other hand were set which reminded me of one of the reasons people fear painting Chaos – there is a lot of trim to deal with which meant quite a few evenings hunting down every last bit of it.

Game day rolls around, and after a little bit of a late start we finally got some games up and running. All of us are in our 30’s (ish), all met at university and all spend a lot of time chatting online in a Facebook messenger chat I am dying to move to Discord so I can reduce my hell site intake. But any chance to get together in the flesh, roll some dice and hang out is always much appreciated – I genuinely felt much happier after this weekend and will be striving to run more. This is doubly useful as thanks to the Dastardly Regular Opponent, we have access to a scout hut that comes with most of the things you need for a wargaming event – parking, tea-making facilities and tables to then cover in our piles of terrain. There was actually a good selection of mats and other pieces brought along, and I was pretty happy with all three tables that were setup – definitely helps the visuals of the game when there is a small town or focal points to fight over.
Unfortunately, the Dastardly Regular Opponent was busy with real-world stuff and could only turn up for one game, so there was a touch of swapping people in and out. I decided to skip the last game to make sure that the others who had driven from the wrong side of the Pennines and North of God’s Own County could get their third game in. It also meant I got to hover and watch some of the other armies on display do their work. We had a reasonable mixture – two Bretonnian armies, a Dwarf army from the Dastardly Regular Opponent, an Empire army, my own Warriors of Chaos and the Creative Regular Opponent’s Tomb King army.
Because of how long ago it was, I won’t provide blow-by-blow coverage of the games, just a few overall thoughts on each encounter.

Game 1 saw me up against a former housemate and his Bretonnians. The knights on horses are always interesting to play against, especially as someone more used to clashing against the static forces who like to sit back and shoot your incoming horde of armoured boys. This is doubly so when you’re dealing with someone bringing two sets of Knights on flying rats (pegasuses but shush) and a Pegasus-riding hero designed for monster slaying. I did do a little funny when the game started by rushing my Demon Prince at his Pegasus hero. This went as well as you might expect – Demon Prince caused some damage but a single wound by the Bretonian Hero was converted into some monster-slaying shenanigans and he was banished away. I found myself outmanoeuvred by the rest of the knights (as you might expect) but both the block of warriors and the Chaos Knights caused some major damage and lasted almost until the end of the game.

Game 2 saw me against the Dastardly Regular Opponent and his familiar-looking Dwarves. Familiar in the fact I printed most of them for him. This was a more familiar game – the Dwarves sat back and shot while I advanced across the board. The marauder horsemen got shredded pretty quickly by the various blackpowder weapons shoved down range but when the Chaos Warriors hit home I managed to push the usually resolute Dwarfs back. I don’t remember the end results (we had to call it due to time) but I do love how the Dastardly Regular Opponent and I are slowly starting to learn and evolve from each game. For example, he’s learning to ignore the big block of Warriors and position his troops far enough from the board edge so that they don’t immediately flee.
All in all, it was a good day, with everyone enjoying the games they fitted in. We were all ready to play some more Old World soon.
And then that didn’t happen. Plans were suggested but never made, the end of the year came around and we hadn’t managed to get together again. However, things are looking up – there has been a verbal agreement for another Old World day in March, with a discussion of moving the points total up to 2000 as all our forces have grown.
The good news for this is that I’m actually well on my way to being ready. Although there is still plenty of painting to do, I am very lucky that I don’t actually need to buy anything to get me up. I already have the additional 5 Chaos Chosen Knights I’ll need, as well as another block of Chaos Marauders. The big addition is a Chaos Sorcerer, who has a combination of spells and items that could turn my advancing Warrior block from “oh they’ll be here in a few turns” to turn 2 assault in the right setup. Going further, such as up to 2500 points, I think I’d probably end up printing another block of Chaos Warriors to turn the slow grinding advance into a two-lane threat.
It’s safe to say though that passion for the Old World isn’t dead – everyone in the group is still excited to play, I’m very much looking forward to getting some more games in!