Kings of War Doubles - Franticon 2020

Following on from the report earlier this week on the Vanguard tournament at Franticon 2020, here's my brief report on the Kings of War Doubles event. By this point, the Black Order had done alright for itself in Vanguard with an overall result of 5th and 3rd best painted. Now to escalate the conflict to the larger scale of Kings of War. 1000pts of grim and grizzly Black Order knights alongside my ally's force of angelic, fire-wreathed Basileans - about as far from the Black Order's low-fantasy, Slavic/Norse-mythology inspired roots as you can get. Our lists: Basilea -Paladin Knight Horde w/Boots of Striding -Ogre Palace Guard Horde -Elohi Horde w/Brew of Strength -Gur Panther Troop Black Order -Frostfang Cavalry Horde w/Brew of Haste -Frostfang Cavalry Horde w/Mead of Madness -Snow Fox Regiment -Tundra Wolf Regiment -Lord on Frostfang (Very Inspiring for both armies per event pack)

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Round One

For the first game we faced a father-son team - Ian and Will's Kingdoms of Men + Ogres alliance in a game of Raze. This was quite an interesting combination - from memory, the KoM ran a big block of Pikemen, two regiments of Knights, a troop of Mounted Sergeants, a regiment of Polearms, a Wizard on Pegasus and a foot Army Standard Bearer. The Ogres ran a Sergeant (inspiring both armies), a Siege Breaker Horde, a Boomer Horde, a Berserker regiment, a Goblin Blaster, one mounted Goblin Scout troop and a Warlock. Quite a good combination and definitely a couple tricky units for our (very) mounted force.

Loved these pikemen - brings back fond memories of WHFB Empire!

We won the roll for turn 1 and moved up to hold the centre. Ian and his son were excellent opponents in this game; we made a couple mistakes early on which they capitalised on very well, and by turn 4 it looked very much as though we'd lost the game. After throwing away our fast units on the left flank (just visible above - the Tundra Wolves and Panthers) and the KoM Knight reg barrelling down the left flank to threaten our rear, things definitely didn't look good. In the centre, we'd eventually managed to crack the Boomers, Siege Breakers, Berserkers and second Knight reg, although we'd lost a Frostfang horde and Elohi doing it thanks to an unlucky double 1 on the Berserker regiment. Things began to turn around on turn 5, when the Pikemen horde - which had spent most of the game manuevering to catch a flank on the Knight horde - made a front charge into the Lord on Frostfang and failed to rout him. In so doing, they gave one of the Frostfang hordes a flank. The rest, as they say, is history. With the Pikemen gone, the Ogres wiped off the field and only a Pole Arm reg, BSB and a Wizard left, the field had just been won by our NA/Basilea alliance. Both sides had razed 3 tokens and with the Pikemen's unit strength no longer a factor we just scraped a win by holding the central objective. A very closely fought game - Ian and Will won our best game votes for the day and were great opponents to face, really sportsmanlike but also very sharp (especially Will, who caught us out on a number of our mistakes). They were very unlucky not to win this, and probably would have if not for a low Nerve roll on the Frostfang Lord on turn 5.

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Round Two

So far, one win. Next round saw us facing a Forces of Nature/Basilea alliance, with three(!!!) Earth Elemental units, some Ogre Palace Guard, Paladins on foot and a Phoenix flying around healing things. The scenario: Control.

Our opponents for this game, Luke and Richard, were both lovely chaps - very new to Kings of War (I think Franticon was even their first event) but both picking up the intricacies of the ruleset already. In the pic above, you can see a wall of Defence 6 backed up by a Phoenix and Ogre Palace Guard/Paladins.

Unfortunately, we managed to seize a flank on the left side pretty early on. As our cavalry outpaced the Elementals, a wall of knights - Basilean and Order - slammed into the Def 6+ wall and...crunch. Lots of dead elementals. Frostfang Hordes are one of the few things that can take out a Def 6+ unit on the charge, and rightly so at their price point. On the right flank, the Tundra Wolves held back a regiment of Basilean mounted Knights and a Sisterhood Panther unit for a couple turns while we mopped up in the centre. Unfortunately, by the time the Basileans broke through the Tundra Wolves, it was too little to late and we'd already done enough to hold four 'squares' of the board for a final score of 5-1. Again - and I know it's a cliché for the winners to say this - we were lucky to have two really nice opponents in Richard and Luke. They were unlucky to run into what was essentially a (very) hard counter to their Def 6+/Heal stonewall. Hope to bump into them again at another event.

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Round Three

So far, so good, and with 2 wins we were now somewhere in the top half of the event. In fact, we were quite surprised to find ourselves on the top table in round 3!

Facing us in this round were Ed Herzig and Daniel King with a Sylvan Kin and Free Dwarf list respectively. From memory, the Sylvan Kin ran a regiment of Archers, three regiments and a horde of Forest Shamblers and the Wiltfather.

(The Elohi are waaaaaaay too far over on the left flank - a critical mistake)

Daniel's list was quite interesting because it was almost the exact twin of a list the #1 ranked Czech player (Vit) uses back in Prague (not totally surprising because it's the strongest list the Free Dwarves have) - three Troops and two Regiments of Brock Riders and a Ranger Captain. Vit's list usually had one less Troop, no Ranger Captain but added Sveri or a Berserker Lord. I felt very confident against this half of the list as I'd had my butt kicked by it before and felt I knew its threats pretty well. I was glad it didn't include Sveri Egilax as otherwise the Brocks would be outdistancing my Frostfangs. The scenario for round 3 was Loot. We didn't really have a plan for this scenario - we realised the Sylvan Kin shamblers could pick up tokens while the Brocks held us off, so the uncomplicated plan seemed to be 'Kill the Brocks fast enough that we still have time to kill the Shamblers'. Broadly speaking, we defeated ourselves in this scenario. By the game end we'd tabled the Dwarves and wiped out all but two of the Sylvan Kin units. Unfortunately, they were on the other side of the table length with two of the three Loot counters. We focussed on killing things to the exclusion of scoring tokens. There were two moments we could probably have taken the game if we'd redeployed the Elohi to threaten the right flank (see our deployment pic where we overloaded on the left flank) rather than multicharging something with the Frostfangs, which was just bloodlust.

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Final Results

Overall, losing round 3 by a single point we got bumped down to 5th overall. We were quite annoyed that we'd lost the last game, but victory was definitely within our grasp at several points and our final placing didn't reflect how close the last game was. Still - lots of lessons learned and a good outing for us! I was also very fortunate to receive 1st Best Army in the Doubles, which was a great honour.

(Awards from Doubles. Something from Vanguard snuck in there too!) Next up is the report for the Singles - will have that up in the next day or two.