Meeting Engagement Rematch (Wars of Ozz)

As you saw in my last battle report, there was a game of Wars of Ozz between the Munchkins and the Gillikins. Chris’ Gillikins won 21-15. I wanted a rematch, and Chris Comeau agreed to one. We agreed to again use the meeting engagement scenario with random deployment zones as before. This post will show how this game went this time, mostly with pictures and a bit of narrative. It had a lot of excitement to be sure! We ended up playing in my cellar as opposed to the nice garage – as my wife was not feeling well and I wanted to be nearby in case she needed me.

As a side note, yes, this is a late post, but my wife Lynn and I had a subsequent unwanted medical “adventure” the day after this game – which I will describe at the end.

Back to the game – the forces were the same as last game. I did, however, end up drawing excellent characteristics for my two infantry regiments. The Zoraster’s Guard Infantry Regiment (ZGIR) was already the best musketry unit on the table – and I the “Well-Drilled” attribute which gained me an additional 2″ of range to both my long and short firing ranges. For Colonel Tik-Tok’s regiment – I got the “Impatient” characteristic which gave me first hit capability in melee. My Munchkin cavalry got the “Charismatic” attribute which only affects routing distance. My brigade commander drew the “Magical Protection” attribute which helps when your enemy has a witch nearby. My opponent was slightly less fortunate – as one of his two regiments drew the “Blind” attribute which hurt his marksmanship. His other infantry regiment drew a good attribute, “The Fortunate”, which allowed a reroll of a bad result during the game. His goat riders got “The Impetuous” attribute which improved their elan. I don’t remember his brigade commander’s attribute, but it was moderately positive. By the way, artillery batteries, allied units (like skeletons), and witches and wizards don’t get these bonuses.

The deployments were as shown below. The Munchkins are on the left and the Gillikins are on the right. I had my two Munchkin infantry regiments at opposite ends of the tabletop – one near my wizard and my medium battery – and one next to my cavalry. My opponent had a skeleton regiment screening one of his Gillikin infantry regiments on one end and his goat riders, medium battery, and the other infantry regiment on the other end.

Then I decided to try to improve the ZGIR’s marksmanship with an “Uncanny Marksmanship” spell from Zoraster. This would raise my already strong marksmanship from a 7 to a 9 out of 10 hit probability at short range (on top of the increased range bonus)! As you may remember, a spell needs to roll under a spell level on a D10. Zoraster, with a level of 8, needed only to roll anything but an 8, 9, or 10. A 10 is a critical failure (which last game caused his head to explode). Sometimes a critical failure has a bizarre result that can be positive. In this game, I rolled a 10 no less than 7 times out of 12. With different dice!!!!

Luckily, this time the critical failure did not cause a head explosion, and I even got some good results. Below, I rolled my first of 7 critical failures (the zero) and got a 17 for the following result roll. This let the spell work, but lowered my spell rating to 7 for the remainder of the game. Which, when you roll 10, is largely irrelevant! In any case, my ZGIR was even more deadly – even to the point of negating the skeletons’ advantage versus my musketry.

At this point in the game, I was down to my two infantry regiments, plus my wizard. The Gillikins had two infantry regiments, plus a medium battery, a damaged goat-rider regiment, and a witch.

This move took the pressure off of Tik-Tok. The Gillikin cavalry was in no shape to close with the bear, but decided that that was better than being hit in the rear and routed. In the end, the bear base did its job before being eliminated, but the Gillikin Goat Riders routed nonetheless – having had enough for the day. The two infantry regiments got into melee with Tik-Tik getting the better of the exchange (being “Impatient” and getting the first hits in help a lot too). The Gillikin infantry now routed as well. This left only the Gillikin Medium Battery on the battlefield facing the two Munchkin infantry regiments – which closed in on it.

In the end, it was the ZGIR which wiped out and overran the Gillikin battery, and won the game 21-18.

It was a good game – and I feel I was lucky to pull out the victory. Certainly the magic critical failures had us both laughing. I will be running two games similar to this at HAVOC in late March/early April.

As for our adventure, I had travelled to Shrewsbury (45 minutes away) for a 7 AM car service – while Lynn got a 10 AM doctor’s appointment at UMASS (40 minutes away) to see why she was having shooting pains in her back. My car took a while. Around 11 AM she texted me that the doctor ordered a “blood clot test” for her as that was a worry for her lungs. By the way, I hate texting but the lab was too crowded for her to speak clearly with me at that point. With my knowledge and background, I texted to ask what the name of the test was (she was unsure) and to ask/tell her not to leave the hospital until she got her results. Unfortunately, when Lynn asked the phlebotomist how long the results would take, and was told maybe an hour, maybe a day. I knew that a potential blood clot in the lung was a STAT situation, and that likely the test was a d-dimer (which I have had myself). In any case, she left and drove home – as I did and we arrived at home about 5 minutes apart around 1 PM.

Within 5 more minutes, she got both an email and a call to go to the ER as the d-dimer test was elevated. So we drove together to UMASS Memorial in Worcester, arriving at 1:51 PM in the waiting room or the ER. It was SWAMPED. We did not get into the medical area of the ER and a bed for her until after 6 PM. We waited for a CAT scan until 11:30 PM, and then a read. It was not sure if she was going to be admitted or not but the diagnosis was pneumonia. At this time they started IV antibiotics – BUT as I recently had had a bad sinus infection I was on and needed to take my own antibiotic dose (which was of course at home). So I left her, drove home, got my own pills, then got a call from Lynn that she was being discharged. I then drove back to Worcester, got her, got her late night McDonald’s (she had not eaten since the morning). We got home about 3:30 AM, at which point I’d been up for nearly 24 hours.

So, good news, she’s already better! Not a fun story, but one I’m glad worked out.

Anyways, I hope you liked the battle report – I should have a couple more posts for you this week on a couple other playtests and some jungle terrain that I built for a Maya convention game.