Today was the last day of the first Confrontation tournament at Battlegrounds. I was supposed to face The H but he no-showed so I got a win by default which got me the win for the tournament. I would have preferred to have won by actually playing but I'll take first place and the $25 in store credit. Even thought The H didn't show up there was still a lot of Confrontation being played. W played AH in a Temple of the East (played by W) versus Temple of the North (played by AH) battle.

Temple of the East's advantage is “When it is activated, a unit can transfer some or all of its faith points to the other units of the company.” The definition of faith points in the core rulebook is a little vague, in my opinion. It's not clear to me whether or not units without a member with a Fervor stat actually generate faith. I've posed the question on the forums and it's still unclear. So, until Rackham chimes in, it looks like we're playing it that they do.

AH had a clear advantage early on when some fortunate dice-roll took out W's entire unit of Fusiliers, leaving him with only a unit of Spearmen led by Abel. At that point, AH's only losses were two members of his unit of Templars led by Severian. AH parked his Fusiliers in the middle of the board and started accumulating Elixir like crazy and it looked like it was all over. Unfortunately for him, AH just didn't remember what he could do with all that Elixir and, although he eked out a timed win, came really close to losing.

After that W and I played a friendly game with his same Temple of the East army against my Twilight Hills Wolfen army consisting of a unit of four Hunters with Serethis and a unit of four Fangs with a Rune Guardian. Twilight Hills allows me to give a unit the Scout ability (the unit can deploy anywhere that isn't engaged with an enemy unit). This mean that both my units wound up with Scout since Serethis' Spear of Mist gives his unit Scout. W is a great guy and a really good sport and it's great to have him as a regular at Battlegrounds. That being said, he adopts a play style that I generally find to be “un-fun” to play against. Simply put, the dude turtles. His army builds in AT-43 and Confrontation usually consist of long-range weapons backed up by high-armour infantry and he sits back and makes you come to him. To give him his due, his plays this style very well and has good success with it. Having two units with Scout, though, was pretty fun to play against him.

The tables we play on at Battlegrounds are about four feet square and we usually deploy in opposite corners with your deployment zone being anywhere within 30 cm of the corner. Deployment wound up looking like this:


Ordinarily, W would have likely put his Fusiliers on the hill but I'm guessing he wanted them behind the Spearmen so that they could shoot without becoming engaged. The long and the short of it was that this one just turned out UGLY for Temple. The Wolfen eliminated all of the Temple without losing a single fighter. I think they only took three damage total. One thing you do not want when you're facing Wolfen is for them to be shoulder-to-shoulder in a big brick. Both his units wound up eventually being routed on run off the table.

So, the lesson learned is to beat the turtle the best weapon for the Wolfen is Scout!