Battle Report: Undead vs. Greenskins

As mentioned earlier, I test-drove the Song of Blades and Heroes rules last night with a quickie solo-skirmish. 300 points of undead vs. the same of orcs, etc. The battle took place on a 3'x 3' section of my gaming table and took about an hour. It would have been faster if I had been more familiar with the rules.

The rosters:

UNDEAD

6 x Skeleton Warriors
Q: 3+ C: 2
Undead

4 x Skeleton Archers
Q: 3+ C:1
Undead, Shooter (M)

9 x Zombies
Q: 6+ C: 4
Undead, Short Move, Slow


GREENSKINS

2 x Ogre Warriors
Q: 4+ C: 4
Long Move, Big

3 x Orc Warriors
Q: 4+ C: 3

4 x Goblin Archers
Q: 4+ C: 2
Shooter (M)

1 x Goblin Wolf Rider
Q: 4+ C: 3
Mounted, Long Move

Like I had said, the undead swarmed the boyz under. I won't get into a blow-by-blow of the whole battle, but suffice it to say it was a nearer thing than I expected, and the outcome was iffy pretty much down to the wire. I probably messed up once or twice (I should have had the orcs check morale when their losses started piling up). Overall it went fairly quick. The most amusing part of the game was when the goblin rider took out a zombie with a gruesome kill and 5 of the 6 remaining zombies failed morale and crumbled to dust. That gave the orcs some hope for a turn or so before the last archer went down, leaving the wolf rider all alone to deal with three skeletons. It was close, but when the first skeleton knocked him down and the the undead kept the initiative, it was pretty clear that the boneyard boys were going to get a killing blow in before the gobbo could get to his feet (paws).

A few observations:

• Rolling for each model seemed slow at first, but as I got used to the sequence, it went faster.
  
• Keeping track of each model's turn got confusing, but I think if I were only tracking one roster instead of two, it wouldn't be so bad.
  
• Zombies are Slooooow.
  
• My archers spent more time in hand to hand combat than some melee models (both sides).
  
• Tracking the bonuses and penalties got a little confusing sometimes, but not insurmountably so. Again, increased familiarity with the rules will probably help.
  
• Moving adjacent to an archer, then having your melee attack knock it back so that it shoots your model next turn is a definite "Gah!" moment.
  

All in all, good times!