Cronch’s Road Through 2025, Part 4: A Thorough Eeling

Welcome back, readers! It’s time for another of my fortnightly (sorry, Americans) stumbling through 2025. A reasonably short installment this time, with one game and a bit of hobby to cover, plus a bonus bit on a one day event I’ll be running soon. Let’s get into it.

Hobby

Unfortunately, I don’t have anything new to show off this time around. I’ve been picking at projects here and there, and been working on something cool that I’ll be able to talk about next time.

One great thing I did a couple of weekends ago was to attend Cult of Paint’s Brush Skills course, hosted by Andy Wardle at the nearby Incom Gaming. This is a whole day dedicated to layering a single leg of a miniature, focused on getting clean basecoats, effective layering, volumetric highlights, with a real focus on how you’re moving the brush and what kind of paint you’re using, as well as how you’re thinning it. It was a really fun day and I felt like I learned a huge amount. I’ve recently felt like I want to start pushing my painting further again, and these skills will be invaluable to practice when I do.

Other than that, I’ve been continuing my clear out and cataloguing of projects and models. I am really inspired by those of my friends that know exactly what they have left to paint, and I’d like to be in their shoes one day, so I’m really trying to cut down aggressively!

Event Planning

I seem to have become one of a couple of people interested in running Age of Sigmar events where I live, and this weekend will see the arrival of Trinity Throwdown: Revengeance, taking naming inspiration from a swathe of stupid mid-late 2010s videogame titles. It’ll be a one day, three game event, or RTT to some. RTT doesn’t seem to get used as a term as much in the UK as the USA, although it’s picking up popularity with the homogeneity that the internet allows. To me, “one-dayer” and “two-dayer” are more common than “RTT” and “GT” though.

Whatever you call it, I’m looking forward to the event! It looks like we’re going to have 12 or so players which is enough for a decent competition, and I’ve managed to get some prize support direct from Games Workshop in the form of some Spearhead boxes, so I’m really excited to reward attendees with some spoils that couldn’t be achieved with the ticket fee alone.

It’s been really nice to be part of a growing event scene in Worcester. My friend Dan is about to run his third two-day event here, and they’re always great fun. It also sounds like another friend Alex is about to start running a series of slow-grow events to appeal to new players, of which we have an increasing amount. It’s always great to find community, especially at a time where the world can otherwise feel quite hostile.

Game – Linked Ley Lines vs Matthew “chimp” Ward’s Idoneth Deepkin

I had the luxury of taking a day off work to go and hang out with Three & Two co-host Matthew, and get a game of Age of Sigmar together. It’s always really good to see chimp, we don’t get to play very often at all but it’s always a great time when we do.

Rich’s list - click to expand

I chose to give the Ironjawz a turn on the table, having not played with them since Sheffield Slaughter this year. They’re underpowered still and I went in knowing that, but if you can get Brutes or buffed up Ardboyz onto target at the right time they can definitely do enough damage. The Maw-Krusha remains irresistible despite definitely being bad – the stacked enhancements and warscroll abilities can mean quite a scary number of mortal damage in the right circumstances.

Matthew’s list - click to expand

Matthew chose to run the Akhelian-focused army of renown, which I haven’t seen on the  table before. It’s an interesting proposition, giving up a lot of the stuff like Tides that initially seems like it makes Idoneth tick in exchange for what turned out to be some pretty powerful abilities.

Placement of terrain and objectives in this mission meant I couldn’t really get my Bossrokk Tower as far forward as I wanted, and so decided to put it off to one side. This turned out to be a huge mistake, as it meant my Weirdnob Shaman basically couldn’t do anything useful all game. This is one of those “would you ever do it if you had thought about it?” type errors – why did I put it there? I deployed the Gouger and Gaw-Gruntas with it, neither of which were going to be targets for my spells, so it was a doomed endeavour. Other than that I castled everything up centre board, other than the Maw-Krusha on the right flank, while Matthew mostly castled his army in the Akhelian Leviadon’s 5+ ward bubble in the centre of his side of the board.

Matthew won on drops and gave me turn 1. I took a very shuffling turn, with the Ardboyz moving up onto the central objective and the Brutes holding behind them. The Krusha held the right objective, and the Gore-Gruntas screened the Gouger on the other side of the board. All of this scored me part one of Wrathful Cycles and a nice 15 point opener. Matthew responded by committing to the pigs without going in on everything else, killing the Gruntas and getting into the Maw-Grunta with a clever pile-in, then killing that as well! He also debuffed my Ardboyz to a 1d6” charge, keeping him safe from the Counter-Charge I’d anticipated making.

I won turn 2 priority, but couldn’t really do much with it. The Maw-Krusha moved to take on a lone Allopex but failed its charge. Ardboyz engaged the Leviadon and eels they were near, and began a pretty useless slog. I had nothing fast enough to challenge the King and Volturnos who had killed the pigs, so I kind of had to leave them to do their thing. Which they did, splitting up to engage both the Maw-Krusha and the wizard in his tower. Matthew spent asydrazor points alongside Volturnos’ built-in fight first in this AoR to make his entire army fight before me and really knocked the wind out of its sails.

Then he took the double turn and cleaned the rest of my army off of the board.

Result: 29-69 Loss

A frustrating loss, although I’m genuinely quite glad to see how that AoR works, it seems really good and in a way a lot more flexible than the core Idoneth battle traits. If you own a lot of eels and sharks, give it a try!

I’m done with even getting the Ironjawz out for fun games now I think. They just feel like they absolutely can’t take a hit, which is mad given their decent saves and health. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that they can weather the hits, but doing so takes too much wind out of their sails for the fight back. What they really want to do is fight in melee, obviously, but even in normal AoS play the back and forth nature of the combat phase means that they just fold too quickly. Add in abilities that can really affect the flow of combat, like the fights first in this game, and they haven’t got a chance.

Matthew was a great opponent as always, and I did have a great time with him. He was also kind enough to buy me a very nice bagel before completely schooling me, which softened the blow somewhat. We also played a game of Spearhead, which I won! So it’s not all doom and gloom.

Next Time: Event Running

As mentioned earlier, this Sunday (at time of writing) I’ll be hosting Trinity Throwdown: Revengeance at my local store in Worcester. If the numbers line up I’m hoping that I’ll get to play in the event as well, in which case I’ll have a trio of battle reports for you next time. Either way I’ll talk about how the day goes, and cover any notable happenings. I should have more hobby to talk about too!

Until then, happy hobbying and I’ll see you in 2 weeks.

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