You Had Your Fun, Now I Have Mine

I'll be away from the computer all day today, off slaying the Emperor's enemies in Epic. Normally the Battle Bunker is closed on Mondays but today is a special Monday -- the day after Christmas -- so they'll be open to serve your shopping and returning needs.

We usually play a game built around 2700 or 3K point army lists and had originally planned a "mega battle" of 6K points for today, which would take about 5 hours or so to finish. But other Epic players want to join us, so now we're likely looking at six players and maybe as many as 30,000 points total! It promises to be a long day....

But fun, in that brain-wracking way. I find that I like the strategic thinking of this game, the planning and execution, the sudden and sometimes terrible surprises of large-army combat. I've even taken chess back up, albeit with a freeware program on my computer, to sharpen my skills.

Because you never know when some general, having just lost his key man, will turn to scan the crowd, point a sharp finger my way and bark, "You! Lead my forces to victory!"

Later, y'all.

MONDAY NIGHT UPDATE: Whew! What a day. We got there about noon and started setting up just before one. We finished setup around 2:30. The first turn took three hours and we never even finished the second before one guy got dispirited, another fell asleep, and another had to leave. Man, oh man.

We had three armies to a side; two sides. Each side was 18,000 points. The whole battle was 36,000 points! Unbelievable. I think it's the largest game we may see for quite a while. Eldar, Space Marines and Orks (that's us) vs. Eldar, Space Marines and Imperial Guard. The IG has lots of artillery that can reach across the field and pound us before we can even get moving. It was brutal at first. Mark was our overall general; Fuzzy and I his lieutenants. Two of the three guys we faced were long-time players of Epic and very good generals.

We elected to wait for them to move up, then start whacking away at them. That mostly worked.

It was a huge mess and lots of fun. My Space Marines anchored the center and did their job in holding it. I even lent support to Mark's Orks on our right flank. Fuzzy had the left flank and he was rolling it up by the end of turn one. In turn two, he broke a large section of our opponents' forces and was clearly going to control his side of the board. I was still securing the middle and Mark was slowly grinding away on the right, suffering a lot of frustration from his direct opponent. But he also broke a lot of the enemy's forces.

A slow, draggy, chaotic slugfest. It was enthralling!

TUESDAY UPDATE: Mark reports on his experience of the mega-battle.