About a Demo (Warmachine)

What really made Levels 2013 Warmachine tournament such a success was some sort of publicity.

And by publicity I mean that it eventually lead into a demo game of Warmachine that took place about a week and a half ago.

Person in question was a long-time miniature gamer, so Warmachine was cross-demoed (I raise my middle finger to dictionary here I guess) with Hordes.

Game itself was somewhat epic, because it happened to go into caster versus caster personal melee combat. The melee combat itself wasn't that epic, however, because first Scaverous failed to nail down Kaya the Wildborne (she was left with two hit boxes) and in return Kaya didn't manage to bring down focusless Scaverous by herself, even by using her feat.

Gnarlhorn Satyr had to dislodge itself from melee and come and stomp Scaverous a bit more. Problem here was that Gnarlhorn Satyr had lost its Mind -branch, which was healed by Kaya to one point remaining.

Free strike was made by P+S 7 Nightwretch, so barring absurd damage the beast would survive, but even such a pesky melee ability could cripple such a mighty warbeast by rolling only one point of damage to wrong branch...

But it was not meant to be. If memory serves, Nightwretch rolled enough to get exactly to Gnarlhorn's armor value.

It seems that the Curse of Scaverous carries even into demo games.


What I did notice during this demo game is the amount of rules you, as a somewhat active Warmachine player, start to take for granted. Last time I gave a demo game of Warmachine it was to a player with next to zero experience in miniature games. It was easy to explain everything with "this is just how everything goes" mentality. I mean, I did not actually have to stop and give any introspection to the inner workings of game mechanics.

But this time around opponent (or rather the one receiving the demo game) had the experience to ask questions, and it was a very different thing to answer questions than to just say okay things happen like this - oh, except you can't do just that, you have to do it like this.... I guess some real questions gave some insight on what basic things do raise questions in first-timers.

Curiouser and curiouser, but that's for my musings now.