Relics Demo Game

Some of you may remember that at Grumpy Old Wargamers Con, my beloved wife and I had a demo game of Relics.

I've then realised that it was so exciting and fun that I took about half as many pictures as I should have to do a decent battle report.

Orcnar, the faction we didn't play

So, we were lured to the table by pretty, pretty models, and then had many of them taken away for the actual demo game...

I want to own all of these later...

This was actually pretty sensible, as the models they left us were a good sized force for a simple demo game to explain the rules.

I chose to play Britanan, because I like puppets, I like Guardsmen, and both of these things bore my wife to death.

Yes dear, I'm aware you think that model is awesome...

The wife chose the Nuem, because they have crazy steam punk machines and are pain obsessed close combat lunatics. Given her Dark Eldar, I'm starting to sense a theme.

I was so enthralled by my awesome puppets that I totally failed to take many photos of Sim's models, for which I shall be undoubtedly mocked later. I set out a sensible gun line, and she advanced, using cover as best she could. She's notably gotten pretty darned good at it given her time playing Dark Eldar.

I ran my Dragoons up on the left, taking a couple of pot shots at the Nuem, before withdrawing and running them around to the right . . . unfortunately, my rifle line got a bit too close to the Nuem's stompy death machine.

Her remaining infantry and caster then took advantage of my being tied up in combat to charge in and finish me off in a brutal melee that lasted a long time, but ended up with the Britanan getting the stuffing knocked out of them.

So here are the winners, the crazy Nuem commanded by my darling wife.

Needless to say, the game was awesome, and we now have a big pile of Relics boxes lying about the house ready to be assembled. The mechanics are simple enough to understand (increase or decrease the number of dice you're rolling, you're trying to get doubles), and there's a nice tweak to list building (if you take more than a certain number of any one unit, the cost starts increasing to encourage diversification).

This also marks a new trend we're moving towards with new or more obscure games - we'll make sure we buy at least two starter sets so we are guaranteed another force - we can always lend out one of ours to someone else to play with.