Another trip to the Deadzone

 

Tonight me and the crew (Dan, Dave and John from The Eternal Warriors) all met up at Draxtar Games in Batavia, IL for some Deadzone! Dan and John have never played a game so I figured this was the best time to get them roped in.

I first had Dan and Dave play each other, Dan's Enforcers against Dave's Rebels, with me supervising and answering any questions. Dan found out the hard way that going hand to hand with a Teraton is not a good idea because Dave's Teraton cleaned house! Needless to say, the Rebels gave a good licking to the Enforcers and ended up winning the match.

I then had my Marauders (Orx) go up against Dan's Enforcers. Dan's mission was to secure a certain objective while mine was Infiltrate where I had to get as many of my troops across the off the table through Dan's deployment zone. I really like how this game gives both players separate missions to complete because it definitely livens things up and honestly 2 different forces will have different reasons for being in a Deadzone.

Dan learned how effective Blazing Away is in this game. Blazing Away is an action that targets a square, not a model, and it's mean to pin and suppress units in that square. If you succeed, your opponents models can be pinned, suppressed or actually take damage. When a model is pinned or suppressed you have to use a half action to either go from suppressed to pinned, or pinned to up and standing. Since you're only allowed to use 2 half actions a turn, Blazing Away can do wonders to screw up your opponent's plans. You can also wound or even kill models by Blazing Away because every success you get that takes an enemy model past suppressed is potential damage. Being in cover actually penalizes the defender when being on the receiving end of a Blaze Away. When you think about it, if you have cover around you and someone is laying down some suppressing fire, you sure as hell are going to cling to that cover to avoid being shot. Some units are designed to Blaze Away as effectively as possible, for example the Marauder's Rainmaker.....

Not only is this guy a walking gun show, he has a rule called Gun Crazy which forces you to roll on a table. Results of the table can either make you fire again with another gun (and he has plenty), stop shooting or your opponent can pick an unused weapon and also pick the target! The later happened in this game and Dan made my Rainmaker shoot and wound my Commando Captain.

Dan picked up on this and from there on out he almost entirely went for Blazing Away actions to pin down my units. I'm pretty sure the fact that 1 of my Commandos exited the table through his deployment zone gave away what mision I had, so kudos to him for picking that up and choosing an excellent strategy to prevent me from doing it again!

There are other facets to the game that I can go on and on about but I'll save that for upcoming articles. Today was a blast and I fell even more in love with the game! The other thing I realized is if you wanted to you can easily plug in 40K models that almost all of us have lying around. You can easily sub in a unit of Space Marines and just use the Enforcer rules, or even go ahead and do a count's as Inquisitor with retinue on the table and use either Enforcer's or Rebel's rules. Campaign rules are baked into the basic rule book and your units can even advance and gain new skills ala Necromunda.

So to wrap things up, Dan did such a good job of pinning my guys down most of them died, I only had 2 guys left when I finally decided to throw in the towel. As predicted, Dan is now hooked and can't wait to play again. John did not get a chance to play but he was watching and reading the rules and he is going to pick up the Plague, which in my opinion is such a cool faction. I like how Mantic made The Plague to actually be intelligent and not just randomly wandering zombies.

Now I need to stop slacking and start assembling and painting some permanent terrain, I'm talking at least 2 if not a 3 level building, can't wait to show it here!