Going a Little Retro - Epic Returns!

I had a wild idea over the weekend so late Saturday night I dragged out the old Epic Scale/Space Marine/Titan Legions miniatures, set up a table, picked out some forces, and let Blaster and Red discover them Sunday morning.

I went with Orks vs. Space Wolves since those are two armies they play in standard 40K

Orks - 100% painted

Both were about 3000 points which was a small to normal sized Epic force back when.

Wolves are mostly painted. They were the last Marine army I was working on when we stopped playing the game so not all of them were finished. 

This was straight-up early 90's Space Marine - no bloody 40,000, Armageddon, Net, or any other kind of Epic ...

Deployment - neither of them has ever seen this game played or set up before so I "DM'd" while they played.

I was pretty happy with the way it all looked on the table. I was trying to remember how long it's been and I'm pretty sure the last time I played I had at most one kid, which puts it about 15 years back. That means the mini's, the buildings, and that hill with the trees on it are all older than my kids ... there's a weird moment for you. For 40K players - when this game was released there were no codexes for any army if that helps you place it in time.

I won't go into turn-by-turn detail. Since our boards were in use on the 40K table (along with the green cloth) the playing area was a little smaller than standard. Red didn't really understand what it meant when I reminded him "hey if a transport is destroyed the troops on board are also destroyed" which meant that the entire Evil Sunz clan was blown up inside its battlewagons meaning they were broken pretty early when the Wolves (and the Ogryns) charged in. The Wolves ended up winning on Turn 3 and that's where it ended, but it took several hours to get there and we all had a blast.

One note - they really liked the system here - orders, IGO/UGO movement, then alternating activation for combat. It keeps things moving but adds a lot of tension as decisions are made about when and what to activate as the other players makes those same decisions. I enjoyed it too as a change from the 100% IGO/UGO of 40K. The victory conditions are also nicely simple - you get objective points, and you get points for breaking enemy formaitons - the best of both worlds!

The Mekboy is targeted for elimination

Grand charge of the Evil Sunz

The Space Wolf & Guard response

The Gobsmashas make a break for an objective as the streets of Bluesville see a ferocious clash

On the Ork right, the Stompas head for an objective but the Landspeeders are waiting

The Kult of Speed moves in to assist the Stompas

Nob Bikers vs. Land Speeders

On the Ork left the Snakebites seize a second objective. They were soon joined in the woods by Grey Hunters and Wolf Guard for a serious dust-up.

It was a lot of fun and they both spent some time yesterday making up their own forces for a rematch, which spurred me to dig out the rest of the Epic forces and sort through them - just in case. We may have a series of summer battles developing here.