Swiss Army Falchion

At a melee friendly tournament, the big red Mount could be pretty useful. He's basically a "Swiss Army Knife," capable of doing many different things but certainly not a master at any of them. In a room full of melee units, you may not regret taking him.

At the tourney, I used him alongside Grimnak, Nerak, Ornak, Marcu and 4 teams worth of Blade Gruts. Army has a real 'Nak' to it, heh.

A few of the armies featured units who Brunak was quite happy to see including Zombies of Morindan, Roman Legionnaires, Samurai, and some Greenscale Warriors backed by Zogross Hardscale. I also brought Brunak to help combat against possible "FireStorms," who would've been tough for my Orcs to fight. Overall, Brunak's Blood Hungry Special Attack had plenty of viable options.

The primary reason to bring a Swiss Army Knife is to have the ability to cover a lot of different bases at once, and Brunak does that to some extent in my Orcs build. He does give a small advantage against the units mentioned above, but perhaps there is another reason to bring this Mount into combat? The Orcs Build as is already takes many of the advantages that Brunak normally offers (outside of Lava Resistance), but can usually perish to powerful ranged builds or units with higher stats and equal attrition levels. I chose Brunak, as opposed to another Orc Champion Tornak to both hide a few weaknesses and to power up the capabilities of the Gruts. Without Brunak, my army would only have 1 way to fight off evil things like massed commons in the form of an only average endurance unit, Grimnak. I'm not saying that Brunak is more survivable than Grimnak (in fact, he was killed in turn of Minions of Utgar strikes), but he does give the army a longer time for power-attacks. Tornak couldn't have done that, and Tornak's Orc Warrior Enhancement would've been a bit too unwieldy to try to use along with Grimnak's as I imagine Ornak would've been moving both at the same via Red Flag of Fury.

Speaking of Ornak, Brunak can actually Carry Brunak closer to the battlefield so that Red Flag of Fury is much easier to pull off. Sure 8 spaces is a long range, but once the battle starts, you don't want to lose turns with Grimnak just so you can move your flag-boy up a few spaces. I can understand moving Nerak with the Gruts (3 attack with a 9 space threat-range isn't too bad, especially if the rest of your Gruts benefit from the move), but Ornak is just too wimpy. His meager attack boost is nice to have, but as the Blade Gruts only feature a basic 2 attack dice, I don't see the Utgar Symbols helping much.

If you don't feel like moving Ornak (perhaps you don't see Red Flag of Fury being worth a damn this game...), I had the option to move up Marcu or a Blade Grut so that I could get a Glyph in a single turn (or in the Blade Grut's case 2 turns). Depending on the Glyph, this is actually a viable move. I used this to somewhat decent effect in the first game I played at the tournament, but because I lost that game I'm not sure you need to be taking my advice... Yeah, that was my attempt at humor.

When using Brunak, your going to have to remember that his big muscles only give him 3 hit points. He does have a nice 7 defense though, so let's focus on that for a second. Focused on it? Great. When using Brunak as a big hammer (his other role, the main one being a giant pony), its O.K. to charge him into a bunch of low attack squad figures. Bonus points if said figures have low defense for Blood Hungry Special Attack to kick in a few times. The goal for this is to paint a big red 'X' on Brunak so that your other heroes (Grimnak mainly), don't get swarmed so quickly. That 7 defense should give Brunak a turn or two to take out as much as he can, and if you can get him on height, he becomes a massive 8 Defense hero who's lost life won't ultimately make you lose. But, if you've been using Ornak to move Grimnak and Bruank on every single Turn 1, then your opponent might think otherwise. Of course, if your Power attacks do what they are supposed to (that is, eliminate all enemies ASAP), then you won't have to worry about trying to pull out tricky tactics with unsophisticated orcs.

Hopefully, this Swiss Army Falchion can serve you well in the future if you play him with Gruts anyways. 'Scape On

The Mercenary Samurai

As some folks know, I happen to love the board game Shogun (or Samurai Swords depending on when you've gotten the game). I also hold the belief that Shogun helped to "design" a few of 'Scape's units. As we know though, HeroScape never had any Ronin.

Thus,

The custom uses 3 Samurai figures (I like using the Tagawa Samurai for this purpose).

The Kokugura Ronin take many of the mechanics from Shogun's Ronin and implements them into 'Scape in a powerful way. In Shogun, players had to hire Ronin and could place them anywhere on the board which is a powerful force. At the same time, there was the chance that all of the Ronin would be "sold out", thus players would bid on use of them. That is basically incorporated into Payment Delivered.

Now let's look at the parts of the card that is all HeroScape. Among the first things you'll notice is that this squad doesn't have 6+ move like the other Unique Samurai Squads. Sure the Kozuke only have a base move of 5, but they still have their Charging Assault, and yes the Ronin are technically not Samurai (the class states Ronin), but Ronin are still as Samurai (in fact, they were Samurai before they became Ronin!). The question is why are they only moving at average speed? Well, that is because they are already able to move excessively fast thanks to their primary Payment Delivered Special Power. When used in sync with The Job Is Done, these guys can move all over the place in a few rounds. I'm not going to get too involved with strategy here (this isn't the main design post after all), so all of this can easily change in time. And of course, as they have training as Samurai, they know how to use the infamous CounterStrike.

'Scape On.

Terrain Throwdown!

The Map, the Board, the Battlefield... All these things could be used to effectively describe the in-game area for when we play some HeroScape. Some folks just build according to the idea of competitive play, others because a map looks nice, and some try to combine both theories into one.

But, is there any value to simply having two people randomly toss terrain together for a quick game or two? Maybe. This thread of mine, on heroscapers.com suggests the idea of having two preset piles of terrain to make a map with. After trying this with a rookie, I found out that it doesn't work very well. I think that a few more limitations are needed, perhaps the builders need to be a bit more equal in skill?

I'm still all for the idea that if there are more than just 2 people playing, then we can build any ol' board and hope for the best.

'Scape On.