One Christmas my Dad got me a complete squadron of Squats bikes. They were hastily glued to cavalry bases (without having their slots filled) and painted in a red/blue/silver scheme before roaring around the tables of Warhammer 40,000's second edition (2E). The retro-hammer 'Bring Out Your Lead' event at [url=http://wargamesfoundry.com]Wargames Foundry[/url] provided an opportunity to relive those halcyon, cardboard-fuelled days.
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My old friend Graham who stepped up with a vintage army of his own. Though all my Squats were released before 1994, Graham's were actually painted back in the day, making them even more authentically retro. His is a gorgeous force, with conversions born from a mix of passion and restrictions of the early Eldar range.
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Graham'd also brought an allied contingent of Slann – meaning we were both using defunct alien races.
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Both our armies were informed by the 'Black Codex' – a pamphlet in the starter box with concise versions of every list. That list was the last official list Squats had, and I've played them with counts-as or home-brew rules ever since.
Counter Strike
2E stands out in my memory for its avalanche of cardboard. Admittedly, real games wouldn't have used EVERY reference sheet – but we did out of a combination of cardboard fetishism, and because it had been twenty years since we'd had to remember the Chainfist's armour penetration value was D20+D4+D6+10. This meant that our gaming area was festooned in datafaxes, wargear cards, psychic powers, strategy cards and polyhedral dice.
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Weirdly, 40K has seen a card resurgence with the Psychic and Strategic Asset decks. Fashions come around.
yUm jaM! i liK JaM!
As squad after squad of of Eldar opened fire with shuriken, the big red sustained fire dice slowed the game down to a crawl. Every Eldar rolls a pair of sustained fire dice to determine how many shots they fired and records the ensuing jams. There's no way of batch rolling those red cubes of tedium. Luckily there were enough jam counters to cater for Graham's bad rolls.
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Despite the atrocious jamming, Shuriken Catapults sliced through most of my Squats. The players on the table over were having a game of Rogue Trader, and chipped in that the weapon had been toned down from Rogue Trader - when its Following Fire rules meant it could keep firing indefinitely.