Fighting in the Streets

The other night my Saturday gaming group took a night off from the polyhedrals to take a vaction in lovely downtown Mordheim. It had been a while since we hit the boardwalk for a wyrdstone-cream cone and a Sigmar’s Sizzling Sausage (don’t ask, but Chad’s obsessed with them). It was just like Coney Island, but with more rat-men, mutants, undead and witch burning and less fun and games.

Mordheim’s strength has always been the aspect of play where yoru warband gains experience and suffers injuries as you continue to play it. Unfortunately the customizability and organic warband evolution was tempered by a clunky system and obtuse rulebook. So we decided to give Coreheim a try.

Half of the players had played Mordheim before, but for most of them it was the first time assembling the warband of their choice. We went with a team game over a free-for-all to speed things along, so we had the Undead, Posessed, and Night Goblins against Reiklanders, Witch Hunters, and Skaven in a straight-up brawl. After the forces closed, both sides started suffering attrition fairly quickly.

The Reiklanders who held the center of their lines were the first to fail a rout check after their leader fell to the Undead warband’s vampire. Soon the Witch Hunters – who had flanked my Possessed that had come up the middle to help the Undead with the Rieklanders – caused enough damage that my band failed their command check as well, followed quickly by the Skaven and Night Goblins. The Undead and Witch Hunters started grinding down to start forcing rout checks and in the end the Witch Hunters failed first, giving the Undead force’s allegiance side the victory.

Overall it was a fun night of gaming. Our first stab at the Coreheim rules went well enough to try them again in the future. None of us play Warhammer, so the move towards a slightly more War of the Ring-based rule system hasn’t been a problem for us. That said, one of my biggest problems overall was the slowness of models in Mordheim compared to the long missile ranges. While Coreheim shrunk missile ranges somewhat, they also shortened movement, something we’ll likely undo when we play again.

The Coreheim ruleset did have some downsides, like the movement reduction listed above.  In addition some of the short articles the Corheim web site do not come off very mature.  I don’t want to be too harsh, but the authors are doing themselves a disservice with those documents.

Even so, there’s still some interesting concepts in Corheim that I think we’ll be able to tweak into something that works better for us.  Mordheim’s a now-and-then game for us though, so it might be a while before we can put theory into practice again.