Gaming: Planetary Empires

For most of us Planetary Empires is simply a book sitting on the shelf in our local game store, gathering dust. For others it becomes a chance to create a truly unique experience where cagy veterans can gather round the tables and trade blows while talking smack, trying new armies and building a sense of camaraderie rarely seen in most gaming circles. It is an interactive campaign with many players that follows a general format that is easily modified, all while building veteran abilities for your units and trying to maintain a tenuous grip on your territories and trying to gain new ones. One of the guys ('guy' is an inadequate description, perhaps 'diabolical man child' would be more appropriate) in my local gaming area suggested a Planetary Empires campaign a few months ago, with some hesitancy I accepted in the spirit of trying something new.

Our campaign organizer, aka diabolical man child (shameless plug for his blog: HERE!), painted up the tiles and had everything ready for the first day of the campaign. Everyone arrived at his man cave and, over the course of a few adult beverages, rolled for who would pick their starting location and then proceeded to select all their initial tiles. With a lucky roll I went 2nd out of the other 8 players and decided on a simple strategy, stay away from all the crap on the planet and seize the moon base! Conveniently for my new Space Wolf battle company, one of the moons was constructed with all 6 of the basic building types:

Once everyone had selected all their tiles we could set about organizing the first games, for the first round of the campaign (each round lasts two weeks) everyone would be fighting at 1,000 points on a 4x4 table, making for some brutal and bloody battles. Many of the players in the campaign decided to try new armies for the campaign and I was no exception, pulling my 8 year old Space Wolf army down from the shelves and starting to paint them. Other guys pulled out Orks, Dark Angels and even an Eldar army was seen prancing merrily across the fields of battle on the initial days of the campaign.

My army revolves around my Grey Hunter squads, which I load out as 9x Grey Hunters, Meltagun, Power Fist, Wolf Banner, Rhino, Wolf Guard, Combi Melta and Powerfist. For my HQ one squad drops a Grey Hunter and adds a Rune Priest. My long range support comes from Long Fangs with missile launchers. It is a really straight forward list, and very easy to 'pair' up with additional squads as the campaign moves along. Its an army designed to do one thing and that is to close with and destroy the enemy as quickly as possible. A far cry from my usual Imperial Guard armies!

Over the next few weeks I will have some additional posts about what makes this campaign fun, how the battles go and my progress on the army.

still practicing_

Tallarn