The day has finally come! Trumpets and fanfares! After six years working on the vertical board of the mining town of Qala Debdou, it’s time to actually start trying it out for real :)
I’ve been building it for ages (and not building it for even longer), and up until now I’d only tested it with miniatures, checking if they could move around the board, if I could reach every corner with my hand... But I still hadn’t actually broken it in with a proper game. Well, I’ve finally done it!
First things first: the board isn’t finished! There’s still loads of stuff I want to add. But the truth is the whole main module has been ready for over a year now, and it’s good enough to put to the test. What I really want to find out is whether I’ve spent years building a genuinely playable board… or just an oversized dollhouse that’s totally got out of hand :D
For the occasion I got together with my usual geek crew, who very kindly set me up with a game of Necromunda. I’d never played it before (not even the original, which has been a thorn in my side for years), so I told them I thought it was a brilliant idea.
There was a bit of buzz about trying the board out, so in the end four of us got together. Two of them are regular Necromunda players and have been running a campaign for a while now, one with an Escher gang and the other with an Orlock gang. For the other two of us, they suggested a mutant gang and a group of Enforcers.
The idea behind the game is that the working population at the smelter/factory/mine/whatever has turned into a bloodthirsty horde of cannibal mutants thanks to the management slipping unauthorised additives into the food in a bid to save a few credits... Now riots have broken out in the district, and two rival gangs have seized the chance to loot everything. The foreman is under threat, so a small detachment of local enforcers has to escort him to the spaceport for evacuation.
But the local mutants are lying in wait! They see both sides as filthy invaders, and they’ll do whatever it takes to defend their home...
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| The outskirts |
When I prepared the board I decided to display almost any other scenery elements I had, in order to present the town and its outskirts. In the end it wasn't such a good idea, but we'll get to that in a moment. Here you have the gangs:
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| Escher lurking in the shadows |
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| Orlocks coming over to the party! |
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| The escorted foreman |
I'll edit the first picture so you can have a better understanding of the situation. I'm marking the Orlocks on the left of the pic (green), the Escher on the right (red), the Enforcers on the lower part (blue) and the spaceport on top of the structure (blue arrow). There are several objective tokens scattered throughout all the board (which both Escher and Orlock gangs will attempt to get) and we determined six random points frow where the mutants will come out each turn:
The goal for the Enforcer team was quite impossible to achieve. They'd have to go just across the battlefield, enter the town and go up and up through the maze, being caught between two way larger gangs and the upcoming mutants. The two gangs would have a more or less standard confrontation, having to capture the objectives and, ideally, the foreman (who was coming to them anyway). The mutants would only have to cause some mayhem, so their victory conditions imply keeping the hive clean of strangers.
Let's roll!
The gangs spread out and start eyeing everything around them with greed and hunger:
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| Come on, girls! |
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| Come on, boys! |
At the end of the turn we rolled the dice and the muties started to come out!
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| Come on, non-binary unwilling genetically altered people! |
The Enforcers started to run with the foreman towards the entrance to the town:
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| But the gangs are already dangerously close |
On the next turn the Orlocks already ran into some serious clashes with the mutants...
But they just kept coming out of everywhere:
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| These minis are perfect for everything but what for what they were originally designed |
One of the Escher Juves threw a demo charge at the Enforcers squad. They all held their ground, but the foreman ended up wounded:
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| Boom |
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| I'm new to the game, but that result doesn't look good |
The two gangs started closing in on the Enforcers, figuring they’d force them to hunker down and dig in. But for me that would’ve meant certain death — the goal was to make it to the other side of the board. So the Enforcer sergeant grabbed the wounded foreman by the leg and dragged him along while the squad broke into the open, firing at anything that moved within range.
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| Orlocks got their share too |
The muties were more dreadful than anticipated:
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| Those steroids on the meal really made their effect |
An Orlock with a jetpack (they have two in the gang) got onto an Escher occupied roof, severily injuring two girls and capturing the objective:
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| Ouch |
The mutants deployed their ultimate weapon, an Ambot (we used my mini of the
Genestealer Cult Mining Suit)
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| You can ignore the posters in the background. Or not |
The mutants caused an absolute bloodbath — they turned out to be lethal.
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| Both for the Orlocks |
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| And for the Eschers |
As for the Enforcers, they made their desperate dash into the open — and honestly, I think I had possibly the best turn I’ve ever had in any game in my whole life XD
With a single shot they took down the Escher leader, which meant her wild pet (that had been attacking an Enforcer) was forced to flee:
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| Bang |
They also dropped a mutant that was charging straight at them:
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| Blamm |
And finished off the wounded Escher Juve (the one who’d lobbed the demo charge at them earlier):
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| K-pow |
The Orlock with the jetpack killed the remaining Escher on the roof, meaning that the Escher gang lost five (five!) members in a single turn. Wow.
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| The Escher gang was essentially out of the game, and this was turn 4 |
Now that the Ambot had taken care of the Escher, the path was clear to its next target… the Enforcers
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| Whiiiir. Stomp. Stomp. Whiiiir |
The Orlocks were having a hard time dealing with the muties too. However, the guy with the jumpack and flamer guns managed to fry a couple of them:
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| Flames on! (flying flaming guy, come on) |
The foreman managed to get back on his feet, but they could no longer run for it. The Orlocks caught up with them and the fight turned into close combat:
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| Orlock, Orlock, what a big hammer you have! |
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| It's to smash you better with! |
Things are getting rash for the Enforcers...
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| Yup, that one on the roof is a jetpack Orlock |
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| Can you foresee the result of this encounter? |
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| Well, but of course you can |
Eschers were not doing any better...
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| Looks like meat's back on the menu, boys! |
Given the current situation, the foreman simply started running as fast as he could:
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| Nope. Not gonna stay here |
But he got caught on the run by a jetpack Orlock (kind of true star of the game). He intercepted him and engaged to capture him:
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| Were you going anywhere? |
The Orlocks got the ground and captured the foreman:
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| You coming with us, big boy |
So by the end of turn 7 the game was totally done. The Orlocks declared themselves the winners, having captured the foreman and taken down 16 muties. The Eschers, decimated, had managed to secure three objectives, but they’d only killed one mutant and were left in tatters.
Wow. Intense.
The game was really tense and a lot of fun. The chaos of playing with four different sides added loads of enjoyment, and I didn’t mind the imbalance between players. In fact, that’s what gave the game its unique flavour. However, as you’ve probably noticed while reading, the issue I mentioned at the start did come up. Setting up the whole village on the outskirts of the town was a mistake. In the end, the game focused almost entirely on the horizontal area of the board, and the city —which was what we’d actually come to test— ended up being little more than an oversized backdrop.
We never really got to test its true worth as a board: the corners, the LOS blockers, the chances for ambushes, the different vertical levels... all of that ended up untouched, which is a real shame. Maybe Necromunda (especially with so many players) turned out to be a game with too many minis. I’d have liked to try this out in the town itself. But my gang didn’t even get the chance to set foot on the board, we ended up stuck among the scenery on the outskirts.
For the next test game I want to try something different. First off, I’ll only use the town itself —no extra scenery on the side. I want to really test what the board can do, that’s what matters to me. Secondly, I think this will work better with fewer minis and with a more narrative-driven scenario, not just a standard match of fighting and grabbing objectives. I’m not sure what I’ll go for yet, but I’ll probably try out Stargrave or some other ruleset along those lines. I’ll keep you posted!
In the meantime, I hope you’ve enjoyed this battle. I promise more test games are on the way!
