Struggle

Tuesday's Gorkamorka games did not go as well as hoped. Not nearly as well as hoped.

Firstly, I managed to forget the records sheet - with all the information about what went on during the games - on it. I know exactly what happened to my mob though. And none of it was much good. They say "every campaign needs a bitch", but I didn't expect it to be a) so true or b) me.

In my first battle I tried to rescue my mob's leader from Carly's mob's fort. Bob's leader had also been captured by Carly's mob so somewhere down the line a three-way battle was planned to release the captive orks in a free-for-all. The first problem you might see with this is the difficulty in reaching a fort (thanks to the defenders) coupled with the difficulty of also having to deal with another mob as they race you to the "Jale".

It started off well enough, but the lesson I learned here was - if I'm going to bring vehicles onto the field as reinforcements then I might as well bring them all on at once! My new big grabber made short work of the fort's gate, allowing models on-foot access to the fort. However, the fort gate soon became very crowded as three mobs' collided at the fort's gate in a mangled wreck of trukks and trakks. Then the inevitable scragging began.

It's difficult to get into a manned fort as it is, but getting through a gate with half your mob while the other half scales the walls means you can get ganged up on pretty quickly. In short, Bob managed to rescue his leader (and then promptly bottled out) but I was left leaderless yet again as my mob retreated due to casualties. In fact, another of my ladz was captured. I managed to get seven teef out of the mines (without a collapse) after the battle and had to use all of them to ransom back the recently captured warrior (with the boss still remaining in the opposing mob's prison cell).

The next match was even worse. We played Da Chase again, this time I was the defender against Will. On the first turn his trukk became immobilised and turned into a TNTrukk (i.e. at the beginning of any turn the trukk has a chance to explode). I thought I had definitely won but such was not the case. By turn four I had only one boy standing while Will had only lost two warriors to the exploding trukk. I rolled for permanent injuries and was dismayed.

Two of my ladz were captured. Two. I was incredibly lucky that the two orks in Will's mob were also captured so I was able to organise an exchange of prisoners. However the bad news did not end there. My new trakk driver got wounded in one eye, my original spanner received a chest wound, my yoof got an arm wound, and my harpoon gunner got multiple injuries resulting in three arm injuries (two on his right and one on his left making him virtually useless in hand to hand combat even against grots), an eye injury (reducing his ability to shoot - remember he's the harpoon gunner and therefore responsible for using the most powerful weapon in the mob), and impressive scars which increased his Leadership characteristic enough that he now wants to challenge Krokfang for leadership of the mob.

But Krokfang is still captured and I didn't get nearly enough teef to ransom him back from Carly. So what happens now? Does the gunner, Grimzag, automatically become leader of the mob? If so, I can't imagine him rescuing Krokfang in order to have a pit fight with him considering he now has two broken arms. The rules don't cover anything like this so I'm really in a pickle. I'm just crazily lucky that neither of my vehicles were damaged.

However I think my harpoon gun snapped off the trukk again in transit.

It was all very depressing. And to top that off my computer is crashing randomly again. I changed some hardware around (removed sound card - now using onboard sound) and it worked perfectly for about a week. Now it decides - out of the blue - that it doesn't want to play ball any more. It defies all reason and logic. Why does it work for a week after a hardware change and then suddenly stop working? It doesn't make any sense. It wouldn't be so bad if I could just identify the problem but because I have no idea what is wrong I can't do anything.

So I don't have the event sheet and I'm not getting any replies to my emails asking everyone who has it and my PC doesn't work (I just bought Assassins Creed and Crysis so that was fifty quid well spent - good thing I didn't splash out on the full version of the Spore creature creator eh?) - so the Gorkamorka newsletter will be very delayed.