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Maggotkin of Nurgle Vs Ossiarch Bonereapers – "Age of Sigmar"

Greetings, loyal readers! Today I have a treat for those of you who are invested in Warhammer: Age of Sigmar, one of Games Workshop's beloved wargames, in the form of a battle report. On Thursday, I took my Maggotkin of Nurgle over to my local gaming store to test the waters of combat and see how they fare in battle. I found an opponent who was on fairly even grounds model-wise, who was playing the Ossiarch Bonereapers, and we got a game in. Here's how it went!

To start, we each had an 850-point list to go by. Dan, my opponent for the evening, was a bit short on Mortek Guard (he only had one unit's worth), so we made do with a unit of ten of my Plaguebearers as stand-ins. We acknowledge that Plaguebearers have a slightly-larger base size than Mortek Guard (25 versus 20 millimeters apiece), but we deemed it negligible. Dan was also lacking in a terrain piece for the Bonereapers, so we used one from the store (a Gloomspire Gits piece, if I'm not mistaken) while I used my Feculent Gnarlmaw as per the norm. I also subbed in a Lord of Blights to be a Lord of Plagues as mine still needs to be assembled.

The lists looked like this:

Dan: Ossiarch Bonereapers (850)

• Vokmortian, Master of the Bone-Tithe (180) (General)
• Morghast Archai x2 (210)
• Immortis Guard x3 (200)
• Mortek Guard x10 (130)
• Mortek Guard x10 (130)

Josh: Maggotkin of Nurgle (850)

• Great Unclean One (340) (General)
  • Plague Flail & Doomsday Bell
  • Artefact of Power: The Witherstave
  • Lore of Virulence: Favored Poxes
• Lord of Plagues (140)
• Putrid Blightkings x5 (160)
• Purtrid Blightkings x5 (160)
• Extra Command Point (50)

For those of you who are wondering Dan's loadout for Vokmortian in terms of Artefacts, spells, and the like, I deign to admit that I've forgotten. Sorry, Ossiarch fans!

Our Battleplan was called "Three Places of Power", wherein three objectives on the centerline would be able to be interacted with by Hero units in the players' armies. As it were, I had two Heroes (the Lord of Blights and the Great Unclean One) while Dan had one (Vokmortian). Regarding Three Places of Power, the victory point count goes up each turn by the turn number, so (spoiler alert!) having Heroes is very important.

Turn One

I had rolled to take initiative on the first turn, and my Gnarlmaw was also placed in a strategic location so as to allow for optimal contagion point proliferation and movement alike. With respect to the Great Unclean One's Doomsday Bell (a weapon that also increases Nurgle units' movement speeds by a ludicrous three inches), I got a chance to speed the Great Unclean One and the Lord of Blights up to the two leftmost objectives (from my perspective), and sit there. Dan launched his Morghast Archai unit up to the Great Unclean One to try and take it down, knowing how resilient and annoying it can be. Neither of my Heroes was disposed of that turn. I gained two victory points.

Turn Two

On Turn Two, the Lord of Blights continued to sit there and watch the Great Unclean One deal with a pair of painfully annoying Archai, assisting in it with his Command Ability. Thankfully, the Great Unclean One also managed to cast Favored Poxes on Vokmortian who had sauntered up in an attempt to keep the Archai forces fresh and formidable. The Great Unclean One did not need to move past capturing the objective, so this was no issue to me. I did remove one Archai and deal a good amount of damage unto the other by the end of the turn. I gained another four victory points here. Dan had by this point not gained any.

Turn Three

This turn saw the Morghast Archai killed as a full unit, meaning Vokmortian could not revive any members of the pair of elites. Vokmortian had, at the end of the previous turn, gotten into position to try and kill the Great Unclean One with a single spell, but had failed to do so this turn. Almost needless to say, the big green meanie walloped the Master of the Bone-Tithe to near-death (undeath? Heh.). The Lord of Plagues assisted in this with the use of a Command Point, as he had the turn prior with the Archai duo. Other than that, my Blightkings, who had been split into the two units of five, were each dealing with units of their own – ten Mortek Guard on my left, and three Immortis Guard on my right. The other ten Morteks were meandering towards the right as well. I gained six more victory points, putting me at twelve.

Turn Four

This turn was the last turn considering that Dan knew he had effectively lost the match in points value, but as he wanted a "moral victory", we continued a bit. After all, what's the harm in more practice?

My Lord of Plagues killed Vokmortian, but not before Vokmortian could remove my Great Unclean One. Furthermore, despite getting a ton of attacks in on the Immortist Guard and the engaging Morteks, both units claimed my Putrid Blightkings save for maybe one individual model among them. It was unlikely that the Lord of Plagues was going to be engaged with this turn, but I summoned a unit of three Nurgling Swarms with the Feculent Gnarlmaw to make sure that I could tar-pit a little bit more. Practice!

At the end of the turn, I gained four more victory points and Dan got one.

Final Score: Dan 1, Josh 16

This was my second game of Age of Sigmar ever, and I felt that it was sort of a blowout objective-wise. Having one more Hero than my opponent made a huge difference, but my goodness, Ossiarch Bonereapers are almost more resilient than my Maggotkin, so props to Dan for fielding them for the defensive game! The Bonereapers' only perceived shortcoming lies in their mobility, but that is easily rectified with cavalry units, which are available. I'm pretty sure that Dan is looking to get a Katakros, Mortarch of the Necropolis pretty soon, so that's something that I'll have to contend with soon as well. Yikes!

As for the Maggotkin, their strengths lie in their ability to move to a spot and stay there indefinitely, it seems to me. Between the Great Unclean One's Doomsday Bell adding to my units' movement speeds and the Feculent Gnarlmaw allowing close units to run and charge on the same turn, it's easy for my heavy-hitting Blightkings to get somewhere fast and beat face with many, many attacks. I think I managed about 21 hitting attacks with four Blightkings at one point. I didn't do as much as I wanted to with those attacks because of the saves the Ossiarchs make, but I digress.

Thank you to Dan for allowing me to play with him, and to Just Games for facilitating the use of the space!

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