Redvers and Son Get Into Bushido

After my heavy defeat with my new Horselords, my son wanted to try out the new faction that he picked up at UKGE – The Jung Pirates. Specifically, he picked up The Deep starter box that contains a lot of weird fish/human things. Like my experience with the Horselords, he hadn’t spent a lot of time reading the cards and so was going into the game fairly blind. In his warband were,

Jung Keikoku (JK) who is some octopus samurai thing. Comes with a useful grapple attack.

Fu Ran Ku (FRK) – a jellyfish with a poison attack

Mother of Pearl – a sea snake with a human body who also has some useful ki feats

Anko – an angler fish human that predictably has a hypnotic gaze attack to stun opponents

An Electric Eel, which does pretty much what you would expect

Kani-Chan – an enormous crab covered in vents spurting out fire

Some tiny crabs that spawn in from his terrain feature that don’t do much other than irritate the opposition.

He also took a stormwall terrain feature that blocks like of site and can move around each turn by 1”

For my side, I went back to my Cult of Yurei faction and took, 

Waku the Soul Collector who I’ve also given Fearsome Presence which gives him Dread that further enhances his Fear ability.

One Animated Militia skeleton

Warui, another skeleton that if he dies, I get to bring on a kami of my choice

Mokoti for his control markers

Maiden of Sagoya to throw Fear markers around. She can also summon a ghost that loves to attack frightened enemy models. 

The Wanyudo for some fiery slam attacks

I also took some upgrade cards. Feed on Fear allows me to add a Ki token to the card whenever a Fear test is failed and once it gets to 4 tokens, I can distribute this out to anyone in my faction.

Glimpse of Jigoku which allows me to pick an enemy model to make a test which, if they fail, the treat all enemy models as having Fear and Terror, so ideal for working with the Maiden, getting tokens for Feed on Fear and for disrupting an enemy model.

Pariah’s Voice, which I play in the starting phase and it removes 1 dice from all enemy Ki Challenge tests – extremely useful for getting Mokoti’s control Ki Feat to work.

Miserable Fraternity which is an event to play when an enemy model fails a Fear test. They take wounds equal to how much they fail by, so again, playing into the Fear element of my list.

We’re playing a scenario with three neutral objectives across the centre line of the board. If you are in BtB you can spend an activation to interact with the objective and turn it friendly. At the end of turn 2, 4 and 6, you gain 1 Scenario Point for each friendly objective and the person with the most scenario points gets 1 VP. The objectives reset at the start of turn 3 and 5.

Prior to the game starting, my son handed my the Red Pearl enhancement card to give to Waku. This gives Waku a Death Sentence Marker (which gives any model attacking him an extra melee dice) and it also removes Fear from Waku, which also negates the Fearsome Presence I gave to Waku as well.

Below is the deployment. My son is using a couple of rat swarms as proxies for his terrain pieces. 

Turn 1.

As usual, turn one is about moving models up into position. However, I kept The Wanyudo back and he was able to launch a Banzai charge into the electric eel that had strayed too far forward. The EE failed its Fear test (so one token to me) and the Wanyudo used Slam Attack to push the EE back 3” and deal out 1 wound. This also moved the EE away from the scenario objective.

Below are some shots of the end of the first turn.

Turn 2

I play my Glimpse of Jigoku on Anko who fails the challenge test and now treats all enemy models as Fear 6 and having Terror.

I also play Pariahs Voice giving all enemy models 1 less dice when making a Ki test. I waste no time in activating Mokoti and using his Control Ki ability on the big grab which works and I now have a big crab working for me for 1 Activation.

The EE uses its electricity attack which basically zaps everything, friend and foe, within a couple of inches. At the moment, this is just the Wanyudo and my son rolls poorly and I avoid taking damage.

I use the large crab to attack Anko (we forgot the Fear test here) and Anko gets a face full of claw taking 3 damage and a fire marker.

Waku slaps a death sentence marker on JK which will make all future attacks by my models easier with the extra melee dice. I use this to good effect as I move Warui into melee with JK who struggles to handle the skeleton (mainly as I roll all dice in attack as being Durable, I’m only going to take one wound in return). This doesn’t go well for JK who takes 5 wounds but does manage to grapple Warui and hold him.

My son moves up Mother of Pearl and uses her once in a game Curse of Doom. This gives 4 doom markers to the target. You remove a doom marker each turn and once the last one is removed, the target takes 7 wounds. Poor old Mokoti gets this and 7 wounds will kill the plucky little monk outright in 4 turns.

The Maiden of Sagoya uses her ki feat to summon Sagoya Kaidan, a ghost that loves to attack models that are frightened.

The big crab tries to attack the Maiden of Sagoya but I’m able to roll well enough to deflect the attack away. I can then use the Wanyudo to interact with an objective to turn in friendly, but my son counters this by using the EE to turn it back friendly.

Finally, with my last activation of the Animated Militia skeleton, I interact with the middle objective to collect a scenario point at the end of the turn and therefore pick up a Victory Point. This triggers my son’s rockpool terrain feature that releases an annoying little crab.

Turn 3.

The objectives reset to neutral.

My son wins the initiative test and uses the EE to zap the Maiden for a wound and Sagoya Kaidan for a couple. I respond by getting The Wanyudo to activate his Inferno Ki feat, that gives the EE and the little crab that arrived at the end of turn 2 a couple of fire markers.

My animated militia skeleton attacks the jellyfish in the middle of the board and I deal 1 wound but there is a reason that these animated militia are so cheap – they have the critical strike debuff and any wound roll of a double kills it out right, which is exactly what my son rolled. He’s well chuffed with this kill, right in the centre of my line.

Mother of Pearl uses her ranged attack to target Warui who is currently in melee with Anko. This is high risk as she may hit Anko rather than Warui. Unfortunately, this is exactly what happens and Anko goes down.

The big crab attacks Waku but he has the Protected special ability, before the crab can roll any wound dice, I decide to sacrifice Mokoti to avoid the damage. Waku does however take a wound from picking up a bleed marker.

As the turn finishes, the little crab, who is still on fire, gets cooked and is removed. The EE also takes a couple of fire damage as well.

Turn 4

Again my son wins the initiative and uses the big crab to attack Waku. Given Waku’s death sentence, I roll all dice in defence but still end up taking a wound.

Sagoya Kaiden attacks the EE which fails its fear test. This is good news as not only is the EE now down a melee dice and is not allowed to roll more attack dice than defence dice, Sagoya Kaiden gains a melee dice as he has the Vengeance trait against frightened models. The EE loses badly, taking 3 wounds. 

Warui gets attacked by the octopus thing and gets held, so can’t move or fight back. But I have one eye on the scenario objectives and as this is turn 4, it’s also a scoring round. So the Wanyudo turns the right hand objective friendly. 

My son is running out of activations and this allows me to activate the Wanyudo again who kills the EE. This death, being close to Waku, gives Waku another activation counter as he harvests the soul of the EE.

This extra activation that Waku has just gotten is key as he disengages from the big crab and moves into BtB with the middle scenario. His extra activation allows him to turn this friendly and at this point my son realises that he does not have enough activations to turn two scenario objectives to at least draw the round. He concedes at this point. 

Overall it was a good game. My son had some awful dice rolls where nothing went his way and he does need to practice with his new faction but the Jung Pirates have some interesting options to throw around.