The End of the Road

After some intense competition, our Gorkamorka campaign has finally come to an end.  Sadly, we were all a bit rushed for this one, so not all the mobs are fully painted and a few big chunks of scenery were also not quite finished when we played.  Still, it was a day filled with twists and turns and a dramatic (if not unexpected) finish.

Our first game took place at a Mektown Brewhouse, where our nobs were up to their usual drinking and brawling, unaware that an ambush was about to take place.

As the four mobs began to coalesce around the brewhouse in an effort to double-cross each other (or double-cross the double-crossers), my nob, Grizwoad was hurled out a rear window.  Fortunately, Deezo, his big trakk was parked nearby, so he went to rouse the driver and start gettin' da boyz together.

Meanwhile, Chad was casually (and somewhat suspiciously) walking out the front door of the brewhouse, where Urzig's trukk was parked. 

Whie Urzig was still inside brawling, Chad made a dash for the trukk, hoping to take out the unsuspecting driver before he knew what hit him.

One of Chad's boyz also made a move on Marvolork's mob, using the jump pack he'd won in the first race to get the drop on them

Unfortunately, Chad's careful strategic maneuvers were no match for Urzig's brute strength, and soon both he and Marvolork were fleeing for their lives, leaving Urzig and Grizwoad to rule the streets of Mektown.

Thus far, Grizwoad and his gang had been doing quite well.  Apart from one spanner that got ambushed by Urzig's boyz, the rest of the gang had made it to the trukk and piled in.  They still had all their scrap and had mostly avoided any fighting apart from a few of Chad's boys, whom they had run off with relative ease.

In retrospect, the gang should have driven off the table with their winnings right then, but at the time, that seemed rather un-Orky.  Instead I decided to plow through Urzig's scattered forces and get a few more shots off before the game ended.

The outcome of the ensuing fight wasn't bad per se.  My mob's shooting (not to mention my lovely spikes) kept Urzig at bay and everyone in the mob got out unscratched.  Unfortunately, Urzig's mob decided to shoot out my trakks, reducing my movement to five, then four, until by the end of the game my big trakk was only moving three inches on its gas engines and two for each thrust.  I offered to simply concede, but my opponent insisted on dragging the game out another half hour until my trakk finally was able to limp off the table.

The second round found my mob facing off once more against their old foes, Chad and his Ork bros.  They were by far the leaders in the campaign, while my mob was battling for third with Marvolork's.  This time, however, I had my whole mob and they were looking forward to avenging Abby Sr's untimely demise.

Deployment was a little bit tricky, as we'd each placed a large unexploded bomb in the other's deployment zone.  I ended up with my forces split along two flanks, while Chad and his mob were mostly grouped around his heavily armed trukk,which had won a Kustom Force Field in the previous race.  He'd also acquired a number of bikes, and since he was rollin' in teef, he'd made them all 'eavier.  It was quite an imposing force for my tiny mob.

My big trakk rolled forward to contest a few pieces of scrap near a rickety lookout tower.  Chad's trukk took up position in the center arch while two bikes and his jump pack boy raced around to flank me.  Fortunately, the crew were able to lay down enough dakka to stop most of his vehicles in their tracks, and we ended up with a fairly stationary battle line for the rest of the game.

On the other side, one of his bikers rammed Abby Jr. and Shifty head-on, immobilizing both vehicles. Since both vehicles were 'eavy, their wrecks were all but impervious to fire from a standard shoota.  As such, neither side dared leave the safety of their smoking debris and instead proceeded to have a lengthy shootout at just out of arm's reach.

A second bike tried to race across no man's land to break the stalemate but was deftly felled by a single shot from Grizwoad's gun.

While all this was going on, Toast managed to get his brand new flamecar all the way around Chad and his boyz and came up behind the whole mob.

Before they knew what hit them, Toast's skorcha had engulfed half their mob in flames.  Chad's boyz bottled out, leaving nearly all the scrap for Grizwoad.  With the bonuses for taking out a mob that was well over a hundred points ahead of me, this was easily my best game of the campaign.

Unfortunately, my fellow Morker Mob was not faring so well.  On the other table, Urzig had finally managed to take out Marvolork, leaving his mob nobless.

Going into the final race, the stakes were as high as ever.  Chad was within a few points of winning the campaign, but after taking a beating in the first two games, his victory wasn't yet certain.  Marvolork was dead and I had no chance of passing them in one game, but if our boys managed to shut out the Gorkers (or if Urzig and Chad didn't survive the battle) we might keep the game going.

The race began and I was off to a great start.  My two trakks raced forward while the other trukks and buggies spun and crashed.  Chad and Urzig each had a biker that was keeping pace, but neither had the firepower to slow me down.

Marvolork's racers, as had become their signature, got off to a rocky start.  Barely a car-length down the track, they were already stuck in a pileup.

Urzig had his own signature move at this point, and, as usual, jumped out of his trukk to start causing chaos.  He leapt aboard Marvolork's big trakk to try to take out the mob that was already firmly in last place.  Unfortunately for Urzig, his first target was Grokkenstern, who had recently been given a pair of De-Lux Kicking Legs while visiting the Docs for a completely unrelated issue.  Grokkenstern was flung from the vehicle, but Urzig was laid out by a well-placed boot to the head.  Seeing a chance to take out his rival once and for all, Chad rushed in to finish off the downed Urzig.

Unfortunately for Chad, Urzig had become a nigh unkillable combat machine, and the dastardly nob got a taste of his own medicine as he was beat unconscious by Urzig for the third straight race in a row.

Quite used to watching their boss get beat up at this point, Chad's mob pressed on, weaving through the jumble of vehicles while also avoiding their own land mines which they had strewn about the track.

At the end of the first curve, Chad's biker, Michael, had pulled out in front, with the rest of the drivers in close pursuit.  In fact, at this point, everyone still had a shot.  Even Marvolork's two vehicles managed to catch up to the pack.

As the racers passed the big arch, however, things went awry once again.

Urzig's trukk crashed on the inside lane, forcing the other racers to swerve around the rock spire, to varying degrees of success.  Soon there was yet another pileup, and the larger vehicles found victory slipping away from them once again.

And so Chad's biker, Michael, won our third and final race, placing their mob firmly in first place and ending the campaign.  Chad recovered from his wounds, robbing Urzig of a the satisfaction of killing his long-time rival.

Despite placing a distant third, my mob actually performed quite well.  Looking purely at win-lose ratios, I did even better than Urzig's mob (and better than Chad if you don't count the races), though because we were tweaking some of the rules along the way, my early losses put me at a disadvantage that I was never able to recover from.

Our current plan is to do a mini-campaign in about a month or so to hopefully rebalance a few of the rules that were causing us problems.  That also means that unless I want to run another mob that's 50 percent Spanner Boyz, I need to start converting some more mobsters.

And here's my not-last-place Morker Mob in all its glory!