Shadow War: Armageddon Battle Report & Review

Posted by Comrade on October 10, 2025
Posted in: Posts. Tagged: , , , , , , , . 5 Comments

We have a penchant for old-school gaming here at Comrade’s Wargames, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that I’ve been eager to try out Shadow War: Armageddon ever since I came across some blog posts and Youtube videos about how it’s been rediscovered lately as a diamond in the rough.

Now, don’t get me wrong — Shadow War isn’t an old game, per se. It was released in 2017, just before the debut of the revamped 8th edition of Warhammer 40,000. But it’s imbued with a certain old-school sensibility that appeals to me greatly. How, you might ask?

  • It’s essentially a re-skin of the venerable and popular Necromunda skirmish ruleset, which itself is derived from 2nd edition Warhammer 40k.
  • In my opinion, 2nd edition 40k is a lousy ruleset for army-scale games, but it’s ideal for skirmish level games, where each players controls about a dozen (or fewer) figures. The super granular statline for a typical figure makes sense when you’re only controlling a handful of dudes.
  • It’s one of the last (if not possibly the last) of GW’s one-book-is-all-you-need titles. The main book contained everything: core rules, army lists, advanced rules, campaign systems, etc. There were no extra books to buy, at all, ever. (Now you can see why GW has no interest in this type of approach.)
  • The core rulebook contains a dozen army lists covering most 40k armies, making it trivial to get players of all stripes interested in trying out the game.

Lately, as the increasing cost of models and rapid pace of rulebooks and supplements has increased the barrier for entry to the Warhammer hobby, players like me have been rediscovering older rulesets like Shadow War: Armageddon. To further illustrate the Venn diagram for you: I’m an avid enjoyer of One Page Rules, so I’ve never really been a participant in the current GW treadmill approach to game editions and rules supplements.

Anyway, enough of that preamble! You came to hear about the game, right?

John, Jim, and I got together last weekend to try out Shadow War: Armageddon. The core book doesn’t explicitly include rules for multiplayer games, but we are seasoned veterans of the wargaming hobby, so it was simple to adapt one of the rulebook scenarios to incorporate three players, all competing to accomplish little mini-missions on the tabletop.

I set up a dusty, windswept desert battlefield replete with craggy rock formations and rusted industrial equipment. Here’s a look at the setup.

We played on a 4×4 battlefield, as advised in the rulebook. Weapon ranges are fairly short, and we concluded after the game that a 3×3 battlefield could easily have sufficed, even for our three-player game.

John fielded his grubby little Imperial Guardsmen, and Jim brought a stupendous number of Orks – 11 figures in total, I think. Contrast that with my Inquisitorial warband, which numbered 6 models. Yikes! Here’s a look at our factions as we started the game.

Prior to deployment, each player received a randomly determined mission objective.

John’s Guardsmen were trying to get across the board and exit from an opposing player’s deployment area.

Jim’s Orks were trying to blow up a tank of promethium (the 40k equivalent of natural gas + gasoline + napalm, all mixed together and used for a variety of purposes).

My Inquisitor was trying to isolate and assassinate the Ork warboss.

The game started with John’s Guardsmen moving purposefully through a narrow defile on the left flank of the industrial facility. They used the overwatch rule from Shadow War: Armageddon to great effect to cover their approach.

Waiting to meet them were Jim’s Orks, of course! He couldn’t just let those Guardsmen jog across the field unopposed.

The upcoming clash in this dusty back alley was one for the books. Stay tuned!

Meanwhile, Inquisitor Coteaz sent his warband up onto the central terrain feature — a craggy bunker defended by a trench and topped with (you guessed it) some promethium tanks.

From this perch, they could watch both of the opposing warbands as they jockeyed for position in the outskirts of the facility. I knew the Orks had to come my way to accomplish their mission, but I also didn’t want Jim to have to face John’s Guardsmen alone! So, in a burst of tactical genius, I split up my forces. You’ll see later how this played out for me.

But first — back to that alley. The Guardsmen were creeping along, covering their advance with overwatch, when suddenly a mob of Orks burst forth and charged them in true orky fashion!

It was an absolute bloodbath for the Orks. We learned a lot about the casualty system in Shadow War: Armageddon. You aren’t outright dead when you take a wound, but most of the time you’re in very bad shape, with just a slim hope for recovery on the battlefield.

Over by the promethium tanks, a brawl was developing as Jim charged his Orks up to assault the trench line. I had two models available to defend — Interrogator Lysander Frost and Virgil the Huntsman, who was armed (fortuitously) with a flamethrower.

As this bloodthirsty scrum was developing, Jim’s warboss bravely stepped out of hiding and entered the fray. He started by throwing grenades, then decided to wade into combat and try to draw off some Inquisitorial acolytes.

As it happened, the warboss ended up within charge range of Inquisitor Coteaz! This was literally my game objective — slay the opposing leader! I couldn’t let a chance like this pass by.

Throwing caution to the wind, Inquisitor Coteaz raced into combat against the warboss. For a turn or two, it was a fair fight… we traded blows but no one seemed to gain the upper hand. Once some more Ork boyz joined the fray, things went sideways quickly for the Lord Inquisitor.

Here’s his final stand, just before he was cut down in single combat.

Luckily, his broken body was spirited away by Interrogator Lysander, to be healed and restored to the Emperor’s service.

In doing so, Lysander’s attention was taken away from the Ork boyz scrambling up the hill toward the promethium tank. Oops!

All it took was a tiny little distraction to seal the deal for Jim’s Orks. This silly Ork warrior blew up the promethium tank in a fiery explosion, ensuring victory for the greenskins even as the Imperial factions retreated to lick their wounds.

Feedback from the guys for Shadow War: Armageddon was generally positive. “It definitely scratched an itch,” was how Jim put it after the game. SW:A had all the accoutrements that would normally turn me off from a GW game: super granular stats for figures, weird corner case rules like ammo rolls and crawling 2″ per turn when wounded, inexplicable wargear missing from the army lists.

But I’ll be honest with you — it works. The whole package plays smoothly and is imbued with a healthy dose of nostalgia. The clunky parts are a glorious love letter to earlier editions of Warhammer 40k. And it’s such a small scale game that you just don’t mind flipping through the rulebook to uncover mundane rules for grenade deviation or melee attacks on pinned models.

For me, the most appealing factor is the “one rulebook is all you need” approach. The rulebook is out of print, but PDFs can be found without a lot of effort. And that’s it — no further buy-in is needed. The rulebook contains army lists for nearly every 40k faction you might want.

So we’ll be playing this one again, for sure. In fact, we’re already discussing a campaign to see how our little warbands can level up and improve their position. Stay tuned for more!

The Expedition Soldiers On

Posted by Comrade on September 30, 2025
Posted in: Posts. Tagged: , , , , , . 5 Comments

I’ve spent some time lately returning to my fantasy dwarf heartbreaker army — The Expedition to Hearthspire. This army has been in existence, either in concept or on the actual tabletop, since the late 2000s, when I scraped together a handful of dwarves to play A Song of Blades & Heroes with my old game club back in Chicago.

Since then, my collection of dwarves has increased consistently. Models became units. Units became a small army, then a larger army. Now I’ve got a fairly vast collection of painted dwarves, ready to undertake the quest for the ancient city of Hearthspire. Here’s the latest family photo, taken last month when I mustered the whole group for a game of Hobgoblin with John.

After that game, I felt inspired to paint up some reinforcements to further bolster the dwarven throng. Hobgoblin is an old school rank-and-flank type of game that encourages large armies. So I assessed the current state of my dwarf army and identified the distinct need for some elite, heavily armored dwarven infantry to anchor the center of my battle line.

I found what I was looking for in a big box full of various units and figures from Scibor Monstrous Miniatures – one of my all-time favorite makers of chunky, characterful dwarf models. (Yes, it’s true, I have so many Scibor kits in my dragon hoard that they have their own dedicated box.)

These guys were a lot of fun to paint up. I’m not always fond of bare heads (something about my lack of precision and patience when painting faces) but these guys weren’t too difficult.

I painted these guys up over the summer, and they’ve yet to see the battlefield. I’m sure they’ll eventually take to the field in a game of Hobgoblin – I played a session earlier this year with John and got my butt kicked. (And I convinced myself the reason I lost is because I didn’t have a sufficient critical mass of armored dwarvess. Problem solved!!)

Stay tuned for more content in general from Comrade’s Wargames. After a long drought, I’m easing back into the saddle to share more quality hobby content with my tens of readers.

THE DOOMED Battle Report and Review

Posted by Comrade on October 10, 2023
Posted in: Posts. Tagged: , , , , , , , , . 8 Comments

Last month a new game landed like a hand grenade right in the midst of Comrade’s Wargames – THE DOOMED, the new apocalyptic sci-fi skirmish game from Osprey Publishing, written by Chris McDowall.

My group had been eagerly awaiting the release of this game. The premise sounds delicious – warbands of grimdark sci-fi soldiers battle across a benighted planet overrun with nameless horrors. The setting is not defined in great detail, but it seems clear that THE DOOMED is aimed at baroque sci-fi, the sort which features demons, inquisitors, cyborgs, cultists, and motley bands of hardened soldiers. Sound familiar? It certainly tracks with what we’re all about here at Comrade’s Wargames.

We got in a game toward the beginning of October, so I’ll intersperse some photos and impressions of our game throughout this post. Here’s the setup for our game: an abandoned laboratory.

THE DOOMED (sorry, caps lock just seems to pop on whenever I type the name of this game) is a skirmish-sized game meant to be played on a smallish table filled with terrain. The maximum size of any warband is eight models – no more than that. There are 4 flavorful warband lists to build your forces. In addition to two opposing warbands, every game features a Horror – a chaotic monster of some sort, usually with a few weaker minions nearby. Each Horror has its own set of special rules that govern its behavior on the battlefield and the behavior of its minions. Along with the Horror, each scenario also specifies some nexuses, which are basically “weak points” on the battlefield that must be defeated before the main Horror can die. Imagine egg sacs, or power stones, or prey carcasses … as long as those exist, the Horror is effectively “shields up” and largely invulnerable. The nexuses must be dispatched in order to defeat the big boss.

As you can imagine, this was an absolutely delightful game concept. Player-vs-player, with the added twist of a rampaging spoiler faction that operates under its own set of rules. To be clear, THE DOOMED is not intended to be a competitive game. Instead, it is designed to represent savage combat between warbands where the greatest threat is probably not the opposing player … it is the Horror that stalks the tunnels, slaying without prejudice or preference. The game is designed to promote collaborative gameplay alongside traditional matchups. Will you join forces for a turn or two to punish the big bad, and then go back to gleefully slaughtering the opposing warband? Who will break the gentlemen’s agreement first?

Our game got underway with some cautious exploration by both warbands. Inquisitor Ash, commander of John’s contingent of feudal sci-fi guardsmen, led her warriors to examine the first laboratory.

Meanwhile, my Dark Mechanicum warband led by Ozmas Hyperfane, the Sanctified Ferromancer of the Sixth Liturgy, filtered into the abandoned science facility by another route, which unfortunately brought them into close proximity to THE DEVOURER (i.e. the Horror that we selected for this scenario). The Devourer activated and promptly began pursuing my Dark Mechanicum warband.

One of the most innovative aspects of THE DOOMED is that there are no movement rates or weapon ranges. You basically nominate a model, describe where you want to move, and then roll a dice vs. your figure’s Quality to see if you are successful. If you succeed, you move directly to that point. If you fail, your opponent places your model anywhere along the route you described. Yikes! Ranged combat operates similarly … everything is understood to be in range, so the only real limits are line of sight and intervening terrain and cover.

I’ve played games like this before, and they really require – nay, demand – an incredibly dense terrain setup. Thankfully, that happens to align with our interests here at Comrade’s Wargames, and we are blessed with a wealth of beautiful handmade terrain to adorn our battlefields. Just something to be aware of it as you’re reading through THE DOOMED rulebook.

Even as the Devourer closed in and its devilish minions spawned at random points throughout the battlefield, my warband tried to remain focused on the objective, which was to occupy and seize two of the three laboratories. The labs themselves had a variety of nasty rules in effect to make them into truly deadly combat zones.

As the halls rang with the sound of desperate combat, somehow Ozmas Hyperfane barged his way into one of the labs and encountered a puddle of viscera which represented one of the Devourer’s nexuses. Aha! Its weak points were revealed!

Before Ozmas could stomp the goo puddle, he had to dispatch John’s feudal guardsman. Thus our first player-vs-player combat was joined!

THE DOOMED has a fairly simple combat resolution system, so it was easy to get up to speed. Weapons have straightforward profiles emphasizing the number of dice rolled to attack or the number of dice rolled to deal damage, along with a special rule or two. The rules system in general seems to play second fiddle to the voluminous sections devoted to the various Horrors, their lairs, their henchmen, and their in-game capabilities. Truly, this is a scenario-based game, and the star of every scenario is The Horror.

The Devourer quickly picked up the scent and smashed his way into the laboratory to confront Ozmas Hyperfane. The confrontation was decidedly one-sided – the poor cyborg was smashed into pulp and wreckage by the enraged beast. Oops … there goes my leader! How could I possibly carry on without this key piece of my warband?

Meanwhile, Inquisitor Ash and her cohort of goons was doing a good job of clearing and securing the other labs. Demonic dogs (spawn of the Devourer) continuously menaced her and her warriors as they struggled to gain the upper hand. More critically, they were responsible for destroying the final two nexus points, thus making the Devourer vulnerable to lethal attacks.

And about that Devourer … to put it mildly, he decimated my warband, slaying them almost to a man. Temporarily out of targets, the big guy stepped out of the laboratory – and into range of my cyborg railgunner, who proceeded to pop him at range with a series of spectacular dice rolls, followed by whiffed defense rolls by the Devourer, which snuffed out the big guy and ended our first game of THE DOOMED.

This was a tremendously satisfying game that brought together several of my favorite tabletop gaming concepts: skirmish sized games with warbands comprised of unique models, AI-driven NPC factions, and objective-based scenario play. John’s terrain was lovely, and his newly painted Devourer model (plus those demonic dogs) was a real treat to get onto the battlefield. The game itself is definitely designed to encourage some fun kitbashing and DIY terrain creation. The massive list of unique Horrors in the rulebook, combined with an equally comprehensive array of scenarios, ensures that we’ll play this one again soon … and that no game will be precisely the same.

Grimdark Future: Tendrils of Corruption

Posted by Comrade on October 3, 2023
Posted in: Posts. Tagged: , , , , , , , , . 5 Comments

We got together earlier in September for a game that could very well represent the grand finale of our Grimdark Future campaign.

Recall that we launched our campaign (The Cauldron) at the beginning of 2023 as an escalation league, wherein each player would start with a handful of models each and play smaller skirmish games of Grimdark Future Firefight, slowly adding more models as we went along through the spring and summer.

I’m happy to report that this approach proved to be a smashing success! We all stayed motivated to build new armies, one unit at a time. At our height, we had 8 players participating in monthly games. Now we’re approaching the end of 2023 and we all have decent sized armies that have gained some experience on the tabletop…mission accomplished, I’d say!

So, this game was a bit of a bookend for our highly successful campaign.

We had 4 players for this game, and everybody wanted to bring some of their larger, more expensive models (tanks, mostly), so we decided to go for a larger 2-vs-2 team game. We set the game in the upper reaches of Ardent Maxima, a hive city on the planet Gamma Euphorion Prime that was in the process of falling to the forces of darkness. Daniel’s newly painted Realm of Battle terrain tiles provided a stunning backdrop for this game.

Chaos Space Marines from the Death Guard legion had allied with Genestealer Cultists boiling up from the depths of the underhive to push the defenders of the Imperium back to the very highest levels of Ardent Maxima. After the destruction of the monument to St. Deneia in last month’s game, the Imperial defenders retreated to link up with their Eldar allies.

The forces of the Imperium and their Eldar allies made their stand in a vast plaza that had been defiled by thick, fibrous tendrils of fleshy matter. The origin of these throbbing purple members was unknown – were they some organic artifice of the Genestealer Cult made manifest, or perhaps a symptom of a planetwide plague delivered by the followers of Nurgle? No one dared ask.

John’s Imperial Guard took to the field alongside Josh’s Eldar – or Aeldari, if you prefer. They had some hard-hitting units, but they would be hard pressed to counter the advance of the forces of evil as the game got underway.

The game began with some long-range firepower as the armored vehicles opened up on each other. My Chaos Predator (a new addition to my army, nice!) dug in behind a makeshift barricade and unloaded its weaponry on the distant shapes of a couple Leman Russ battle tanks, barely visible behind the haze of dust and smoke.

With a roar of combustion engines, Daniel mobilized his fleet of trucks and began advancing on the objectives. Cultists wielding a variety of improvised weaponry scaled the crumbling masonry of a shattered building and brought fearsome firepower to bear on the Imperial armor.

The cultists’ advance brought them crashing headlong into the Eldar vanguard. With a guttural howl, the cultists swept into the frail, spindly looking space elves, blasting the infantry apart with heavy caliber weaponry and rending their grav tank into utter wreckage.

On the left flank, the foul daemon engines of Nurgle roared to life, following the cultists as they advanced to seize an objective located athwart the rusted TECHNOBRIDGE.

Even as the Death Guard daemon engines were pressing their advance on the right flank, realspace flickered and frost scabbed the pitted metal flooring as reinforcements arrived from the Warp: a foul Daemon Prince of Nurgle and a trio of battle-hardened Blightlord Terminators.

These lumbering behemoths arrived in the Imperials’ backfield and immediately commenced sowing havoc and despair. Terminators are jacks of all trades in Grimdark Future – OK at everything, great at nothing. Their mere presence had the desired effect of ratcheting up the tension. The defenders’ line appeared fragile – would it falter??

Ultimately, the TECHNOBRIDGE did not fall to the forces of Chaos. It was defended, at great cost I might add, by Eldar Dark Reapers led by Maugan Ra, backed up by the reliable firepower of the two Leman Russ tanks.

The defense of the TECHNOBRIDGE seemed to stiffen the spine for the Imperial and Eldar defenders, and they mounted a late surge against another objective located within a ruined multi-story building.

The timely arrival of some Imperial Guard Stormtroopers/Kasrkin/Tempestus Scions, backed up by the graceful shape of the Eldar Wraithlord, put the objective into serious jeopardy. There was only one solution – pulp those stormtroopers into a fine red paste by driving Daniel’s rockgrinder truck through the middle of the them! Yee-haw!

This action was followed up by a volley of fire from the Chaos Predator, which had been serving as effective fire support for most of the game.

With the endgame approaching, the Predator rumbled out of its fighting position and motored toward the central objective, located amid some puddles of toxic waste (dangerous terrain, in the parlance of Grimdark Future).

That bold advance was enough to seal the victory for the forces of Chaos. This was a very close fought game that definitely could have gone either way up until the final turn. Those are the best types of games – the ones where both sides are competitive until the very end.

So, this may prove to be the final game of The Cauldron, our grimdark/Inq28 campaign that has inspired a frenzy of painting and terrain building over the last 10 months. If you haven’t read through our past battle reports, do yourself a favor and take in the majesty of The Cauldron on Comrade’s Wargames. You’ll be glad you did.

Once and Future Death Guard Heroes

Posted by Comrade on September 1, 2023
Posted in: Posts. Tagged: , , , , , . 3 Comments

I recently acquired and painted up several of the Space Marine Heroes Series 3: Death Guard – for the second time this decade! More on that later.

These models were originally released a number of years ago, primarily for the Japanese market, and they were only recently released earlier this year in the USA. They’re packaged and sold as individual blind boxes that contain 1 random miniature from the 8 models in the series.

I bought a couple of these guys and then traded for a few of the others. I ended up with a duplicate of the standard bearer guy, which gave me an opportunity to convert up the surplus model. He’s the guy on the left in the photo below.

But here’s the interesting (and slightly silly) backstory: I’ve actually owned these models before, back in 2020. When they were released for the Japanese market, they were commonly sold as a sealed case containing one of each of the models in the line, including the Malignant Plaguecaster that appeared less frequently and was sort of a chase rare. I bought my sealed case in December 2020 and then promptly lost interest in my Death Guard army for a while.

Over the next two years, the Death Guard Heroes set went out of print and started to command a premium price on the secondary market. I did a sober analysis of my still-sealed box – did I really need more Plague Marines? Would I truly get around to building and painting these guys? I wisely decided to “sell into the hype” and made a tidy little profit on my box.

I figured that was the end of the story, yet here we are – I’ve re-purchased those same models (for a much more reasonable, non-premium price, I must admit). BUT! I’ve also finished painting them, so I win in the end.

Anyway, it’s a silly little story that just goes to show how much I enjoy regular, run-of-the-mill Plague Marines as the backbone for my Death Guard army.

As a bonus, here’s one more Plague Marine that I painted up around the same time. He’s converted from one of the Chaos Space Marine Chosen from the Dark Vengeance boxed set, with some extra bits from my Putrid Blightkings leftovers.