Playing Kings of War with my son

Well playing might not be the right word. But I did have a muck around game with my undead and humans with my son Zac which he enjoyed - especially when he got to roll a lot of dice. And f you have played KoW before you will know that it is a dice fest - a very enjoyable one at that. Anyway I took a few pics of the game which was interesting to run. Here they are with some brief comments re what I learnt at the end:

Humans with ogre and giant allies

Undead

Zac overseeing the undead line (he wanted to play the werewolves!)

undead first moves

Zac look on as the forces clash in the centre 

The ogres hit the Revenant King in the flank - he routed

The soul reavers (chaos warrior figures) and undead cavalry destroy the human centre

Giants rout a unit of skelly spearmen that held them up for a couple of turns

After dispatching the foot and mounted knights the reavers turn on the ogres who have been held up by a horde of skellies

Mounted liche charges the human cannon battery

Wraiths and undead trolls finish off the other unit of ogres

The pitiful remnants of the human army prepare for the final onslaught

Where it finished when I called it

So what did I learn? Well from the perspective of the undead the reavers are well worth it and I need to add a unit of mounted reavers to my undead army. I have sufficient mounted chaos warriors for this so all I need to do is paint them. The horde of skeletons did their job too holding up the best foot troops the human army had. The wyvern rider wasn't well handled as I attacked too quickly with him and as a result he got hit in the flank. In hindsight he is better hitting units that have already been engaged on their flank. The catapults were pretty useless too - the more games of KoW I play the more I think artillery isn't worth it.

As for the humans? Well for starters I need to upgrade the troop of cavalry to a regiment. I need to add some better units too which I do have undercoated ready for painting - another unit of foot knights and mounted sergeants. I could add a horde of retainers with double handed weapons (pole arms in the KoW lists) which might be handy too. Bowmen are crap and I only field them to add numbers. The problem I had with the army was that it contained a lot of average troops but not enough heavy hitters that are capable of destroying enemy units reasonably quickly. And ultimately that was the difference - once the undead breached the line in a couple of places they could simply roll it up with flank attacks. The humans couldn't breach the line in the first place. Mind you I used humans and ogre allies against goblins down at my local wargame club about a month ago and the result was the opposite - indeed I was somewhat surprised how one sided it was. So it might simply be an issue with not having enough of the better troops which I can fix easily.