Kharadron Cornered, Saved by Cards: a Weirdly Brutal Spearhead Game
A battle report that felt completely wrong for Kharadron
We had one of those games that immediately turns into post-match theorycrafting, rules archaeology, and laughing at how absurd the whole thing was.
This time Kharadron Overlords got pushed into a corner of the board almost from the very start. Instead of doing all the things we usually associate with KO — mobility, clever positioning, flying around, picking angles — the game turned into four rounds of desperate survival and a straight-up brawl.
And somehow, against all logic, it still got pulled back.
Pinned early, punching for survival
As end3r put it after the game: KO basically got run over in the corner right at the beginning and then spent most of the battle trying not to get tabled.
That already sounds bad.
It gets better: the dice were apparently on their usual anti-Kharadron agenda, so the shooting that should have helped stabilize things mostly did not. Which made the whole game even funnier, because this ended up being probably the least Kharadron-like Kharadron game possible:
- almost no flying tricks,
- almost no maneuver game,
- very little payoff from shooting,
- and a lot more “fine, we do this with our bare fists then” than expected.
That mental image alone is worth the game report.
The comeback came from the cards
The really fun bit is that the game looked grim for a long time, but near the end the cards started lining up just right. Not in a clean, controlled, textbook way — more in a “how is this even still alive?” way.
And that is honestly part of why Spearhead is so enjoyable. Sometimes your plan works. Sometimes your army does what it says on the tin. And sometimes your elite sky-dwarfs stop being elite sky-dwarfs and just cling to the table edge until the deck finally throws them a rope.
That was this game.
By the end, what looked like a prolonged defensive disaster somehow turned into a result that could be salvaged. Not elegant. Not thematic. But definitely memorable.
The real second half: arguing about windows
Of course, no Age of Sigmar evening is complete without a rules discussion that starts simple and ends with everyone understanding less than before.
After the game we went deep into visibility, cover, and obscuring terrain in Spearhead. The key question was beautifully practical:
Can you shoot through a window in a big terrain piece?
We spent a good chunk of time untangling that one.
Our rough takeaway after the dust settled:
- large terrain with Obscuring works like a top-down, 2D check,
- so if the target is behind it, you generally cannot shoot through the window just because you can physically see the model,
- smaller terrain without that keyword works more like normal line of sight,
- so fences and similar pieces are much more intuitive,
- and yes, this is the kind of rule that makes your instincts fight the actual wording.
At one point the summary was basically: we played it correctly, but for the wrong reasons.
Which, honestly, is a very relatable hobby moment.
Good game, confusing rules, great evening
The best part of the whole conversation was that despite the bizarre flow of the match, the bad rolls, and the rules headache afterward, the overall feeling was very simple:
it was just great fun to play.
And that is really the important bit. Weird games are often the ones we remember best. The armies do something completely off-brand, the rules send us down a rabbit hole, and afterward we immediately want to set up the next one.
Also, there may or may not now be a growing temptation to look for some completely brain-off barbarians with no shooting whatsoever, since if the guns refuse to cooperate, maybe the answer is to stop pretending and just charge.
Relatable.
Final thoughts
A very odd game for Kharadron Overlords, a very funny post-game rules spiral, and exactly the kind of evening that makes us want to meet up more often.
If this is what our “non-standard” Spearhead games look like, we are absolutely in.