Judge Dredd - Kind of a Reboot

Tonight marked our first campaign games using the new edition of the Judge Dredd miniatures game. We'd made the decision to continue running our existing forces from the original campaign, which has given rise to a few inconsistencies (robodogs now have completely different stats, some mercenaries aren't even an option any more) but nothing we couldn't figure out.

In preparation for this, I painted up a few new models for the Judgement League. This was to take advantage of the fact that it's now possible for me to actually spend some of the credits my force has been accumulating so far, and takes the full force up to 8 models with a scarily high total value.

L-R : Outlaw, Captain Metropolis, Wreckage and Bluestreak.
The new additions to the Judgement League.

As it happens, I'm also running an Ape gang in the campaign. These are a newer force with less experience, specifically so that I have something to fight opponents with smaller forces. We have a new player, Dale, with a zombie force that's only played a couple of games so this seemed like a good idea. So guess which force I wound up using tonight? Put it this way, the new models didn't see the tabletop.

My first game was against Dan, who's been using robots since the start of the campaign but has just started a new force (robots again) so that he can rebuild using the new game rules from the start. This was a fun game, although I had the lion's share of the luck this time out. High point of the game was when Doris, one of my gorillas, blasted Dan's mercenary executioner droid out of the sky with a double-barreled stump gun then laid out his demolition droid two seconds later. In the end, Dan's one remaining droid ran away while I only lost a single chimp.

The new game rules worked really well. I've found myself taking a completely different route with regard to talents as the force advances, which I guess shows that the changes have added some viable new options.

Second game was against Adrian's cursed earth desperadoes, another new force and one that he's really gone to town on with some of the conversions (although I suspect he may tire of me referring to one of his lovingly converted mutants as "fish boy"). This was considerably closer than the first game. Ady's Klegg mercenary took out one of my gorillas before I could return the favour and his robodogs swarmed another. In the end though, the fact that my apes were higher level with better stats meant that I made the most of the long range gunfight and got another victory under my belt.

Incidentally, the other game going on was Chief Judge Cal (under the control of Andy) vs Dale's zombie horde. Since Dale was so badly outnumbered we allowed him to take zombies as mercenaries (not normally allowed) and so he was fielding a total of 86 zombies plus a few other, random models. He still lost, and there were many, many casualties. But the game scaled up to that size of battle really easily, which speaks volumes in and of itself.

So yeah, new rules are a big improvement over the previous version (which I was already a huge fan of). Looking forward to next month's campaign games, maybe next time I can unleash the League.