As promised, I took my dwarf army to the local hobby shop, and

engaged in a pair of battles with my friends' elf force.

We played two battles in succession, and we didn't change the field's setup between battles,

(Except for moving our strongholds) though we did deploy from different sides each time we played.

The field of slaughter lies silent before the storm.

The armies weren't complete, unfortunately. My dwarf garrison used slips of paper to represent many units, and my elven foes used Roman infantrymen and riderless horses to represent their swordselves and warbeasts.

Dwarf forces rally to defend a tunnel entrance into their underground metropolis.

Poorly represented elves rank up in a loose formation,  prepared
to capture the mountainhome at all costs.

A unit of gundwarves hides behind a row of sturdy miners,
the two units attempting to flank the invaders.

Their plan is cut short by the swift advance of
the elves' giant crossbow, which obliterates the
whole group of gundwarves in one shot.

The surviving miners flee into a ruined town,
where I have been collecting some stronger units
in an attempt to capture this central position.

The elves also want this area, however, as their war lions and the elf wizard
general himself have gathered at the base of a hill next to the ruined town.

A unit of dwarf-led war bears (Marked "Bears with Beards" on their representative slip
of paper), coordinate a sudden attack with a solitary dwarf ambusher to kill the elf
general and win the battle in one decisive blow.

Well, that was fast. Here's a blurry shot of the dwarves posing with
their kill. Yay! This was so quick we decided to play a second game,
the dwarf counterattack on their elf aggressors.

The second battles' pictures were all victim to a glitch, unfortunately. I was only able to save one image-a poor shot, that would otherwise have been discarded, of some dwarf elite units waiting to spring an ambush on a procession of equally advanced elf war machines. The elves were ambushed as intended, (The whole game revolved around me trying to stop this huge advancing group of deadly units clumped together), but amid the carnage the elf army was able to sneak two of their war lions behind my general, killing her while the main area of battle continued to stalemate.Suffice to say the battle did not go well for the dwarves after that. I had some nice shots of my brave warriors desperately trying to retreat from the elves, but they were lost with the rest.

So there you have it. Two quick battles, one win, one loss. The game I'm using is hordes of the things, the rules of which can be found on wikipedia for free. It's a lot of fun but way too random to be played very seriously, and as you saw, often all too quick to play. I'll be seeing you all next week, with some tutorials on how to paint freehand.

Take care!