Our play group has about 10 or so games in with Chaos in the Old World and I need some help with Khorne. The first few games Khorne dominated until people realized that they could run away from him and deny him turns of the dial.

Ever since those early games Khorne has struggled. The other three gods seems to be able to delay playing cards/summing due to more cheap cultists and more cheap Chaos Cards. This seems to force Khorne into having to commit early allowing the other gods to avoid him.

Of course Khorne has a few tricks, the card to keep people from summoning away from you, however you have to actually draw the card and not have it nullified by one of the other Gods.

Due to Khorne's low number of cultists and the one toughness on their Bloodletters Khorne seems to have trouble getting domination or coming in first in ruination making a VP win very difficult. As long as the other gods are paying attention they seem to easily deny Khorne a second spin of the wheel.

I don't even think the other gods "have it in" for Khorne, it just seems that they can stall by playing 0 casting cards or 1 point cultists and then see where I play my cards or my 2 point warriors and work around that. More and more our players are being concious of dial turns and making sure that a majority of the time no god gets more than one turn (often 2-3 gods tie for the most so no one gets any extra).

I'd love some ideas on how Khorne can keep the blood flowing. Slaanesh is winning our leaderboard but usually Tzeenth and Nurgle are close behind in the VP race while Khorne is stcuk in the middle on VP's and far away from a dial win.

Thanks for any help.

OK, Khorne is pretty hard to win with in an experienced group. However, consider the following:

1) Take the cultist upgrade first. This lets you spread out little attack dice everywhere without committing as much.

2) In the early game Slaanesh often doesn't have much mobility, nor does Nurgle, if they want to get a dial tick. Wait in the places they want to use. Summon a cultist first turn in either Bretonnia or the Empire to give yourself flexibility and try to hit the regions with nobles

3) Summoning the Bloodthirster somewhere is not stupid because you can move it with The Blood God's Call later. This pays dividends later. In fact I have seen Bloodthirster in the Empire as a succcessful, if expensive, first turn strategy

Even though it is in bad form, since these forums are not used too much I figured I'd reply to my own post and touch on Phobiandarkmoon's comments.

After two more games Khorne has roared back and is doing quite well for himself. Our group took some internet advice and some ideas of our own and Khorne won the first game of the night and came close the second. In the first game it was Bloodthirster in the Empire followed by four cultists. A first turn Bloodthirster means no Teleporting Khorne too far away from everyone else. On the second turn Khorne played some cards and some Bloodletters and was able to dominate the Empire and grab a spin and put it at 8 Ruination Tokens.

This caused some other players to jump onto the sword of Khorne in attempt to get in on the Ruination. Khorne dominated it again and got first in Ruination as well. He then used the card to summon his Bloodthirster somewhere else and started over.

Khorne won handily with both a Dial and a VP win (a "super win").

The second game started with the World Event Card saying no battles in two regions (Empire and Bretonnia). Khorne began with a similar start, going into Kislev with the Bloodthirster and bringing the 4 cultists. This allowed an immediate domination. The no battles also caused the Empire and Bretonnia to get ruined very quickly as everyone could pile in their cultists without fear of losing them. This put Nurgle in a bad spot. Kislev was occupied by Khorne and the Empire and Bretonnia were quickly ruined, leaving one populous spot on the board, Estalia. Khorne teleported over there and there was a nice big orgy of destruction and it too was ruined in short order leaving Nurgle with no more spin options.

Slaanesh managed a dial victory on the same turn that Khorne achieve a VP victory, giving Slaanesh a narrow win, but Khorne was very competative and if he'd been paying better attention he probably could have stopped the dial win.

tl;dr version

1) Dropping the Bloodthirster first (it can't be teleported) and following up with 4 cultists seems good. Try finding a populous region with either a noble or Warpstone to ensure people have to come to you at some point since it will be quickly ruined.
2) Since no one wants to be killed by you, you often have regions to yourself to dominate and ruin while the other 3 gods trade off getting first or second.

Glad I could help - in the end Khorne's first turn strategy should probably depend a little on the cards in his hand, but that's a matter of learn which cards are useful for what srategy

How did the Bloodthirster and four cultists (ie, five figures) dominate the Empire, which has Resistance 5, on turn one?

Kushiel said:

Reread carefully - he only talks about domination on turn two, admittedly as part of the same paragraph.

Or in short, he didn't

Not in game two, Phobiandarkmoon.

Mugio said:

Emphasis added by me.

So how did he dominate? We know there weren't any Skaven in the Empire, since the only OW card was Electors Sue for Peace. I can't think of any other way he could have dominated the Empire, unless his group didn't understand the rules for domination and have been playing that they need to meet, not exceed, a region's resistance value.

In game two he camped at Kislev at the start, as mentioned just prior to the sentence you emphasised .

Dam said:

Ah. Yes, there's that. Thanks.