First game of 6th - 4 player mayhem

Yesterday our club had its first game of 6th edition. We decided to have a 4 player game on a big board. I thought we were going to have a 2v2 game but instead we had an all vs all game. 1 of us had actually played the new rules, 2 of us had read them thoroughly and the other one hadn't looked at them at all. This of course made the game a lot longer..... a lot lot longer..... We got to the end of turn 4 by the time we gave up. I'd nearly lost everything by this point anyway.

Waaagh! Dakka Dakka Dakka Dakka!

We rolled for the random mission and made up our own deployment to make things fit. We got the relic mission (like capture the flag). Carl got the point for first killed unit by killing one of Jons defilers with his first shots. It was our first experience of the new system with armour points. The defiler died from loss of armour. It was a strange experience being killed from immobilised results.

Jon looking happy as usual.

I found the whole armour points thing to be quite nice. I killed 2 razorbacks with glancing shots from my nob bikers and my dakkajets. Ian didn't like the fact that you now have to have even more dice or markers on your tanks. I like the new system because I tend to use more combat style armies and rarely take any high strength shooty units.

This bloody thing just wouldn't die!!!!

Combat is so much different now. I absolutely hate overwatch shots, it shreds my orks before they get into combat. Challenges are a mixed bag I think, it can really screw around with your squad leaders. A nob with a power klaw in combat can now get annihilated in a challenge or hide at the back and do nothing. Not really a good thing. I think challenges should have been kept to independent characters. Hammer of wrath isn't as good as I initially thought it was, I thought it was simply every charging model got an I10 hit but its only the ones that make it in base to base that get it. This messed up big time on my charge as the one model that I got into base to base was the one issuing my challenge, the challenge went ahead and stuff got moved. I also hadn't read about the whole piling in only on your initiative value. That was weird and messy. I thought you simply piled in by initiative and then work out the hitting not a case of actually moving when its your turn to hit. This being the case, nothing piled into my nob bikers to get hit by the I10 hammer of wrath as I'd planned. Oh well, it was all for learning anyway.

Walkers seemed really fragile in this game. I hope that's not a trend I'll see continue.

Things I've learnt so far:

• combats are dangerous to charge into, you can get shot to hell before you even get to hit things.
• flyers are cool but you need to think ahead about where its going. 
• Look out Sir! is a pain in the arse. I liked the old wound allocation system just fine.
• Armour points are good. I used to hate getting a ton of glancing hits that do nothing.
• Armour 12 flyers, i.e. stormravens and vendettas/Valkyries are an absolute pain to try and kill now.
• Bikers rock. No more instant death on my toughness 5 nobs!
• Feel no Pain rocks on my nob bikers too. Lascannon to the face... don't care, didn't feel it lol.
• The leader traits thing is random and annoying. I got the scoring unit one for my leader, it was pointless for the game we played. Carl got a good one and I can't remember what Ian and Jon got. I think Jon forgot to even roll one.
• Don't play a 4 player game when you're learning a new ruleset.

Tomorrow I get  to play a game of 5th because my friend doesn't have a new rulebook. I'm going to get really confused and my head may or may not explode.

Game 4 of the Alaris Dream campaign

Today's game was a random objective game. There were 5 games on 6'x4' boards with one on one 1500 point games. There were 5 markers on each table, one in each quarter and one in the middle. Everyone was handed secret objective cards that were for their eyes only. The card detailed which 2 objectives were yours. Due to the secret and random nature of it some players had objectives in their opponents deployment zone and I'm sure some would have both players going for at least one of the same objective.

Each of the 5 tables had different terrain and this in turn had different effects on the game. Our force commander had asked us previously in the week if there were any preferences as to which board we wanted to play on. I picked the swamp board. The swamp counts the entire board, minus hills, as difficult terrain that grants 4+ cover. There's also a chance of your models being eaten by a swamp monster. I picked this board specifically so I could pull some C'Tan Writhing Worldscape shenanigans with Imotekhs nightfight and some scarab farming.

I won the roll to pick sides and go first. We could pick any side of the table. So I picked one of the short sides to keep Imotekh as far away from the enemy as possible. If he died then he'd be gone from the campaign permanently. 

My opponent was Space Wolves. His army was mech mainly with a squad of long fangs and a dreadnought.

Before the game started I had an ambush tactic to use. I decided on ambushing his Long Fangs with Imotekh's warrior squad. Imotekh's flamer attack massacred the squad killing 3 of the missile launchers. The relic Imotekh gained in the last battle came in use for the return barrage of fire. 2 missile launchers and a bolt pistol fired at Imotekh and his squad. The bolt pistol missed and the shot was reflected back, killing the sergeant (Yay relic!), one of the missile's was save due to cover, the other knocked down a warrior who promptly got back up again. The 2 remaining Long Fangs then cacked their britches and decided to leg it in the opposite direction but they regrouped at the beginning of the game.

Once the game got started it pretty much revolved around me getting my close combat elements to the enemy while Imotekh blatted things with lightning. He killed 2 rhinos and a razorback. Probably the best he's ever done with it. But the important thing was that the nightfight was keeping away fire from my warriors which were sitting nicely on objectives.

My Wraiths got to the enemy first but had been decimated by Vindicator fire by the time they got there. They managed to destroy the main gun on the vindicator before finally falling to their injuries. 

A turn later my scarabs got to the enemy. The didn't really kill much except for the dreadnought, taking 20 off its armour value lol. They mainly acted as a tar pit for the 2 squads of wolves and the lord that had got out of exploding rhinos.

My C'Tan killed a lone dude and I then made a hideous tactical error and charged him into a combat already going on with a horde of scarabs and wolves. The scarabs died in droves, loosing combat by 12. The poor C'Tan, after taking not a single wound, then fell due to fearless saves. He only killed one marine with his explosion :( After this his effect of making terrain dangerous was lost.

After this all happened, the Spyders finally made it into combat. They didn't do much either. They did manage to chomp through a few marines but eventually they had all fallen bar one that was in combat with the Wolf Lord.

At the end of the game my warriors had been sitting on their objectives the whole time and I'd kept the Wolves at bay. They held one objective and I held 2. I got 6 kill points and he got 5. Each objective was worth d666 (3d6 sort of) points, due to some lucky rolling I ended up with over 1200 points :D

It was a fun game but I really ballsed up with the C'Tan. I could have put the scarabs onto better targets too. I didn't realise that Space Wolves are so damn annoying in combat against mediocre combat units like scarabs.

Game 2 of the club campaign

I forgot my camera so no pics today.

Last night was an awesome, fun and truly bizarre game. I'll try to describe it as best I can. First off, I was a bit hyper from a crazy drive to make sure I got to the club as quickly as possible as I finished work later than normal. I got held up by an accident on the A1 and my car ran out of fuel near the club due to a dodgy fuel guage. I made it there half an hour late buzzing from adrenaline and having not eaten much. I dread to think how annoying I was last night.

Anyway, on to the game. It was a 3v3 game for random objectives. We had to search buildings instead of shooting and on a d6 roll of a 6 there was an objective. Also to make things way more crazy there was a set of tunnels underground accessible via buildings in the main table. These tunnels were represented with space hulk terrain on another table. The rooms in the tunnels were also possible objectives. We also had restictions to our force org, we can only have 1 elite/fast/heavy/hq if we take 2 troops, 2 if we take 3 troops or 3 if we take 4 troops. In this game each player only had 750 points, so the restrictions were quite limiting. We also had restrictions on max wounds, MCs, saves and vehicle armour.

On my side (the bad guys), I had necrons led by imotekh, 20 warriors, cryptek with chronometron and 5 wraiths with whip coils. Dale had orks, 90 boyz and a warboss. Jon had nurgley chaos marines and some plague bearers.

On the enemy side the corpse gods followers had: Blood angels led by Dante, lots of jump pack stuff and space wolves with erm wolfy stuff and long fangs.

Imotekh messed up the game quite a bit. We stole the initiative because of him and he made it night fight for the first 3 turns meaning we barely got shot at all. His lightning was a bit pants, killing only 7 or 8 marines I think.

The whole game revolved around trying to get guys into the tunnels and our armies moving towards the middle of the table. Two objectives were found and held by our side in the tunnels and one was found and held by the space doggies. My necrons fared alright, I lost 2 wraiths and a handful of warriors. My wraiths killed a captain and a squad of honour guard barely taking a scratch from them. The orks died in droves, kind of what orks do though. The nurgle forces did well holding 2 objectives and killing Dante.

The blood angels died in droves too but the space wolves did well, killing loads of orks.

So in the end the bad guys won. Dante now can't come back for the rest of the campaign (yay). Imotekh survived to fight another day. It was an amazing game. Haven't had this much fun playing 40k for a while. Congrats to the Guardians of Tyr for organizing it. Thanks Ian and Barrie.

I hope this wasn't too rambling or incoherent. I'm knackered and relying on my iPhone to autocorrect and hopefully make this all make sense lol.