Day 1 - Games 1, 2 & 3 - Throne of Skulls Doubles Tournament Feb 2018 - Part 2

Following on from our first post HERE about our participation with our Astra Militarum army in the Warhammer World Doubles tournament in Feb 2018 and Rich's post about slow play and our experience at combating in the tournament HERE I am going to cover the games we played across 2 posts.

On day 1 we were scheduled to play 3 games and this is the story of those three games - not in massive detail but a selection of highlights and a recap of our experiences of each game. Day 2 will be covered in a future post.

Prelude
We were going to the tournament to win. Have a great time yes, but win. As you may know from our previous posts Rich and I didn't have much time to play before the tournament but had done our research and preparation as much as we possibly could and were ready...

Friday Night
We had arranged to get to Warhammer World on the Friday night to play a quick friendly(?) game against Dave (@errantwolfdave) and Chris (@ChrisFrosin) to test our theories and strategies and to give me my first play of Astra Militarum in 8th edition - eek! (Our list is HERE if you are interested)

The game was super fun and was great to meet Chris and his Necrons for the first time and catch up with Dave and his Space Wolves. We lost!! What?!! How did we lose??!! To be honest I expected to struggle a bit as this was the first time that we had played our army and we made a few mistakes:

Early on against the pesky Necrons

- We deployed poorly - it was our first time and we set a screen of infantry up but too close in to our corner deployment which meant that we left a couple of tanks outside the line!!
- We put Pask on the side closest to the enemy and so he got targeted straight away.
- The main mistake - we took too long and run out of time! We played 4 turns and if you have read Rich's post (HERE) you will know we need 5 at least! If we had played that extra turn we should have won the game. Dave had no models left on the board and Chris only had a handful whereas we had most of our army left. Gah!

Overall a good game though and very tight. It was a good benchmark for what we needed to work on for the next day so we swiftly reconvened to the pub to talk tactics...

Lost Patrol - Games Workshop board game preview

As you will know if you follow Twitter (@4dadsapocalypse) or have read any of my posts, I play a lot of games other than 40k.

Now that GW is releasing lines of board games that link to 40k or the heresy my juices are really flowing. Battle at Calth, Execution Force and Deathwatch have all been recent hits with the added bonus of being able to use the miniatures in games of normal 30/40k. Absolute genius from a marketing perspective and even better as the individual board games play great too. My only big problem with these 'board' games is that they are expensive coming in at around the £80-100 mark which is still very prohibitive to entice newer players into the hobby. Also they are fairly complicated and so take quite a while to play. As a dad my time is limited so if I have a couple of hours I'll play 40k but a lot of the time I have an hour tops so I have been gravitating towards something quicker such as Magic or X-Wing.

This is where Lost Patrol caught my eye. A board game of sorts with miniatures that only takes 30mins for only £35!! Now we're talking, so what is it exactly? Here is the write up on the website:

Moraz III – a deadly jungle world filled with danger and fear, populated by ferocious aliens who wait in the undergrowth to pounce on the unwary and mercilessly kill anyone who stumbles across them. Even the plant life itself is malignant here, constantly twisting and growing in unnatural ways to trap its prey.

A dropship containing vitally important surveillance files has crash landed on this hostile planet. It’s up to you and your squad of Space Marine Scouts to retrieve these files, activate the dropship, and hopefully escape with your lives!

Lost Patrol is a two-player boxed game, set on a hostile jungle world on which nowhere is safe! One player controls a squad of plucky Space Marine Scouts, and the other controls a swarm of horrible Genestealers – it’s a fast-paced game of kill-or-be-killed between two iconic sets of warriors! Inside the box, you’ll find five Space Marine Scout, twelve Genestealers, six Infestations: the markers of imminent Genestealer appearance, and thirty hex tiles.

This is actually a re-release of the game from 2000 with rewritten rules and updated miniatures and game board pieces. Looking at it it has some great genestealer mini's (who doesn't like them?), some scout mini's (let's skip them shall we) and some great looking board tiles. The game looks fast and fun with an interesting randomness if the board tiles get pulled out blind which provides some interesting variation to avoid boredom. My only wonder is whether the game has longevity as the description only provides info on a single mission. Is there any more missions? Is there a campaign element? Also as the price mark is only £35 could there be fantasy flight style expansion packs? This would be a first step for GW but is perfectly possible with this type of game. An expansion with more missions, tiles and some 'boss' mini's is perfectly feasible for a £20-25 price mark?

In conclusion I am glad GW is going down this route as well as supporting its core games, it opens up more opportunities for people to play and is exploring an interesting price point. What do you guys think? Have you played the old version of Lost Patrol?

Let me know and happy gaming,

James

Tyranids vs Khorne Daemon Kin

After many months of a distinct lack of gaming time I finally managed to carve out an open slot for a game last week. I would be putting my Tyranid army up against my brother Mikes' Khorne Daemon Kin in a 2000pt game.
The Tyranids are just one of many armies I collect and one that I haven't used in a long time (that's it, get my excuses in early!) and one that I have just over 2000pts of. This made picking my army really quite easy, take everything, well almost, a lonely Carnifex was left on the shelf.

After setting up the terrain and rolling for deployment type (Vanguard Strike) and Mission (The Scouring) we got to setting up.

I opted for putting my big things on the left to attempt to roll his flank while using the masses of little things to hold up his other flank. While he evenly spaced his men along his deployment zone.

It is at this point that I would like to mention that I have never faced the Daemon Kin before and never seen the Blood Tythe table in action but the ability to get a 'free' Blood Thirster from it is certainly scary!

The game was a blood fest. We both charged at each other intent on devouring/reaping skulls as quickly as possible. I acquired first blood when my termagants shot and then charged a unit of blood letters while my hormagants swarmed over another unit of blood letters. His counter attack consisted of counter charging with everything he could and wiping the 2 units out while his Blood Thirster set up what I though would be a clash of the titans by charging my Tyrannofex.

Well, the clash of the titans was over very quickly as the Blood Thirster, with one sweep of his mighty axe, took the head from the Tyrannofex leaving it's slowly cooling carcass on the floor.

From here it became more one sided, my shooting was pitiful and all my charges seemed to end with more dead Tyranids. The dice gods had abandoned me. By turn 4 I was down to just a couple of units.



However, I did get my revenge on the rampaging Blood Thirster when my bonesword armed warriors managed to roll well enough to insta kill it due to the Life Leech special rule. Revenge was sweet, as was the look on his face as I banished his prized unit back to the warp.


 With the game soon coming to an end I lost by 5vp to 1vp. Obviously this loss was more down to my brothers weighted dice and obvious underhandedness and had nothing to do with my tactical faults and poor decision making!

The Emperor's Feth Astra Militarum Army Part 1 - The beginning & thelist

The Emperor’s Feth

I enjoy hearing about how people started in this hobby, chatting about armies, lists and I absolutely love looking at painted models. With this in mind I thought I would blog about my history with 40k, what I’ve been up to, and introduce my 1^st army The Emperor’s Feth. I hope that you enjoy what I’ve been up to and would love to hear your story and what you think of my army and list. Over this post and more over the next few weeks I’ll showcase this army with my thoughts and how I painted each unit so please read on, enjoy and comment by all means…

The Beginning…

So as The Emperor’s Champion (Rich) says 2009 rolls around and out of curiosity I walk into a Games Workshop in Stockport, Manchester. As it happened, that week 5^th edition was due to be released and 40k was being pushed in the store. I got chatting with the manager and had a good look around before my eyes finally came to rest on an Ogryn model. It looked ace – bigger than the others and full of character. I had no idea of the rules or army, all I wanted was to paint this beast and so I bought it with a few paints and a brush and there was the start of my love affair with the Imperial Guard or as it is now known the Astra Militarum.

Above: The first model!

Tournaments

Over the next few weeks 5^th Edition Imperial Guard was released with a bunch of new models which nicely relieved me of any spare cash I had at the time. As I was building my army Rich had also been getting into Ultramarines which prompted lots of games and new models as were constantly trying to beat each other. Each week would see a new addition that one of us would have to counter with a purchase or a list change of our own – we were having a mini arms-race!! At this time Games Workshop began their 40k Doubles tournaments and Rich and myself decided to enter with Ultramarines and Astra Militarum at our first tournament and then with a Double Astra Militarum force at subsequent tournaments. We had to choose a name for our army and so The Emperor’s Feth was born. The doubles tournaments were amazing, we got to meet loads of people (Dad Dave is one), see Warhammer World, do fairly well in the tournaments and most importantly get nominated 4 times for best painted armies.

Above: The Emperor’s Feth at a tournament at Warhammer World

Above: Under pressure at a tournament at Warhammer World. Not quite sure how we got ourselves into this situation!!

Above: Dad Rich looking a bit geeky at our first trip to Warhammer World back in the day

Hobbying

It was during these tournaments where I saw some beautifully painted models that I decided that I wanted to create not just an army but an army with a theme. At this point I was considering painting a Tyranid army as I love Aliens (who doesn’t) and love the idea of Genestealers and a swarm. I started but after putting together and painting a handful of Genestealers decided it was a bad idea that would take far too long – especially as I still wanted to add to The Emperor’s Feth. So I came about the idea that The Feth would be specialists at fighting Tyranids and began to model Tyranids onto my existing Astra Miltarum figures. I also built the army list to this theme. In order to fight the swarm I have lots of bullets, flamers and some snipers and lascannons for the bigger creatures. This hobby idea is still taking shape so you will see some ideas completed and some more develop as I complete projects this year.

Above: One of The Emperor’s Feth Chimeras

At the current time I am also halfway through painting a 40k Flesh Tearers army – more to come on that in a future post – but I still have lots of Feth to continue with yet. Anyway enough chat, let’s get to it with my current list of all the models that are completely painted:

Company Command Squad

Company Commander

2 Veterans with Meltaguns

1 Lascannon Heavy Weapon Team

1 Astropath

Chimera – Multilaser & Heavy Flamer

Platoon Command Squad

Platoon Commander

4 Troops with Flamers

Chimera – Multilaser & Heavy Flamer

Combined Troop Squad

2 x Troop squads

2 x Flamers

2 x Lascannon Heavy Weapon Teams

Commissar

Heavy Weapon Team

3 x Autocannons

Heavy Weapon Team

3 x Missile Launchers

Veteran Squad

3 Plasma Guns

Camo cloaks and snare mines

Chimera – Multilaser & Heavy Flamer

Ratling Squad

6 x Ratlings

Vendetta

10 man troop squad

Vendetta

Manticore

Heavy Flamer

Leman Russ Punisher

Heavy Bolter Sponsons

Heavy Bolter

Leman Russ Executioner

Plasma Sponsons

Heavy Flamer

Leman Russ Demolisher

Plasma Sponsons

Lascannon

Grand Total – 2000 points

Above: The current 2000pt army in all its glory.

As I said earlier, keep looking out for posts on ‘The Feth’ over the next few weeks where I will post more photos, discuss each unit and include how I painted it in detail.

Let me know what you think in the comments below.

James

Space Hulk

Well I didn't think that my first blog post would be about space hulk. However the unexpected opportunity of my first ever game came about last night as Steve (one of the other 4 dads of the apocalypse) and I met up for a couple of hours.

Space Hulk is one game that I have wanted to play since I played Space Crusade on the Amiga 600 many moons ago. I love the simplicity of the idea, the tension and the claustrophobia that the game presents.

We only had time for one game and as I hadn't played before we decided on the first mission and that I play the part of the genestealers. This allowed me to play on a simple board and make plenty of mistakes that wouldn't lose me the game. Here is the board we played on:

So a quick battle report and then a separate post as a review of the game.

The Space Marine objective was to flame the control room - the most northern room. The Genestealer objective was to kill the flamer...

Turn 1

The space marines lumbered forward into the first room, working together 1 split to cover the southern corridor and their backs. The others faced the imminent danger of the blips approaching from the east and blocking their path to the objective.

Turn 2

As blips appear south and west the marines advance forward and open the eastern door revealing fangs and claws tearing down the corridor. The leader of the squad, the sergeant enters the corridor first and clicks into overwatch mode but his storm bolter jams leaving him vulnerable...

Turn 3

The sergeant doesn't panic and uses his experience under pressure to clear the jam and aim true cutting down the feverish genestealers tearing towards him with no mercy.

Turn 4

More aliens appear from the east and charge but the sergeant bellows a war cry, fills with battle rage and sprints forward to feel the glory of close combat. The marines behind trust their sergeant and flame the corridor preventing any aliens splitting the squad. The rearguard holds true as the threat also looms from the south...

Turn 5

The sergeant's power sword flashes as he cuts down all in front of him. Watching his sergeant's back the marine with the heavy flamer rounds the corner and hot promethium engulfs the corridor to the north burning a horde of aliens. The marine watching the rear fires true and extinguishes any threat from behind. The marines assert their authority...

Turn 6

It's decision time. The sergeant gives the order to split up as he advances to hold the southern corridor so that the others have time to move north and head towards the control room.

Sensing a break the genestealers make their move attacking from the south and east both in front and behind to force mistakes under pressure...

Turn 7

And there is the break for the aliens. The marine sergeant pulled up his storm bolter as the aliens rounded the corner only for a dull click to emanate from the trigger. A jam at the worst time cost him his life and left a gaping hole for the aliens to exploit...

Turn 8

The surviving marines collectively made their decision to move, move, move and get to the control room before being overwhelmed. The 2 remaining Storm bolter marines led the way protecting the heavy flamer and ready to sell their lives so that the mission could be successful...

Turn 9

The marines get forced back and surrounded in the close confines of the corridor but their shots count and genestealers litter the floor around their feet. Up to this point 29 have been terminated through marine ferocity.

Turn 10

The marines drive forward and break the tyranid assault fighting back to back to cover all angles as the heavy flamer marine breaks for the control room to the north and the successful completion of the mission.

The storm bolter marines set up overwatch covering fire across the north/south corridor to eliminate any threat...

Turn 11

One of the marines fighting back to back drops having been cut down. His partner glances behind him which gives a genestealer the fraction of a second it needs to make it across the corridor in front. As he realises his mistake and is pulled to the ground he glances past the corner in hope only to see his brother's heavy flamer clatter to the ground arm still attached. An apology to the god emperor exits his lips and the blackness descends...

So the tyranids win but only just. If the overwatch shots hadn't jammed the Blood Angels would have triumphed the very next turn! A very enjoyable game which really could have gone either way so thanks Steve but 1 - 0 to me for the blog!

Anyone have any experience of Space Hulk? I would love to hear of any really close games you've had.

Make sure to check my review of Space Hulk in my next post soon.

James