Blog

Hey all,

I had a fun game of Warhammer 40k with a couple of mates last night. For those that don’t know it, it’s a tabletop strategy wargame, kind of like a turn-based RTS game, where you move models of your units around to do battle. If you’ve played the computer game ‘Dawn of War’, that game is based on the tabletop game.

Games Workshop came out with a new Codex (book of army-specific rules) for the Blood Angels army, and since I got it, I’m finding it hard to play anything else. There are some great new units, and they’ve expanded on a bunch of other units that I previously didn’t really use that much. Of course, this means I’ve bought some more miniatures, so I need to do more painting! The missus and I are going away next weekend though, so I’ll bring some along so I can do some panting while we spend the weekend chillin’.

Anyways, we played as myself and mike (Blood Angels and Dark Angels) versus James (Chaos Space Marines), at 1000 points each side. Mike and I had a few emails being swapped earlier in the week to discuss tactics, decide how to balance unit choices between us, and we ended up going for an interesting tactic – he would provide all of the troop choices, with a Rhino for transport and a squad of Terminators for some beefy assault, and I took the HQ and another elite squad. I ended up getting two expensive units, being Mephiston as HQ, and a squad of Sanguinary Guard. These guys are a cool new addition for the latest codex, and while they’re kinda like having Terminators that have jump packs, and are good at both shooting and assault, they don’t have the invulnerable save that Termies do, which got them smited pretty quickly at the end of my last battle.

While the Sanguinary Guard are a cool unit, this battle they didn’t get to do anything, as they deep-striked near one board-edge, and then I changed tactic and sent them towards another unit, which had them travelling for a bit, and everything was pretty much over by the time they got in range. But Mephiston… well, that guy rocks! At 250 points for a single model you’d hope so, but he’s definitely going to be seeing battle again. Multiple psychic powers per turn, awesome stats, he ended up jumping across the board, taking out a defiler in close combat, then jumping across to a smear a squad of Plague Marines. And with his strong armour and high toughness, very few things actually touched him. Definitely need to plan some tactics with him.

Anyway, I’m not normally a person to do full battle reports (although I might, even if I just put them up here so I can look over them later on, see what I learned), but this is just a bit of a quick bleargh about what happened. James was the unfortunate victim of some very bad dice rolls, and he had a very impressive army that had Mike and I a bit worried when we first saw it. Because we ended up with a couple of our squads in reserve at the start of the battle, and positions the rest of ours in two separate groups, James struggled a bit in placing his army, as he basically had to split his force to attack both groups, and this then made it a bit easier when our squads deep-striked (struck?) into the gap in the middle. We ended up calling the battle before it was over, as we were playing at a Games Workshop store, and they were getting ready to close, but the Space Marine forces definitely looked to be victorious. Mind you, James’ Thousand Sons squad looked rather nasty, and we didn’t get to do much damage to them before the battle ended, so I’ll need to look them up and work out a way to beat them…

Anyway, it was only one battle, and I’ll wait to see how later battles go before making full accounts of these new units, but I’m liking them so far.

I might start posting battle reports for a couple of later games, but I would probly need to put up some photos as well… which means I really should go and get more painting done! Hehe…

Anways, that’s enough of that. More details after our next game. It’s also been a while since we played BloodBowl (again, tabletop version, not PC game), so we may play that again before we play 40k.

Cheers,
Craig.