I’ve recently gotten back from my first NOVA Open – and the first NOVA Open in a couple of years thanks to COVID-19. With a focus on Heresy and Specialist Games, rather than the more mainline GW games, how was the experience?
The Itinerary
This year has finally seen the return of my attendance in some events, after most events I was signed up for in 2020 being canceled, and deciding to wave off of the 2021 LVO 40K Narrative as the omicron wave of COVID-19 got, in the words of my brother, “a little spicy”. Coming on the heels of the Horus Heresy 2.0 release and a growing passion for specialist games, the itinery I built was…extremely grognardy. I signed up for five events in total, which was, candidly, probably pushing it a bit hard. I’ll probably bring that up from time to time – this event was a lot.
The events in question?
- Horus Heresy Centurion (1500 pts., limited vehicles with an emphasis on infantry battles using some custom army composition guidelines)
- Horus Heresy Zone Mortalis (1000 pts., does what it says on the tin – a day of Zone Mortalis gaming)
- Horus Heresy Strike Team (300 pt. games styled on the old Kill Team-type rules – skirmishing specialists, where models act on their own)
- Adeptus Titanicus Princeps Formal (2000 pt. Adeptus Titanicus games)
- Battlefleet Heresy (2500 pts. of Battlefleet Gothic if basically all the composition rules were stripped out)
That’s a lot. The astute reader will also note that that’s three (arguably like…3.75) different rulesets over the course of a three day stretch. I never claimed this was a good idea, but I couldn’t really bring myself to drop any of these – Horus Heresy is where a lot of my energy is at right now, Adeptus Titanicus is god’s most perfect game, and I really wanted to play Battlefleet Heresy because when am I ever going to get to play that again?
Clearly I had to do all of them.
That’s just science.
One thing to note about 40K: It’s not that I don’t like 40K anymore, or that I’m not interested in playing it. I went to the GW Seattle Open event and had an absolute blast. If I was free, I’d be going to the Santa Fe event as well, which sounds amazing and is giving me serious FOMO. The problem is actually that the event was too good. It reminded me how much I enjoy playing narrative 40K between fully painted armies.
But it also reminded me how much I hate transporting my Eldar.
Look at this madness. Delicate little pieces in multiple different directions, all of them resin. I swear by KR cases, and they do their level best, but after an event, there’s at least a couple broken models. My next closest army in terms of painting is…a 25 PL Black Templar patrol force. My Sisters of Battle are a project that is going to take years to do.
Weirdly, that leaves my Imperial Fists as the best painted-and-transportable force.
Plus, I am really into Heresy right now. It’s hitting the right notes for me.
Pre-Event Hobby Madness
It wouldn’t be an event if there wasn’t last minute painting, would it? In the ramp-up, I was primarily concentrating on my Imperial Fists, getting three units completed (two Tactical Squads and a squad of Seekers) and pushing another one (a pair of Laser Destroyer Rapier platforms) over the half-finished line. Overall, I’m really pleased with the technique I’ve been using for the Imperial Fists, which rests heavily on weathering enamels, but it’s a nerve-wracking process – until literally the final painting step, they’re the color of a French’s Mustard bottle.
Along with some units that were already done – another Tactical Squad, a Contemptor, an absolutely massive number of Assault Marines and the backbone of my army, some Tartaros Terminators with Storm Shields – I have a functional, fully painted Imperial Fists army that I’m rather proud of. It also modularizes nicely – the 1000 pt. Zone Mortalis Force is a subset of the 1500 pt. Centurion force.
This will come up later.
These took more time than I was anticipating though, which left the Fleet and Maniple in a bit of a time crunch. Fortunately, the scheme I wanted to do for the Battlefleet Heresy event was a quick painting, fairly high concept paint scheme. Essentially, ever since I made some holotable objective markers, I’ve wanted to try a whole army in a scheme like that. I decided to finally get it out of my system, and paint my Battlefleet Heresy force from the perspective of my opponent’s fleet – that is, as a collection of auspex returns, rather than as the ships as they appear.
This was a fairly divisive move on the various hobby Discords I was on, but I decided to go for it, telling myself that if I hated it, the ships were maybe a week’s worth of 3D printing, and I could always start again, and relegate the current fleet to a “Pick Your Legion” learning fleet for my opponents. But the good news is it paints up rather fast, I had some transparent green resin for bases, markers, etc. to tie it together, and en masse I actually think it looks rather nice.
And that was it.
Remember the Titans?
The sad truth was that between work and some scheduling things, I just couldn’t get the Titanicus part of the weekend done in time. I had emotionally braced myself to drop out of the event, but the community came through in a big way. I have to give a shoutout to Condit and Soggy from the Goonhammer/Badcast Discords in offering to just bring extra titans to cobble something together – that’s an extremely generous offer given that everyone’s traveling, etc.
Austin, one of the event organizers, came through however with a complete loaner army with options, tokens, etc. I grabbed a copy of the AT18 rulebook from the GW store at the event (which I’m donating to the club as a spare) and we were off to the races.
Seriously you guys, on the off chance any of you are reading this – thank you.
The Viral Elephant In the Room
Is it safe to go to events?
I mean, obviously I went, so I did the risk calculation and decided for me it was worth it. But that was really only because NOVA strengthened their COVID-19 precautions pretty seriously. Masking was required – and enforced – and proof of vaccination was required. Given that the Federal response to the pandemic at this point is “IDK, good luck”, I think that’s about as much as one can expect. I was wearing KN95’s the whole event, including the flights to and from, people tried mostly to eat outside, etc. and I, at least, managed to continue to dodge COVID.
I also had an Aranet4 CO2 monitor unobtrusively hanging out in my army tray. CO2 concentration is used as a proxy for infection risk – basically, it measures how much of what you’re breathing was previously in someone else’s lungs. It’s an imperfect measure – heavily, heavily filtered air, for example, might not contain virus even if CO2 concentrations are high – but it’s a workable one.
So how’d we do?
This graph is a time series of the CO2 concentration in the hall being used for Horus Heresy, Lord of the Rings, and Star Wars events (IIRC) on the first day of NOVA, which was fairly busy, starting from my arrival in the hall until midnight that night, when the Strike Team event was winding down. There aren’t strict thresholds for what’s “Okay” (if you want details, this is an approachable summary). For me, ~ 500 PPM (parts per million) is a decent, not particularly breezy outdoor space. 800 is a well ventilated interior space. At around 1400-1500 you’re talking about a fairly poorly ventilated space.
The trajectory of the CO2 concentration goes about how we’d expect – as people show up and, you know, breathe, the CO2 concentration goes up. You can see the same pattern over the course of the day in, say, my home office. Toward the end of the Heresy events, it starts to brush up against where I’d start to be concerned, then drops as people break for dinner, the room clears some, and the ventilation system can catch up, before starting to rise again as a smaller group of people are around for the late evening events.
Overall, I was pretty okay with this. The Seattle GT was slightly better, but that was a massive space with really robust ventilation.
For reference, on plane flights, the concentration regularly breaches 2000 ppm. Mask up on planes and in airports folks.
The Games
Horus Heresy Centurion
Up first we have Centurion – a 1500 pt. game format with some pretty serious restrictions. Namely, Vehicles, Allied Detachments, and 7+ wound Dreadnoughts are outright prohibited, and other Dreadnoughts, Automata, Artillery, Bikes and Jetbikes and Speeders of their various kinds are all 0-1 choices each.
Basically, the idea is that this should be mostly bog-standard infantry fighting on foot. My list was fairly eclectic, owing to it being 500 points or so glued onto a 1000 point Zone Mortalis force. Led by a Legion Champion accompanied by five Tartaros Terminators with Stormshields and a mix of power fists, chain fists, and thunder hammers, it featured a strong firebase of three 10-man Legion Tactical squads, two armed with bayonets, a 10-man Legion Seeker squad, and two Rapier Laser Destroyer platforms. On the offensive side, I had the classic Calth-era Contemptor with an Assault Cannon, and 15 Assault Marines, featuring a Sergeant with a Solarite Power Gauntlet and three Power Axes in the squad.
Game 1: Word Bearers
Facing off against a Word Bearer force lead by Kor Phaeron and a unit of Terminators (beginning the weekend’s feature of having more special characters than I was expecting), this force’s core was a Contemptor and two massive and intimidating squads of Ashen Circle, plus some very large tactical squads. The mission was for the loyalists to hold the single objective in the middle, which was a tall order given that very much played to his strengths and not mine.
This was a game where the Terminators proved their worth. After the Assault Marines were absolutely minced in Overwatch (losing a full eight Marines), I was definitely on the back foot. The Seekers tried a cheeky move, and did some harm to one of the Ashen Circle squads, but were immediately wiped out by something like 72 hits from hand flamers. This army was terrifyingly good at dealing with 3+ armor – and rather terrible at dealing with 2+ armor saves. The Terminators simply waded through one of the Ashen Circle units, while the Contemptor (and some accurate bolter fire from the Tactical squads) eroded the other one. The game ended in a draw, with the middle objective contested, the Contemptors facing off with each other, and Kor Phaeron’s squad not yet engaged.
Overall, a delightful, bloody opening game.
Game Two: Surprise Apocalypse Centurion Doubles
Providing a flashback to the LVO Narrative’s Surprise Apocalypse event a few years back, where 2000 pt. narrative 40K lists suddenly turned into 3×3 12,000 pt. infantry-heavy Apoc games, the event organizers announced that we were teaming up for the next game, and asked us to only bring 1,000 pts. This was easy enough to do for me – the Rapiers were largely dead weight in a vehicle-free setting, and the Assault Marines have yet to really light the world on fire. Drop a tactical squad and you’re back to my ZM list.
Now a lot of people had opinions about this – and I get why. At 1,000 points, the core conceit of your army may be difficult to manage to play (there was a White Scars player with this problem). And part of me is a little bit salty that I hauled 15 resin Mk. V Assault Marines several thousand miles for them to whiff one charge. But the nice part was you got to meet more people, and play some neat games.
Game Two was Word Bearers and Death Guard vs. Dark Angels and Imperial Fists. The traitor force was absolutely terrifying – a big unit of Gal Vorbak with Argel Tal, and a unit of…well, one of the DG Terminator units…with Typhus. Plus the corrupted Contemptor (technically illegal, but we let it in), and some other units that commanded slightly less attention. On the Dark Angels side, there was a big block of 10 Cataphractii terminators, a plasma Support Squad, and a Praetor. The goal was for the traitors to get a civilian to an evacuation zone as they abandoned the planet, and we had to stop them.
This game was brutal. It started with the Cataphractii taking a few casualties from a lascannon squad, promptly failing their Leadership check, and then rolling boxcars for the run distance, carrying them off the board. Our opponents were very generous and said to bring back five of them in Reserve, because “Oh, half your army disappeared before you did anything” is not really how anyone wants to win a friendly event. But between Death Guard shooting and a massive pack of Gal Vorbak, things in the midfield were definitely a bloody slog. The Contemptor tried for a cheeky Best Defense charge on Argel Tal, and got murdered for its trouble. I spooked the Word Bearers opponent by trying to play to the objective and gunning down the Despoiler squad the Governor was sheltering with, and had I been slightly more careful with the order in which I shot things, I think we might have had it.
As it was though, the Traitors won this one with one of the most singularly clutch uses of Blessed Martyr I’ve ever seen, saving the Governor by sacrificing the last Despoiler to ensure he couldn’t take any more fire before our line simply collapsed under the weight of the Traitor onslaught.
Game Three: Expected Centurion Doubles
We remained paired for the third game, and I was faintly surprised that they didn’t swap up team mates as well as opponents. Our Imperial Fist vs. Dark Angel task force found itself facing off against a Night Lords and World Eaters force, with a ton of close combat capability, and almost no shooting to speak of.
The Traitors were losing the event (no thanks to me), and so for this one were trying to simply get to an objective in our deployment zone, while we were trying to keep them from it. Our plan was simple: Terminator Wall and weather the storm.
For the first time I used the Seeker’s infiltrate ability to sneak onto the Thunderhawk, hoping to get some key shots off. And they absolutely did, claiming a Sergeant and two Apothecaries before they were cut down in close combat, which I regard as a worthwhile exchange. Generally, that piece of terrain became “The Thunderhawk of Death” – any unit that ascended it was dead or in full retreat by the next turn, on either side.
The wave of World Eaters smashed into the Dark Angels, and the First Legion sold their lives dearly to try to hold the flank as long as possible. Our suggestions to the Night Lords player that now would be the ideal time to stab his ally in the back fell on deaf ears, and as the game came to a close, we ended with a solid Loyalist victory, the line having held thanks to the sacrifice of the Dark Angels, and the intervention of the Imperial Fist terminators with Best Defense to foil a flanking attack by the Night Lords.
Thus ended the Centurion event, and we moved on to Zone Mortalis, which was, to be frank, the event I was looking forward to the most.
Horus Heresy Zone Mortalis
Game 1: The Big, Bad World Eaters
Heading into a field of absolutely beautiful looking tables, I found myself across from a World Eaters army. This one featured Kharn, a unit of Red Butchers, and a unit of Terminators with Lightning Claws, as well as two Tactical Squads. If I’m being honest, this is the first game I played that it was hard to really enjoy, with my army just being wildly unequipped to deal with this.
I was pretty sure I was going to lose this one, and in retrospect, I very much should have remembered the mission pack had mysterious objectives in it, because some of those were of the “wacky antics 50% of your army dies” variety that might have turned the tide (more on those later).
As it was however, my goal was to kill the Red Butchers. If I did that, I’d call it a moral victory.
And I did. It took the Contemptors and all but two of my Terminators to do it, but I did. In fairness, my army might have been in better shape had he not tanked 7 4++ invulnerable saves on his last two Red Butchers, all of which would instantly kill them. Before that happened, I had delusions of trying to stall Kharn’s butchery of my army. Afterwards, not so much, and my goal switched to “Lose 9 to 1 instead of 9 to 0.”
I pulled that off too.
Go me.
Game 2: The Smaller, Slightly Less Bad World Eaters -or- Fun With Void Bombs
I don’t actually have any pictures from this game, but that’s not a mark against it. Facing off against a…shall we say more mundane…World Eaters army, this one was built around a big Rampager squad with a Chaplain and a Praetor.
Remember that bit awhile ago about the mysterious objectives?
Yeah, Turn 1 I stumbled across a “Void Mine”, which forced an initiative check vs. death for every model in the room.
This board had no doors.
That means everyone. I lost the Terminator Sergeant, some Tactical Marines and some Seekers. He lost his Chaplain and some other dudes. Overall, I think I got off better in the exchange.
Despite this setback to both of us, we had a great game – hilariously, our Contemptors ended up facing each other through a hallway neither could fit through, ineffectually shooting at one another. And the Rampagers slammed into my Terminators, but couldn’t quite make it stick, between the WS 5 Terminators thanks to the Warlord trait, 2+/3++ Terminators, and missing the Chaplain’s buffs. It took something like three turns to do in a absolutely bloody grinding battle of attrition, but the Terminators and Legion Champion managed to win combat one round, and chase down the surviving three or four Rampagers and the Praetor, resulting in a fairly strong loyalist victory.
Game 3: The Warmaster’s Beautiful Sons
This game was one of my favorites all weekend. The Sons of Horus player came with a Chaplain, a big Plasma Support squad I was frankly scared of, a Breacher squad, a Contemptor, and a unit of Tartaros Terminators. The goal was for the Loyalists to reach, and then destroy, some objectives. The Seekers ran onto one, and thankfully this didn’t kill everyone this time, but rather just two of them. The middle of the board was fairly crowded, and they couldn’t really capitalize on any fire lanes, so this was just fine.
This was another brutal, grinding, Zone Mortalis-y game.
Holding me at a choke point, his Terminators eventually lost to the superior weapon skill and saves of the Imperial Fists, which is just a wildly powerful defensive combination. My Tactual Marines did a fine job picking off Breachers and Plasma Support Marines while taking some losses in return, but whittling down the Breachers especially.
Our commanders killed each other simultaneously, in a beautiful act of exhausted, blood soaked mutually assured destruction, and the last moments of the battle were my wounded Contemptor vs. his Contemptor, fighting to tie the game.
This game was absolutely everything Zone Mortalis should be, and was on an absolutely beautiful board (painted by my opponent) vs. an absolutely beautiful army. I finished up both exhausted and energized, and wanting to build another Zone Mortalis board. Or two.
Maybe two.
Strike Team
I’ll be honest here, I have very few pictures from Strike Team, simply because, to be honest, it’s not a terribly photogenic game. But it was a pretty chill game – the organizers admitted it was something of a work in progress, and there were definitely some kinks to iron out. One is that people seemed to run out of slots before they ran out of points, which meant units were running around with a lot of bling. I, foolishly, made an Assault Sergeant my commander. I say foolishly because he is a 1 wound chump with a 6++. I also had two two wound terminators with 3++ saves (which were reduced, I think correctly, to a max of 4++).
The missions could stand a little polishing. The first was one of progressive objectives, mostly in the middle of the field. Which is all well and good, until your opponent infiltrates onto two of the three, and now your mission is “Dislodge your opponent from defensible positions before he accumulates enough points that it doesn’t matter.”
In this I failed. My Terminators *utterly* whiffing killing his Terminators did me no favors on this front either.
The second game was sort of equally skewed, but this time in my favor. I had to get to some objectives and plant a bomb on them. A combination of jump pack Marines plus running Terminators to block anyone trying to clear the bombs meant that I had this one in the bag pretty handily – the best my opponent could do was force a tie after Turn 1, and after Turn 2, my whole force could have voluntarily bottled and called it a day.
The concept is good, but again, vulnerable to some people with particular army builds.
The third was sort of a wacky mission involving tossing the bombs from the second game around, our commanders only being able to fight each other, and everyone trying to get to the middle. It was definitely fun, but I think everyone was a bit exhausted at this point. I definitely was. Which naturally meant that my PST Night Owl circadian rhythm promptly kept me up another two hours.
God’s Most Perfect Game
Onward, to Titanicus! This, again, is all thanks to some very generous members of the community bailing my ass out. And I was extremely rusty going into this – we’ve mostly been playing introduction/I-try-to-lure-you-in events, which means Legio traits, stratagems and objectives are not really at the forefront of my brain. The rules for the event, which gave you a slate of stratagems and warlord traits that you could draw from each game without replacement also meant I couldn’t just pick a couple dummy ones to use every game.
Game 1: “That’s a giant Get Fucked Axe” – Brian Harvey
The first game was via a horribly corrupted Legio Vulpa force, commanded by Condit of Goonhammer fame. For a rusty player, I couldn’t have asked for a better opponent. The mission was for the Traitors to destroy some cargo containers, and for the Loyalists to try to protect them as best they could. Given the speed and “You really don’t want to get hit by these guys” aspects of the Traitors, my loyalist Legio Astorum Titans gave up our usual aspirations of mid-field dominance in favor of doing our very best to survive, reasoning that his Titans couldn’t destroy cargo containers if they were dead.
Well…except if/when they blew up and killed cargo containers.
Things got off to an illustrious start when Condit’s melee Reaver stepped on a cargo container with a bunch of artillery munitions, setting them off and damaging itself, which of course made me also decide to play the Thermal Mines stratagem, just completely messing up the poor things legs. It paid me back by speeding across the field and absolutely murdering one of my Reavers, which took its foe down with it thanks to a magazine detonation. My Knights died horribly – as they do – and the rest of the game was spent trying to hold off his advance and not lose too many crates.
An extremely heroic Warhound titan, just pumping megabolter and plasma blastgun shots into his Warlord eventually immobilized the beast, while my firebase Warlord stood vigil. Overall, I think I was coming out ahead in terms of Titan damage, but he carried the day on objectives. Being pushed to the back field, regardless of how advantageous it was for actually killing things, yielded too many points up. Which was perfect for the narrative of the scenario – the Loyalists were landing en masse, the Traitors were going to be overwhelmed, it was a question of denial.
Game Two: Artillery Duel
This is another game I regrettably don’t have pictures of – things were a little rushed. I played against a Legio Krytos force with two Warlords, and this game was essentially a capture-the-other-guy’s-flag mission that turned into an artillery duel. His plan was to pour all his firepower into my Warlord that was carrying my flag, and my plan was to take out his non-Warlord Titans one by one to reduce the fire coming into my Warlord.
I think I had the edge in terms of plans, except for one small detail – me being a big dum-dum. When the Warlord finally went down and dropped the flag, I had a Warhound in range to run and pick it up, hunker behind some terrain, and claim the victory by some real but slim margin.
Instead, I got tunnel vision, and put it on First Fire orders. This, very literally, lost me the game, and it’s entirely my own doing.
The game was great though – just brutal punches back and forth, against a great opponent who came dressed for the occasion in Legio-colors socks and a matching tie.
Game Three: “Can Volcano Cannons melt icebergs?”
Coming off a loss due to utterly, utterly failing to play to the mission, it came as something of a relief that the final mission was just “Kill the Other Guy”. I faced off against another fairly new player, and this game was deadly.
I will admit that my dice betrayed me a bit here. I suffered three reactor meltdowns over the course of the game, one of which was a Warhound in my lines, which killed most of two banners of Knights along with damaging sundry Titans. For an ice planet generally, my Titans were running curiously hot. On the other end, off of four hits from a Reaver with a pair of melta-cannons (an interesting build, but one your enemy is absolutely going to blaze down quickly), I rolled three ones for damage against a Dire Wolf, which did sort of knock the wind from my sails.
But the fact of the matter was my opponent also out played me – I let myself get hemmed in a little bit, and things were going south quickly when the game was called for time, netting my opponent a well earned victory.
So yeah – I went 0 for 3 in Adeptus Titanicus games. But the glory of that particular game is I didn’t care. I had a blast, even getting stomped. It’s just a fun, engaging game. And one where absolutely everyone brought their hobby A-game.
Overall, the event was an absolute blast, and one of the highlights of the whole NOVA experience, which is saying a lot. If I had one complaint, it’s that the tables were a little light on terrain, but I’m told that that’s partially because they added six more tables on fairly short notice to let people play, and that’s going to strain anyone’s supply of 8mm terrain.
Battlefleet Heresy
This was my last event of the tournament, with an hour or so between the end of AT18 and the beginning of Battlefleet Heresy. It turned out to be a little longer as the mustering of people – some of whom had dropped out – took a good long while. Which was good – I needed to read the rules again. If you want to hear a full rundown of list planning, etc., Episode 9 of Lost to the Nails has you covered. The short version is my fleet is both extremely unsubtle, and primarily built around a low cognitive load Imperial backbone. There are a lot of torpedoes, and enough launch bays to keep me in the game if someone goes that way, but we’re deliberately not going ordinance heavy.
Importantly for this event as well, your fleet can take losses, and those losses are serious. The number of resources we were given to repair was pretty sparse, and the three games we played were small enough that I don’t know if anyone got more distributed to them because their fleet was on the rocks.
Also, it was up to us whether we played with alternating activations vs. IGOUGO, and every one of my games we decided to do alternating activations. Interestingly, I encountered two different “phenotypes” of alternating activations:
- What I was expecting: My ship moves, your ship moves, my ship fires, your ship fires, etc.
- What I wasn’t: My ship moves, fires, etc. followed by your ship.
Both have their advantages. I actually like the 2nd system a little better I think, but I’d still like to play through both like, a half dozen times at least. One thing both do which I think is interesting is wildly turn down the lethality of the system. Your ship isn’t going to get hit by All The Torpedos, or take a one-two punch of multiple gunboats without getting to respond necessarily. For your basic cruiser clash this might not be all that entertaining, but for a campaign game, I think it’s got promise – attrition and force preservation become a bigger deal than reducing multiple enemy capital ships to blazing hulks of scrap.
Game 1: In Which the Imperial Fists Attempt Pearl Harbor But In Space…
My first game was against a veteran opponent who sounds like he’s part of the Battlefleet Heresy community, and thus has played more recently than me. Which is not a hard bar to clear – a child born the last time I played Battlefleet Gothic could probably have come to this event and played. He was an advocate of System #2 above, so we went with that. Luckily for me, the Loyalists were attacking, and that meant I got to play the Ambush mission, which put him on the back foot. Fielding a hefty part of my fleet, I went in with the Dictator-class Cruiser Pride of Techys as my flagship, two Lunar-class cruisers, Warspite and Iron Duke, as well as the Strike Cruiser Thunderchild and a unit of Hunter-class destroyers.
Arrayed against me was a Retribution-class Battleship (we decided this was cool and narratively fitting), a Slaughter-class Cruiser that was on patrol, a squadron of three lance-armed Dauntless-class Light Cruisers, and some orbital defenses that played nearly no part in the attack. We also decided, as it immediately became relevant, that the ships not on patrol needed to make a leadership check to bring their turrets online.
I also decided not to squadron any ships – the idea is we had been running silent on the approach, so the level of coordination for two capital ships to squadron just wasn’t there. This was also so my opponent wouldn’t have to take a Strength 12 torpedo salvo to his prow before he even got to move.
This game was great fun, and narratively I think worked really well. The Imperial Fists got some good hits off, damaging the BB’s drives and getting a number of hits through, as well as severely damaging the Slaughter-class cruiser. The rest of the battle was the Dauntless escorts selling their lives dearly (indeed, one of them was lost to the void) followed by the battleship breaking orbit and heading for the deep void, guns blazing as it did so.
The Imperial Fists traded the crippling of Thunderchild and Warspite for the destruction of a Dauntless, the crippling of a Slaughter-class cruiser, and bringing the battleship down to half health. A worthwhile exchange in my books, and indeed a Loyalist victory. Pride of Techys also managed to get an upgrade, and since I didn’t feel the need to boost her Ld past 10, I rolled for a trait, and got the one where her now experienced pilots get a 4+ save, which is really nice given you can churn out a huge number of attack craft launching Imperial Navy fighters and bombers.
Game 2: More Torpedoes
With the Loyalists still having the momentum, I drew the Convoy Ambush mission vs. a Sons of Horus player, and we chose to stick with System 2 – this was good for him, as it meant by ships would activate and he’d still get to shoot at them before they could start doing things. Candidly, this is not an event mission – it was impossible in the time allotted for the Traitors to get their convoy to the other side of the board, and that’s their win condition. While the Traitors losing because they ran out of time to accomplish what they needed to is poetic in the wider span of the Heresy narrative, it doesn’t make for a great game. This was also a pretty easy game for me to play – the first activation was the Crusade-class cruiser Wrathful, which fired a broadside and did a number on the Sons of Horus escorts.
Deadfall torpedoes crippled the Sons of Horus Strike Cruiser and did more damage to Sons of Horus NotCobras, with both my escort squadrons (Three Hunters and Three Firestorms) just having been activated when the same ended. I think I had this one in the bag, long term – there were still a lot of torpedo salvos the transports were going to have to eat, and diminishingly few warships to shield them, but when it was called, he had a slight edge in VPs but lost the game. Overall, this is just not a “knock out a couple turns” scenario, and I’d like to play this mission out fully someday.
Game 3: Run Out the Guns
Everyone was at this point exhausted, and so we had a Kill The Other Guy scenario, with a points value of “Whatever you feel like playing”. We settled on ~ 1500 points, and we both brought battleships, and it was silly. My opponent was a great guy – he was offering his opponents 3d printed ships that he had as spares – before he looked at my fleet and said “Ah, you’re a Soulforge Studios patron too.” And his fleet was interestingly painted – exploiting a lot of the flat panels on Chaos ships for a more modern scheme.
This game devolved into wacky antics pretty quickly – we were both provided with a plastic cup containing a mix of pineapple selzer and coconut rum, and between having not eaten dinner and it being way stronger than it tasted, neither one of us were exactly being skilled fleet admirals. His battleship failed to turn hard enough, and then promptly failed two leadership checks to navigate the asteroid belt around the planet, crippling itself.
My piloting wasn’t quite that bad, but my own battleship, Cleansing Flame, never did manage to fire her Nova Cannon. Once the fleets did close, it turned into a slugging match, with ordinance and weapons fire hurtling across the void. My second Strike Cruiser, Will of Stone, crippled an enemy Dauntless, and was reduced to wreckage for her trouble. But the real start of the match for me was the Pride of Techys. She had been in the rear of the lines, trying to keep enemy ordinance at bay, and where I thought she would be relatively safe. But as the traitor fleet maneuvered, it was clear she was going to take the brunt of their attack.
Having taken a nasty set of critical hits from Thunderhawk-borne traitor boarding parties that crippled her gun decks and launch bays, she turned her prow toward the enemy and prepared to die well. However, in a small miracle, her skilled and veteran damage control teams repaired both sets of damage, and so she vented her full fury on the traitors – killing the ship in front of her, which in turn damaged several others in the traitor fleet. The more organized capital ships picked one of these off, handing the Imperial Fists the win.
The Saturnine Fleet everyone. They know their business.
So yeah. 0-3 in the game I’ve been advocating people play for years, 3-0 in the game I haven’t played in more than a decade and a half.
Now very tired, but very, very happy with the experience, I took Sunday off to hang out at the vendor hall, maybe catch a demo game, and sleep in.
The People
Wargaming events where you don’t know people can be a lonely thing – and an odd thing to balance, both wanting to know people in an event where everyone seems to know people, and then also trying to manage, at least in my case, avoiding introvert crash.
I will say that everyone I met was great, from opponents to organizers to the people I was in line with for probably the better part of an hour at the GW booth, where we bonded over wanting to paint our Sisters of Battle in white armor, and the dark temptation that is Necromunda. Plus hair dye and nail polish.
“You’re from where!?” was pretty frequently uttered when I explained that I was from Eastern WA.
It’s trite and cliche, but I genuinely felt like I made several friends at this who I both already miss and am looking forward to seeing again.
An Unexpected Twist
A member of the Badcast Discord put out a call before the event, asking if anyone was interested in a demo of a historical pike and shot game, The Pikeman’s Lament, which is a skirmish game for the 30 Years War/English Civil War period. We did a short demo, spent much of the rest of the day hanging out, drinking, talking about wargaming, etc.
I was also in DC for a conference the week after NOVA, and we managed to meet up for a proper game. Folks, it’s really quite good. The “push your luck” activation system, where a failure means your turn is done, felt really dynamic, and something of a good compromise between IGOUGO and alternating activation, the skirmish scale is appealing for the oft-intimidating nature of historical wargames, and overall it was just really fun, with some great potential for campaign play.
Definitely planning some things around this for the future.
And yes, I’m putting this under “The People”, because folks were awesome enough that I got suckered into both a new game system and more gaming despite having had an exhausting three days.
The Venue
NOVA has announced their moving to the Hilton in Dupont Circle for next year’s events, which is going to give me flashbacks to high school Model UN events, but it does mean that talking about the venue itself seems a little contrived. It was…fine. The Hyatt is a nice hotel, and the bar and restaurant were genuinely pretty decent (and allowed me to consume some vegetables during my time at NOVA). The food truck system was also a pretty decent one for handling the surge in demand that came at lunch hours, though the quality of the trucks varied considerably both in terms of deliciousness but also speed. The two best, a “Grease Truck” and a truck serving pizzas, were also quite slow, in a way where you definitely felt pressed for time.
The “Cantina”, which was the NOVA Lounge this year for charity, was probably the notable down note. You had to buy tickets to pay for things, and the currency conversion was, shall we say, not friendly. And the food looked – if not dire than at least aggressively mediocre, and in Crystal City there are plenty of alternatives. I ended up essentially writing off the tickets I bought as “I gave money to Tablewar Charities”.
But again, new venue should resolve that.
The vendors were great as well, including a store that was willing to ship my purchases back for a pretty low shipping cost, which was great given the amount of baggage I was already accumulating.
Very much looking forward to what they’re going to manage to put together next year.
Final Thoughts
NOVA was an absolute blast. From the energy of the GW preview on Wednesday all the way through, my opponents were universally there to have fun, play games, and roll dice. And everyone was clearly enthusiastic to be back, and taking what needed to happen for that to work seriously.
Seriously, it was a great event.
I think in some ways, the Heresy community is still finding its feet. Inherently, there are no Solar Aux, Militia or Mechanicum players, which means there was a serious shortage of the usual “Hey buddy, can you play traitors for this, we need some balance”. There were also a lot of special characters, and some people commented that this lists were a little harder than they had been expecting. I get that – I think people really just want to play with their cool toys, and see if they work the way they think they will.
But given that, the consistent level of hobby talent, sportsmanship, and commitment to just having a good time made this one of, if not the, best events I’ve ever gone to.
10/10, will frantically refresh my browser as the server goes down during registration again.