So I’m back at NOVA for a second year, playing the kind of event slate that makes Dan over at the Badcast angry – all Heresy, all the time. Why not 40K this year? Well, first because I can play 40K pretty much whenever I want, and even with a specialist games scene that’s doing pretty well in my small college town gaming community, Heresy and related games are rarer.

The second reason is that I play Eldar, and even though my army hasn’t substantially changed since the original concept in 6th edition, I didn’t feel like spending an entire weekend with my opponents complaining about a decision I made in 2016. Heresy it is!

The astute reader will observe that this writeup is coming like, two months after the event. Thems the breaks. Events transpired.

Horus Heresy

I signed up for both a “Blind Date Doubles” event, where you were randomly paired with someone else for some casual 1000 pts. each Horus Heresy, as well as a 1500 pt. “Centurion-style” set of games, wherein there’s a lot of restrictions that push you towards “Marines killing other Marines” – or sometimes militia or robomen. Alongside that, I repeated last year’s deep dive into Heresy-era specialist games, along with a surprise gaming system we’ll talk about at the end.

So how did the events go, and is NOVA still everything I found it to be the first time I went?

Blind Date Doubles

This was a lovely, casual opener to the event. I took a fairly mundane list, as during packing for a cross-country gaming event, it was extremely valuable to me that my doubles list be a subset of the Centurion list I was going to take later. It featured my usual “Technically This Isn’t A Special Unit But Who Are We Kidding” of a unit of Tartaros Terminators with Storm Shields accompanied by a Legion Champion with the Solar Marshal warlord trait, which is just a bonkers good combo.

Backing this up was a sea of yellow bodies – three Tactical Squads, two of which had Bayonets, and a Seeker squad. This list has a glaring weakness – because it’s a subset of a Centurion list, it’s built under the assumption that I won’t be encountering armor.

This was not a rule for the doubles event.

As such, I entered my first match with some trepidation, as I faced off against a Death Guard army with Typhus, one of the special Terminator squads – the Scythe boys and a Contemptor, alongside a Sons of Horus player with an absolutely massive 15-mean Reaver squad with a Warmonger in it, two Predators, and a Xiphon, commanded by Karl and Paul respectively. On my side was a Raven Guard player, Andrew, who started off rather grimly by losing his Dark Fury squad and his Praetor to a failed morale test. Most of the game was a grind – in the very best Heresy way. Imperial Fist bolter fire just pouring it on to advancing Death Guard troops, while trying to delay the Contemptors long enough. The Raven Guard had enough lascannons to take out the Predators, but not before they did a ton of work winnowing my forces down.

Eventually, I was pretty sure we were done for. The big Sons of Horus assault elements came down, weathered what I could throw at them still well enough to still be combat effective, and absolutely mauled one of my Tactical squads. My Terminators headed their way, and I was mentally preparing to be brought down through weight of numbers when my opponent failed his morale check for Hold the Line. And ran 12″ away. The next turn they ran another 11″.

At the end of the day, Loyalist bodies on objectives carried the day.

The next game was up against Karl again, and Ben Marsh, one of the event organizers, playing his Space Wolves ringers. I hadn’t had a chance to ever play Ben, and he’s an absolutely awesome TO, and playing loyalists, I also never get to actually fight the Rout. I was paired with a Salamanders player named Sean.

Ben’s force, with a large unit of Grey Hunters and two Land Speeders, was shockingly fast, and absolutely tore through our right flank until they got held up by my Terminators, which basically carried my army (a theme for all the Heresy games). Someday I’ll play games that are large enough where that won’t work, but today was not that day. My Legion Champion actually got to cut down Typhus, which was exciting, and Ben indulged me using my special reaction to charge a unit of Tacticals into a Land Speeder because it would be amusing. Overall, this was another really good game – the traitors ran out of bodies before we did, and we ended up taking it 3-0, with the Salamander Pyroclasts and the Imperial Fist Terminators both punching well above their weight.

Feeling pretty good, and remembering how Heresy plays, we moved on to the Centurion games.

Brief Interlude

But before that happened – the GW preview event was going on during the Doubles event. Which means I both got to go to the 40K Badcast live event (which was excellent) and also bath in the concentrated salt of all the 40K players complaining about the new Fulgrim model being Heresy-era (which was also excellent).

10/10, perfect vibes.

Centurion

For those unfamiliar with the Centurion format, basically it’s an attempt to have small Heresy games that are primarily infantry-on-infantry. Vehicles are outright prohibited, as are more formidable walkers like Leviathans, and generally speaking to goal is for it to be a small game with a lot of actual Space Marines who will beat each other to death in the mud. Unlike some people, I don’t think this is the way to play Heresy, but I like it for small games, and it does promote some interesting play styles. That being said, there are definitely winners and losers here – there are some armies that you often see in Centurion and Zone Mortalis but not larger games, and vice versa. And candidly, the Imperial Fists do very well in this format, given making “basic” units better is a large part of their schtick.

It’s also a setting where I wish fewer people would bring named characters (see also: Zone Mortalis), but this is again talking from the privileged perspective of someone who can field a WS 6, 2+/3++ Centurion right out of the book.

My 1500 point list is very similar to my Doubles list, as again the idea was to nest them together. This meant adding a Contemptor, a 10-man unit of Assault Marines, and a 5-man Destroyer squad sans Jump Packs. Not, strictly speaking, the most efficient list, but importantly, it involved Not Painting Anything, which was important.

Game One Daniel, with his Alpha Legion. Hilariously, he recognized my army via pictures from this blog, so if you’re reading this…hi Daniel. Also, I owe you a painted dead Imperial Fiat. I’m working on it, I promise.

This game was a lot of fun, with Daniel doing an outstanding job exploiting the 2″ “You Can’t Touch Me” rule the Alpha Legion have to infuriating effect. With relatively small armies on large maps, the battle basically bifurcated into my Terminators and Assault squad vs. his Laernian Terminators and his commander and then some Tacticals and Destroyers vs. a Saboteur, with everyone backed up by some troops. The one problem with trying to be cagey is it did let me push him off some objectives, and eventually the Imperial Fists carried the day once more, 3 points to 1, but very bloodied. This also began the pattern of my Assault Marines doing Absolutely Nothing. I want this unit to work, I really do, but I’m pretty sure they need at least a character, and possibly a character and an apothecary, to really start doing what they should.

Game Two was against Zachary with more Alpha Legion. This time with a unit of Headhunters, as well as an oddly-teal colored unit of the Dark Angels Knights Cenobium. Having never faced these guys, but having rather breathlessly read about them in the Dark Angels Black Book back in the day, I was looking forward to this fight, and also a little trepidatious about it. There was also a unit of Volkite Heavy Support dudes in the back, which concerned me.

For the first time, I think my Fists were genuinely outclassed in shooting, so it was my turn to be a little cagey, knowing he had to come close to get on the objectives. My Seekers took up position in a fortification that would give them some much needed cover, and the war of attrition kicked off. I came out a little better for it, having gotten some lucky shots off killing one of the Knights and winnowing down the Headhunter squad, while managing to hide the tactical squad he mangled in return such that they could be relied upon to hold an objective, and where the loss of 5 bolter-armed Tacticals doing nothing but that didn’t sting too much. A bloody and isolated fight on the right flank between his Contemptor and a Tactical squad and my Contemptor and a Tactical squad also broke in my favor, leaving me with a safe objective over there. My Destroyers died horribly, but the Rad Missile wielding member of the squad rallied, and got to melt a few dudes, which is always fun.

Finally, my Assault Marines sallied forth to bully a wounded unit, accomplishing they only thing they’d do the whole event, and my Terminators managed to out fight his Knights, relying very, very heavily on their 3++ saves and power fists – and that the Knights were already down two Terminators by the time my boys arrived. In the end, this one ended up with an Imperial Fists victory of 8 points to 7.

The last bout was against Chris and his Night Lords. Chris had played me last year during the “Thunderhawk of Death” game, and had learned well to fear Imperial Fist Seekers. Which meant he dedicated a Recon squad to killing them, and to be honest, the Seekers came out the worse of that engagement. He also played superbly well, making sure prime Seeker targets like Sergeants and Apothecaries were well protected, while concentrating his own forces. We ended up in a massive scrum in the middle, with me slowly feeding bodies into chain glaives. The only thing I had to reach the Recon unit was, once again, the lone missile-armed Destroyer, who promptly turned five of them into glowing slag, and at least interrupted the relentless sniper fire. But when it came down to it, in another grinding game, I came out the worse of it, in no small part due to Sevatar cutting down my Centurion. His psychic power is wildly good. Which is fitting, given he’s the only non-Primarch whose ever given my boy Sigismund a proper fight.

For those keeping score at home: Typhus < Generic Imperial Fist Legion Champion < Sevatar.

He also got off extremely well with doing several wounds to my Contemptor with bolters, which meant less time just massacring his Terminators. When the dust settled, the absolute bloodbath in the middle had gone his way, and he carried the day 5 to 3. I honestly couldn’t have asked for a better closing game for my Horus Heresy part of the event, and Chris is an amazing opponent who I have been fortunate enough to be paired against two years running.

Seriously, I had a blast playing ever single one of these games. The armies were painted, the battles brutal, and even the special missions from the organizers didn’t do much interfering (is this a veiled reference to later games? Who knows…).

Adeptus Titanicus

There were two AT18 events this year, and as one does, I signed up for both. Lamentably, this meant missing the Zone Mortalis event, which is sad, because I haven’t had a chance to really put the new ZM rules through their paces. But 3000 points of Titanicus was too hard to pass up.

Which also meant painting 3000 points of Titanicus, which meant finishing a Warlord and a Warmaster, as I was determined to be able to field my own force this year after needing a loaner army last year. And while it came down to the wire, reader, I did finish them.

So off my shiny new Titans marched off the war.

Into the Fall of Night

This even was the two big 3,000 point games. My first matchup was against Dan, who I met once at a CK Studios class, and who I consider a friend, albeit one that, in an age beset by plague, I know primarily online. So naturally, we had to travel across the entire country to get a game of Adeptus Titanicus in.

And I got crushed.

Dan’s army was a very well designed force, and Exhibit A in Plasma/Megabolter Warhounds being arguably the best Titan in the game. My somewhat pick-n-mix, follow your bliss maniple couldn’t put enough pressure onto his shields to bring them down for my heavier Titans to be able to close the deal with high strength weapons. And so we got pushed off the objectives, and then sort of cut to pieces, in fairly close order. While the actual score was a fairly close 3 to 2, that was just because my big Titans just parked themselves on objectives.

The play of the game? The “Warhound Chainsaw Massacre”, when one of his double-chainfist Reavers just completely annihilated one of my Warhounds, who fell back onto a lance of knights, who managed to take the falling debris on their shields and remain holding an objective. It was a great game, and Dan’s a great opponent, but this game definitely exposed some flaws in my current list at this point level.

Speaking of which…

My second game was against Joe, who brought a Psi-Titan. Playing Legio Astorum, I rarely get to face the loyalist-only Titan.

Sweet merciful Emperor that gun is brutal.

It caught me on the back foot, and I spent the entire game taking critical hits to the head on my Warmaster. Which, to the credit of the skilled repair crews of Legio Astorum, it was able to tank rather well for a few turns, but I encountered the same problem as my last game – a lack of things to break down shields. At lower point games, the cornerstone of my force are two melee Reavers, so this isn’t something I had really noticed until I suddenly wanted to be able to kill things at range and couldn’t. While that right flank was a little frustrating, I got to play some games on the left flank with my somewhat more maneuverable knights and Warhounds.

This setup ends exactly how you think it does, with my opponent declaring we had “Achieved Titanicus”, and very nearly everything in the frame reduced to a smoldering ruin. At the end of the day though, Joe won rather handily 50-something to 30-something.

Onto the Break of Dawn

Fortified with about six hours of sleep (being a West Coast night owl is rough for NOVA) and some excellent Thai food for dinner, we went down to smaller points games, as both the Traitors and Loyalists had started to get battered in the brutal Titan war. This was a three game series, with my first game vs. a fellow named Jamison.

The special scenario had one Titan coming in from reserve. I picked a Warlord of his. He picked Warcrone, my Fist-and-Melta Reaver.

Here is where I beg tournament organizers not to use random-arrival reserves for event games, especially not slow moving narrative ones. Warcrone never arrived, and while I did my best to fight my way through with that handicap, my inability to really sink damage continued, especially when missing one of the Reavers that’s the best as closing. This game felt pretty close, and like if given enough time I might be able to fight my way through it, but when it ended I was down 40-something to zero, based on the magnitude of units slain.

Jamison was a great opponent, and the game itself was fun, but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t feeling a bit discouraged, having handily lost all three games so far, and two of them in a way where I was just squarely outclassed.

Apparently, the scenario gods took pity on me, because my next game, vs. Jackson, was something of a softball.

The setup is this: The traitors have to destroy those MDF objective markers – they are relatively easy to destroy in melee, and hard to shoot. The orbital cannon will shoot occasionally, and should probably be avoided.

All I had to do was not lose objectives. And my Titans, not having to come to him, could tuck themselves comfortably behind those icebergs for cover and just send shots down range. And send shots down range they did. His Clawlord, which was probably his best chance at destroying objectives, took several rounds of Quake Cannon shells, slowing it to a crawl, while his melee Reaver was countered by one of mine. And my Knights, which had been doing their best but not really excelling in the event so far, got off a solid charge on his second Warlord, and proceeded to run wild.

Had we just been running without objectives, it would have been 19-9 in my favor, a solid victory. With a bunch of “Get more points for free” tokens, it was a 54 to 9 victory, and I was finally contributing something to the loyalist side (in fairness, the loyalists were carrying the day without me).

The last game I played was against a guy named Jamie, who was playing Legio Revenatus, a homebrew Legio from a Forge World that was definitely up to no-good, witchy-poo shenanigans before the Heresy, and signed up fast for Horus’s “Join my side and I won’t ask questions about your weird Necromancy Titans” deal.

Legio Astorum, being who they are, were rather eager to take them down. This game was also something of a redemption match for me – it was a capture the flag scenario, and I had lost that one last year by failing to pay attention and play to the objectives.

This time, I decided to get tunnel vision on the objective. It was time to stop shooting, yell All Power to Locomoters and go for it, straight up the center with my melee Reavers. Come back with the enemy flag, or not at all. The big problem for Jamie was that honor demanded that the Titan carrying the flag not take a step back. For my Warlord, who was in cover and mostly absorbing fire while itself gleefully firing away, this was not a problem.

For Jamie’s Warmonger, being chased by two melee Reavers and a lance of Knights, it absolutely was.

Jamie was a shrewd opponent though, and did everything he could to stop me, sacrificing his Knights to try to slow me down, along with a Titan which would almost certainly die, but would keep me from getting long charges and tons of bonus attacks off on his Warmonger. It wasn’t quite enough though, and eventually I got in with my powerfist-armed Reaver, at which point he also gets a ton of sportsmanship points for reminding me that the scenario had rules for just grabbing the flag with a powerfist. Which I did. The final roll of the game was his melta-armed Reaver disabling said fist, which we decided had fused around the flag pole in a solid lump of metal. This was another solid victory on points (45 to 0) that was much closer in terms of kills – we had gotten the objective, but things were very much coming apart at the seams.

Battlefleet Heresy

We continue to go down in scale with Battlefleet Heresy, the event devoted to a variant of a game that hasn’t been supported by GW in the better part of two decades, and thus an event with immaculate vibes. Everyone is rusty on the rules, but everyone is here to have fun with tiny spaceships. My “Auspex Returns” fleet headed out once more, and thanks to a wild imbalance in sides, I was asked to switch to traitors – but was allowed to keep my Imperial Fists rules, which I am thankful for, because my brain could not handle a new legion’s rules at this point.

My first game was against Michael and his Mechanicum fleet, and we opened strong, with the combination of Imperial torpedoes and Brian Harvey’s patented double-bombardment cannon Strike Cruisers doing work when closing. The game devolved into a close range knife-fight, and at the end of the day, having forced a cruiser of his to fleet back into the warp, he was closer to the planet than I was, which won him the scenario.

This game was also interesting because it was the first one I’ve actually played with the “proper” IGOUGO rules of old school Battlefleet Gothic. More on that…later.

The next game was me being pared with a Dark Mechanicum player whose name I lamentably forgot to record, and a guy named Jared driving a proper Imperial Fists fleet, and also running away with the event entirely. And someone who I am absolutely thrilled I got to play against in person. This game was somewhat anticlimatic, but looked good – the Dark Mechanicum advanced into the jaws of the Imperial Fist fleet and got properly chewed to pieces, while I tried to get my ships into combat. In retrospect having the Imperial fleet, with its heavy prows (and heavy prow weaponry) go in first would have been advantageous, but my partner wanted to get some of his nasty tricks off early. To be honest, this game was going to need to be played fast in order to be viable, so we really only made it to the opening rounds.

But it looked damned good.

And I had a chance to talk to Jared about torpedoes. He and I both play Imperial Fists, which are one of the fleets that get to take Nova Cannons. And while I took one for…RP purposes…we both agree that for most of the ways the community handles alternating activations,  it’s a bad idea. You see…we don’t quite know how to handle ordinance. In the IGOUGO version of BFG, there will be two ordinance phases. If in alternating activations you only allow them one, they are agonizingly slow, and indeed a lot of escorts can keep up with them. On the other hand, if you let them have two moves without your opponent being able to move, they are suddenly some of the best weapons in the game – being both long range and horrifically lethal. In that version of Battlefleet Heresy, Reload Ordinance is probably the best order for any given Imperial ship, Imperial vessels are actively a menace as they close, and swapping out for a Nova Cannon is never a good trade. Something to ponder.

The Main Event

But what I was really here for for Battlefleet Heresy was to play the Man, the Myth, the Legend…Alex Selth. I had promised him a game, and he had flown across the goddamned Pacific for it. So we ignored the whole “We’re both traitors” thing, as well as the “There’s a scenario” thing, and set out to play a very large game, featuring some very good and questionably wise flavored cream liquors.

This was a proper game. Multiple cruiser squadrons. A battleship vs. battle barge.

This was a great game – Alex is a great opponent, and we spent many hours rolling dice and chatting, until literally about 3 AM (after all the weak-blodded East Coast types were well and truly in bed). Multiple cruisers were reduced to burning wreckage. Whole escort squadrons were annihilated in a single turn. An absolutely desperate battle took place between Imperial interceptors and Traitor Thunderhawks and boarding torpedoes.

Thunderchild faced down a Battle Barge and two Strike Cruisers, as she does, a noble sacrifice to give my battleship, Lance of Illumination and the ships of my right flank time to get into position.

At the end of the evening/start of the morning, we decided to call it through sheer exhaustion. He had one the left flank, I had won the right, and the center was just a mass of burning ships nestled between two clouds of space gas.

Or they would have been, if the event organizers hadn’t needed to pack up, and we replaced the terrain with bottles of Good Life Choices.

I was supposed to go to a Steel Rift drop-in event the next morning. Reader, I did not.

#noregrets

Thanks for the game Alex.

Bonus Round!

I did manage to rally for a narrative demo of InCountry. I was curious about this game, because I am deeply conflicted about “modern historical” games – Plastic Pressgang will probably have an episode on that at some point next year. But, the best way to have an informed conflicted opinion is to give them a chance, and the guys at the sales booth had been really welcoming the day before. The narrative was that Definitely Not Russia was staging a series of attacks – first trying to blow up suitcase nukes in a number of cities, followed by in my case assassinating a major government official by ambushing his armored limousine as it passed through a residential area.

I actually succeeded in both games, the first primarily thanks to the fateful phrase “So…tell me about this grenade launcher I have?” that taught both my opponent and I why the coherence range for the game is something like 6″, and why infantry don’t advance in column anymore. The second was mostly again a “Play to the objective, and all you have to do is not have everyone die.” An entire half my force sacrificed themselves rushing the limousine, with the very last member of the fire team wounded and bleeding out, but having successfully set off a bomb under the car.

Overall, I found it to be a fun, fairly fast paced game, with a lot of tactical decision making around accomplishing something vs. holding your actions back to cover approaches, overwatch, etc.

There are certainly ways to make this game problematic, but there’s no default narrative in the game that steers into that, and it’s just as easy to avoid. Currently, there’s some talk in my club for adapting it to the “Cold War Goes Hot” genre, to supplement games looking at that hypothetical conflict from a much larger scale.

Overall

NOVA went excellently this year, in my opinion. There were some teething issues with the hotel (the key card maker broke – I didn’t know they could do that, but it’s a bad scene that they did) and parking in DC for “drive in” locals is Not Good, which is a known factor, but I enjoyed the venue. There were also some lighting issues in the main hall, which was a very soothing, but someone difficult to see in blue. Great for a conference keynote. Less great for a Warhammer tournament.

But the events were run well, the Heresy organizers especially put their heart and soul into the events they run, and they really were an excellent time. And with registration being an absolute breeze, and DC being a long but easy flight to get to, NOVA remains the “big” event I hope to attend every year.