So Blog Wars 7 “Retribution” has come and gone and with it the fretting and playtesting of lists (I did neither) and last minute painting (I did quite a bit of that).
I’ve got to say – this was probably one of the most enjoyable I’ve been to. That was in part the group of guys from Red Steel Preston who attended for the first time – giving us a sense of camaraderie (more self-commiseration than congratulation and none of us placed that highly), my opponents on the day, but mainly Alex for organising another great event.
As has now become tradition, about halfway through my first game I remembered I should have been taking notes and pics for a detailed write-up on the blog, so most of my report will be from memory (sorry if I get anything completely wrong).
Game 1 was against Peter Sidaway from Mid Table Obscurity. The mission was basically kill as much of each other as possible and Peter was playing a White Scars bike list with some Space Wolves. This was my first time playing bike lists, although I knew they were fast and hit hard.
Peter pretty much had me on the back foot the entire game and a combination of fast bikes, Storm Shields and FNP meant that getting rid of his bike-deathstar was a real pain. By T4 I had around a third of my army left compared to about two thirds of Peter – but those points were locked in his deathstar, so I threw Abaddon in to try and even the playing field. Abaddon did great – getting 12 attacks on the charge and wounding with 7 – more than enough to wipe out the unit…when Peters Rune Priest managed 7 consecutive Storm Shield saves and Abaddon failed all of his 4++ saves in return. The rest of the game was Peter trying to pick off the remnants of my army whilst my Heldrakes circled overhead picking off random units at leisure.
The final score 1610 – 963 to Peter (who happened to end up in 4th place overall – which was a solid result!).
The final score 1610 – 963 to Peter (who happened to end up in 4th place overall – which was a solid result!).
Game 2 was against Daniel Russell with as Inquisition and Space Marine list in an objectives game where our objectives were worth 5VPs to ourselves but 15VPs to the opponent, with a 10VPs objective in the middle of the board.
Not being too familiar with Inquisition (despite GreyLamb playing them a lot) Daniel gave me a great overview of his army and told me what to be afraid of.
Expecting him to throw lots of nasty-choppy deathsquads at me, I castled-up behind a huge piece of LOS blocking terrain in the middle of the table, which meant that Daniel was effectively feeding me a unit or two of his army each turn. By Turn 4 I had effectively tabled him with only an Inquisitor left holding his objective and about 75% of my army still running around. The game went to Turn 7, allowing me to take all of the objectives for 30 VPs (and 3 secondary VPs). Daniel was a great opponent and there was loads of banter throughout the game.
Game 3 was on table 5 (after my last big win) and was against Chris Buckle with Dark Angels. The mission was a new one, with 3 objectives across the centre of the board and VPs given to the player that controlled one each player turn – and the game maxed out at 5 Turns.
Unfortunately Chris was running two squads of 10 Termis with an assortment of Storm Shields, Scouts, a Whirlwind and a flyer formation of 2 Talons and a Raven. The Termis and Scouts obviously started the game on all three objectives and Chris started scoring points from there.
Given that 6 VPs were being given up each Turn Chris controlled objectives, I had 2 choices – charge in to contest and then get beaten to death or try and whittle them down first.
The game actually went amazingly from a killing point of view, with my Iron Warriors opening up with tons of plasma and pretty much killing all of the Termis by Turn 3. Unfortunately this meant that Chris had earned 18VPs by that point – already winning the game – and he managed to whittle down my Troops, denying me much chance to score myself. Annoyingly my Heldrakes fluffed and didn’t arrive until Turn 4, so whilst the Termis weren’t an issue, the same couldn’t be said for the Flyers picking off my Troops at will…
In my eyes, I never stood a chance at the actual mission, but had an absolute blast playing against Chris and just trying to smash his armies face in. The game ended 17-2 to Chris who managed to finish 5thoverall – so congrats!
That resulted with me ending up in 14th place – certainly not my worst placing and I was happy to be in the top half of the Leaderboard after a 1W /2L result. The Red Steel guys didn’t fare too much better taking an 8th and 10th place (I think) and then petered off to last place…eek.
The painting comp is my area though and I fared much better. Jamie from Index Astartes took best Character with awesome his Iron Hands Chapter Master conversion and I took best Army with the Iron Warriors against some extremely stiff competition from Jamie’s Iron Hands, Ben (from Red Steel) and his simple but very effective IG, Dave Westons stunning Nids (that won last year) and a very pretty Space Wolves army (sorry – I don’t know the owners name) - to name a few.
A few more tasty pics from the day:
I think the painting quality was much higher this time around, with even more people submitting armies – but it wasn’t just the painting, there were also some amazingly themed and well thought-out converted armies, like one based on Pirates and Ninjas and another IG army that was 100% converted in various ways.
The painting competition does now pose a problem though – I have now won twice with the Iron Warriors and Nids and I can’t really submit either again without feeling guilty – unless I can come up with some way of significantly changing them up somehow (because I’m not about to start another army any time soon) – so I’ll have to see what I can come up with on that front for BW8…