Weekend At Paul's - Day 3

Final day of the weekend, and while most of the crew were occupied with nonessential tasks like 'relaxing' and 'socialising', I was looking for more opponents!

Luckily, I didn't have far to look.

Technically, this battle happened on the second day, but it was past midnight and I was stalking the house looking for an opponent who was conscious enough to play.

Battle #5 – Creations of Bile vs Adeptus Custodes

With time for another game, Sultan wanted to try out his Custodes (which are intimidating at the best of times, not least when there are two Contemptor dreadnoughts facing you!)

We played Open Play mission Stand Off once more, which basically meant leaving one squad of Chaos Space Marines at the back while everyone else ran for the centre (with some Warp Talons flying around for a cheeky flanking move).

It became a proper slugfest in the centre: the Possessed killed the Achilles Dreadnought, who were torn down by the Guardians, who were killed by the Allarus Terminators, who were skewered by the Venomcrawlers.

As a sideshow, the Warp Talons tried to assassinate the Shield-Captain on the home objective, and nearly got him before getting chopped to pieces.

In the end, the Telemon Dreadnought swatted aside the Venomcrawlers who were desperately trying to screen the central objective, and made a game-winning 8” charge to engage Fabius Bile himself.

Although the Manflayer is a tricky customer, and after letting his Surgeon-Acolyte get squashed in his stead, he then rolled a bunch of sixes to survive and fight another day. That actually proved critical, since it left the centre objective contested and the game ended with a draw.

Battle #6 – Thousand Sons vs Grey Knights

This was very much an unscheduled game, but I’d been pondering yesterday’s battle with Winters SEO and, after a quick rewrite of my list in the morning, he agreed to a rematch.

The new list had ditched the Cult of Prophecy patrol with all its rerolls (I was trying to be too cute there) and gone for a Cult of Time battalion with one overriding theme: survivability. I was looking at the To The Last secondary to score 5VP for each of my three most expensive units that survived.

I’d seen that the Scarab Occult could withstand the worst that was thrown against them, and I was confident I could keep my Exalted Sorcerer on Disc out of trouble. The drawback was that the other most expensive unit were the 10 Rubric Marines, who could be removed more easily (with more time to rewrite the list, I’d have gotten around this). But I’d resigned myself to losing them (or at least using them as bait) and scoring 10VPs for this objective. I was also happy with keeping Engage on All Fronts and Retrieve Octarius Data, since my army is quite mobile and likes to avoid the centre.

Even more crucially, I wanted to see if I could still score points while avoiding that Terminator death star – the plan this time was not to engage it at all (since none of my secondaries relied on it) and to win on the peripheries.

It took some willpower not to do anything about that monster blob of character and terminators heading my way, but it actually worked. Because I had no intention of attacking them, I could ignore all the psychic powers that buffed them and focus on other defensive denials. The 10 Rubric Marines did eventually fall, but had kited the Terminator blob around for a couple of turns (Cacodaemonic Curse helped to lower the strength of their stormbolters, and I was reliably adding two of them back in with Time Flux and Warped Regeneration).

By the end of the battle, both Terminator death stars were intact, but we had both been scoring high on our secondaries, which was where the game was decided.

I had managed to pivot very early on in the battle, abandoning one half of the board, but securing the other. The big move was teleporting the Scarab Occult to the other side of the battlefield in Turn 2 – they moved away from the Grey Knight Terminators and obliterated all the tactical squads on the imperials’ home objective.

With the scores neck-and-neck in the End Game, I made a slip that cost me the game. Drago had jumped into my backfield to threaten my warlord and lascannon helbrutes. I’d sacrificed a Rhino to delay him for a turn, but had then decided to go all-out for the kill. I eventually got him (yay! Warlord kill!) but that didn’t leave me with enough Smite/firepower to take out the Dreadknight on the centre objective. Knocking him off would have kept Winters on 40VP for the primary, rather than the maximum 45VP.

And with the points on 93:89 in the Grey Knights favour, that proved to be decisive.

It was one of my best games of Warhammer I’ve played. The whole game was knife-edge tactical all the way along and I learned a hell of a lot about tournament play. It goes without saying that Winters was a great opponent and, though we were playing to win, it remained a friendly match where we were encouraging each other along (which is worth noting, since competitive is too often associated with being cutthroat).

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And that's it from the weekend. Absolutely fantastic time with some hobby legends and a big thank you to Paul for making it all happen.