Dis May

 Not so many battle reports from me lately. That's not because I'm not fighting them!

My hobby focus has shifted a bit recently. Partly from new work business, partly from the seasonal rebalancing that Games Workshop stuff goes through for me. I'll be mad keen on 40K for a while, then swing over to Fantasy for a bit, usually on a sort of two-to-three year cycle. 

40K has gone down my priority order a bit of late, mostly from burn-out after a particularly long phase on it. All the rebalancing of rules for tournament purposes throws me off a bit too, I'm definitely not a tourney player. They're in a good place and coming from a sensible approach, don't get me wrong, I'm just not in a mood to keep pace. 

That said! I did manage a recent scrap against Kas, trying out the new T'au codex against his lethal World Eaters. 

Eating T'aout

Most of my points went on the entirely bonkers Tau'unar Battlesuit, nearly 800 points of overpowered gun. Using the new Retaliation Cadre, I was going for a high-risk, high-reward approach of dropping close range Crisis Teams in and spraying death before bouncing away using mobility strats. Kas was practising for a local tournament, so had plenty of hard-hitters, but the meta has shifted away from what he brought the last time I fought him. More Eightbound, no Jackals and a Daemon Prince! Interesting.

Here's the game in short:

So my first turn went well, ceding the middle to Kas and letting him romp towards my guns. Even one hit from the Tau'unar's main cannon was enough to pop his Forgefiend, but somehow his Rhino full of Berserkers just wouldn't yield despite most of my army hitting it.

Here's his list - Angron and his buddies.

That meant I got hit in turn two by some nasty charges, and the Berserkers spiked their damage well enough to cut through an entire Crisis Team and their character. Angron was supporting them and thus able to tag my big chap, and although he couldn't carve it up in a single turn, I utterly flaked all my shooting in turn two, scoring a single Berserker for all my pains. I didn't make it through the next round of combat, funnily enough!

Here's mine. That really is a massive battlesuit, it dwarfs everything else. 

That meant the rest of the game was short and bloody, although no less entertaining for it. If my shooting had been less rubbish early on, Kas wouldn't have had enough to close, but there you go. I scored twenty points overall, thirty if I gave myself an extra ten for painting some of his army, but it wasn't what you'd call a close game. 

Blades in the GrimDark

After that, Pootle and I had a quick evening's Necromunda. 

His Orlock gang, the Flumps, against a new Delaque gang based on the House of Shadow rules. We were playing Cauldron of Lies, where we each have a secret objective chosen from a list of three and can block one of the choices as a victory condition each turn. You get six gangers each, and you're choosing from kill five enemies, drag five loot boxes off the field or get five of your own team to the other side. 

I only put the walls out for the instagram phase - bit hard to see over them for a skype game otherwise!

Pootle used a tactic card to bring three extra Greenhorns with sawn-off shotties to the party. Suited me - I'd decided to kill enemies as my plan, so the more targets to choose from, the merrier!

It was a Zone Mortalis game, and we both picked tiles with patches of shadow to lurk in as our starting points. As the Flumps ran forwards, that left a nice dark patch behind him. Obliging - I could infiltrate a Nacht-Gul champion into that, and immediately charged one of his champions. 

Charged straight into a trap - another tactic card got thrown down. The champion had a sawn-off tucked up his sleeve and got a free shot as I closed in. Pootle managed to miss with this, which kicked off an amazing sequence of rolling ones and twos. 

His champion went down to the Nacht-gul's sword, his mate went down, the nearby greenhorn ran off in a panic into a fungus patch and went down. The rest of his gang ran into psychic interference from the Delaque on the way into the middle, but there were enough to try some acrobatic flanking manouvers. 

My gang leader was lurking in the dark, so this enterprising young ganger leaped over that big hole to get at him.

Twin stub pistols blazing at short range, he missed every shot and even ran out of ammo.

When I shotgunned him back over the edge of the pit, he at least had a lot of time to reload his pistols as he fell.

With that done, the action shifted back to the Nacht-gul, who'd let himself get surrounded by angry Orlocks. One guy with a sword against three with guns, including the gang leader's bolter. 

Solid ones and twos made this the least accurate firing squad ever. Only one hit reached me, the leader running dry on his bolter. Which I promptly dodged using a tactics card, charged in against him and finished him off, causing the other two to run off into the funky fungus cloud just behind.

Much entertained by this utter incompetence, Pootle threw in the towel at this point. Fun game, although I felt like I'd Gotcha'd him a bit with exotic tools from an unfamiliar rulebook. Being able to pin gangers through a wall from a distance or bugger up his action economy with psychic worms felt akin to cheating. A good Delaque feeling, I suppose, and obviously the dice gods could just as easily have decided to shut me down instead, but not quite the savour of healthy victory I was after. 

Games Machine

Finally, I've been on the PC a fair bit lately. Stylus and I have been throwing down in Blood Bowl 3, and I've yet to beat him, the devil. His appallingly agile Elven Union team ran circles around my Chosen of Chaos, easily out-scoring me despite a number of his players going home with broken bones. We've got a four-player tournament coming up with some of our regulars, I shall post outcomes and screenshots once we have them. 

And I'm back on the Total Warhammer wagon, enjoying the Malakai Malakaisson DLC for the game. Skyships! Slayers! The Goblin Hewer! All good stuff. As a Lord, his playstyle is a bit more mobile than the typical Dwarven strategy of 'dig a deep hole and guard it', I've been flying around the Northern Wastes in a giant balloon, picking fights with Elves and Daemons more or less on a whim. Good stuff!