In the week before the tournament, I had to build and paint a Manticore, and a Colossus cannon. Here are some pictures so you know I'm not just making this up.
Sprayed and ready to go. The cannon was made out of the deathstrike missile and some other tank bits.
The first coat of paint, needs more camo!
The completed manticore
All packed up and ready to go!
So we were ready to go. Five people piled into my brother's car to arrive at 10:00 and get some gaming in!
My first opponent was a cool guy named Randy with a very well converted Grey Knights army. He had Draigo, a librarian, a large squad of paladins, 10 purifiers, 5 regular terminators, and three autocannon dreadnoughts.
The deployment was the spearhead version of dawn of war, where you can either deploy one spearhead or three units. We had five objectives on the board, with the middle objective doubling as a strength nine AP 3 laser that fired in a random direction each player turn. I think it only killed one purifier the whole game though. I won the roll and got to go second, so he deployed his purifiers and Draigo with the paladins. I deployed my destroyer spearhead, and managed to kill three purifiers before the game even started. He proceded to move his football line towards me, and I shot at them as they advanced. When my valkyrie full of melta-vets arrived they managed to down three of the paladins, and marbo killed another one when he came in. On my left flank the purifiers were just tearing through squads of guardsmen, but eventually they managed to swarm through and kill them all.
The all star of the game was definitely Marbo. He killed a paladin when he arrived. Then he was charged by the last surviving member of the squad and got THREE wounds through his armour. Marbo wasn't done though, so he sniped a wound off Draigo before charging in and doing another. Then Draigo stomped him, but Marbo is only human after all.
My army's lack of mobility meant that I couldn't really get around that much, so in the end he won three objectives to none.
Second game was against my first opponent's son! He was running Blood angels, with two las/plas razorbacks full of assault marines, a drop podding claw dread, Lemartes and the death marines, a squad of vanguardians, some individual drop priests, the Sanguinator, one more assault marine squad, and a land speeder of some sort. The mission was a modified kill points game with extra points for units in the enemy deployment zone. The deployment zones were triangular, ending in a point nine inches from the centre, and only half of the army could be in reserve. In the above picture we can see my 21 man infantry squad getting ready to charge a fast moving razorback. They missed, and ended up fighting the Sanguinor and the squad that was in the rhino.
They never did kill that transport, but they did manage to kill two of the five assault marines from it before they were completely destroyed. Other highlights include the melta-vets coming in and nuking the death company but leaving Lemartes with a single wound. The enraged chaplain charged the squad and just wasted them. Also, Marbo bombed a deepstricken jump pack squad, leaving only the sergeant, who decided to charge him and was cut down. Finally, I had some outflanking sentinels just camping out in the back of my opponents deployment zone, so he deepstruck a priest down to fight it! My sentinel dutifully fired off his flamer and charged in, and after a few tense rounds of combat I actually killed him!
Now guardsmen aren't really that great in kill points mission, and his vanguard basically dropped in and destroyed all my troopers. At the end I had about 13 victory points to his 21, so it was a decisive victory for my opponent.
So, with two losses I wasn't really doing that well as far as straight up points went, but I had enjoyed both of my games quite a bit. Plus, I had got my secret objective in both games! That's right, there are secret objectives in this tournament. I didn't tell you before, because that is how secrets work. In my first game I had to have a unit in my opponent's deployment zone at the end of the game, and in my second I had to do permanent damage to all of my opponent's infantry units.
Now, the final battle was a special one because it was against my brother!
This game was a regular deployment (18 inches in from the edge) with three objectives. The fun twist this time was that on turn four one of the objectives would blow up and be removed, and the other two emitted an EMP burst that automatically glanced any vehicles in a 6 inch range. Steven's army consisted of 3 dreadnoughts (one autocannon, one death company in a pod, one librarian), two attack bikes with meltas, two jump pack squads, a rhino full of death company, and a vindicator. I deployed one platoon hugging each long table edge to try to keep the outflanking death company out of there, which may have been a mistake as it spread my army a bit thin. Highlights of the game include:
-Autocannon guys on the tower completely lighting it up all game long
-chimera ramming a rhino first turn and destroying it
-sentinels creeping up on the right side and contesting key objectives
-melta vets flying in and shooting some deepstriking jump packers before getting destroyed by them
-the bombs detonating and taking the weapons off of four vehicles, which was all of the ones in range!
After a tense run roll on the last turn, Steven was not able to get up to the only uncontested objective so the game was a tie. My secret objective was to do permanent damage to everything in my opponent's army, which I thought I had done until Steven told me that he had one Sanguinary Priest that hadn't been wounded.
End results:
2 losses(0), 1 draw(10), 2 secret objectives(10) : 20 Tournament Points in total. It was a great bit of gaming and I had a lot of fun. My friend John, who came all the way up from the frigid north for this, ended up walking away from the tournament with the sportsmanship trophy. I'm hoping that I will be able to get my dark eldar painted up for the next tournament!
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