Brief Tournament Report: Arcanacon 2012

For those that don't know, Arc is a huge 40k tournament in Melbourne, with 150 spots available this year - which is a reduction on previous years! Its the largest and longest running tournament in the southern hemisphere, and very difficult to get a ticket for as they sell out in hours. I was lucky to get my hands on a ticket reserved for Battle Bunker club members - thanks Diffey!

Once again I took my hybrid Tau out to play with the big boys - list is here. There were three Tau players in total, playing relatively similar lists. A new team had taken over the tournament and although there were a few delays and confusions they managed to get us over the line in the end - I don't envy them the task :)

If You Can't Beat 'Em... Draigo Wing Battle Report

Well my post/rant last week about the unbalanced aspects of the Grey Knight codex certainly drew a lot of comment. I spent some time this week brushing up on the Space Wolf Codex and came up with 3 lists that I would like to try to power up my poor Crimson Fists; one drop pod heavy, one fully mech and a hybrid list with a single pod. What is absolutely awesome is that I can take a squad of 4 Long Fangs with heavy bolters for 95 points - 55 points less than from the vanilla codex! If you don't know, this is the traditional Devastator loadout for the Crimson Fists, but is only actually a viable option from the Wolves codex *sigh*.

At my local FLGS we are all very easy going when it comes to counts-as and proxying. This is a great way  of making sure that club members get an opportunity to play against all sorts of lists that we might not have the required models for. Anyway by the time I found an opponent and had to pick a list, I had the urge to try my own hand with these acursed Grey Knight. My opponent was up for it so I pulled out 10 Terminators and started proxying :) The Crimson Wolves will have to wait for another day...

You can see the list here. There is something liberating about playing with 4 units and 14 models! The games run so quickly I easily fit two casual games into about 2.5 hours. My opponents for the evening were A) the same guy as last week, playing relatively the same Grey Knights list but with Psyfleman dreads this time; and B) a chaos list with oblits, plague marines, Abaddon, land raider and lash prince.

Tournament Report: Battle Bunker Crash

I've just got back from a four round, 1500 point tournament - a long and intense day, as each game was 1 hour 50 minutes. I had a great time playing against four challenging opponents and learnt a few new things about Tau in the process. For a first time tournament it was very well run, I had no complaints. Well done Josh and Matt, I want to thank you for an enjoyable day.

The crash was a bit different to other tournaments in Melbourne. Firstly there were no soft scores to determine the winner - there was however a painting score that went towards a separate prize. So I could be a dickhead without having to worry about sports scores, yay! Even more innovatively, we all got to vote on the missions we wanted from a selection of 10 in the days before the tournament. So Boone could complain about the missions, and I didn't hear any complaints.

Mech Crimson Fists vs Mech Guard - Mega Battle

After trying to organise a larger game on the weekend for a while now, the stars finally aligned when Matt and I both got permission last Sunday from our respective partners. After a flurry of text messages we settles on a 3000 point game with 4 slots for each of elites, fast attack and heavy support. Of course as a guard player Matt didn't really need the additional FOC slots - Imperial Guard can squadron just about everything. But my Space Marines would be unable to field a legal 3000 point army the way I am playing them at the moment.

I pulled out the terminator heavy 1500 list I have been experimenting with the last couple of weeks and started adding things in till all the slots were full, then added a couple of upgrades and Pedro Kantor. It was nice to get Lascannons in my tactical squads, I just can't seem to find the points for that in my 1500 list. I threw in a Whirlwind which I justified with the fact that surely I would be able to pop enough transports to give it something to shoot at. I ended up with the following:

Librarian - Machine Curse, Gate of Infinity (100)
Pedro Kantor (175)
10 Terminators - 2 cyclones, 2 chainfists (470)
5 Assault Terminators - 3 LC, 2 TH/SS (200)
Land Raider - multi-melta, extra armour (275)
Dreadnought - twin-linked lascannon, missile launcher (145) 
Dreadnought - multi-melta, heavy flamer, drop pod, locator beacon (165)
10 Tactical Marines - lascannon, melta, combi-melta, rhino (230)
10 Tactical Marines - lascannon, melta, combi-melta, rhino (230)
10 Tactical Marines - missile launcher, flamer, rhino (205)
5 Scouts - missile launcher, bolters, teleport homer, melta-bombs (105)
4 Bikes, 1 Attack Bike - 2 meltaguns, multi-melta (165)
Land Speeder multi-melta, typhoon (100)
Land Speeder multi-melta, typhoon (100)
Predator - autocannon, heavy bolters (85)
Predator - autocannon, heavy bolters (85)
Predator - autocannon, heavy bolters (85)
Whirlwind (85)

So we met up at the Battle Bunker (my local games store in Northcote). We decided to play on a 9' x 4' space, a table and a half. We chose to start with Pitch Battle and rolled the table quarters mission - basically I use this on a 3 or 4 instead of the stupid Capture and Control mission in the book. You just treat the quarters as objectives that have to be held as troops that are in the quarter, and can be contested by other units in the quarter. I'll go into alternative missions more in a later post... Anyway with the big table we elected to play with six "quarters".

Matt rocks the traditional Imperial Guard Chimera/Vendetta spam so I was very lucky to get first turn - despite rolling a 2. We set up as you can see in the pics. I didn't take pictures of the progress of the game because we were too busy trying to get it finished before home time. We ruled that you had to set up at least half of your army in each two thirds of the board - to prevent one flank being too overloaded. On a board of this width the player going second could really focus their firepower on a small part of the enemies forces. However when playing quarters objectives this didn't seem to be as much of a problem, and anyway Imperial Guard armies take up so much room he basically had to deploy across the full width anyway!

The Righteous View of the Crimson Fists

I set up with one scoring Rhino in each "quarter". The shooty Terminators were holding the left flank, the center of the board had my Land Raider, 1 Predator, Whirlwind and shooty Dread. The right flank had two preds and the bike unit. Setting up first was nerve-wracking. I had to spread out but make sure that all my units could support each other as required.

The Traitorous Guard Preparing to Die

The seize the initiative roll was a tense time for me but I made it through and got to take that precious first turn. 3000 points of guns got ready to fire.

Well it was lots of fun to play such a large game. I've never played over 2000 points before and must admit I suffered from a little bit of analysis paralysis in the first turn. So many targets to pick from! Luckily it didn't really matter because I didn't seem to do much damage considering - I managed to pop one Chimera and immobilise a single Valkyrie. Luckily Matt couldn't do much better - we could have set up a little closer and pretty much skipped the first round altogether.

Here are some highlights from the ensuing game:

• My bloody Whirlwind was unable to reach any of the troops on the board until the 4th turn ... if only they had a 49" range! They finally took out a command squad (minus boss) under some controversy...  
• Matt not managing to pop a single one of my Rhinos :P
• My lascannon Dread absorbing half a table's worth of fire and ending up stunned.
• The multi-melta attack bike being the sole survivor from a torrent of fire directed at the bike squad, only to miss a Leman Russ from 1" in front of the damn thing! 
• The Assault Terminators with Pedro absorbing a stupendous amount of fire. 
• Once Pedro was finally killed, the Land Raider charging through terrain in furious anger and turned a Leman Russ to slag.

Matt conceded at the end of turn four. This gave as a chance to get home at a reasonable hour and keep our significant others happy :) Basically I pulled some very flukey saves which I seem to have a habit of doing. I also completely forgot to deep strike my 2 land speeders. We calculated that the full game, with a little less time spend dithering on my part, should take about four hours for this size of game - with two mechanised armies anyway.

I hope you have the same good luck with all your cover saves in your next game!