Squirrelfest 2011

Talk about a good time!  I went to a 40k tournament last night with my Chaos Marines that had the more unique rules I've ever played with.  I'll try and get a copy of them and link them.  Due to painting shortfalls, I had to adjust the list I posted last week.  I dropped the 10 Lesser Daemons, the icons and the Havocs and put in a Greater Daemon and two five man Chaos Marine units with missile launchers.  Anyway, here's a brief overview of my games.


Game 1 - Get Out of My Tree! - Opponent: Space Marines
The mission was five objectives, four of which were deepstruck on to the board by the players, one in the center called the Hometree.  The big wrinkle was that you could destroy objectives as if they were monstrous creatures but there were also secondary, tertiary and tactical points available.

My opponent ran an extremely scout heavy list with three thunderfire cannons and two shooting dreads backing them up.  He had first turn and I just turtled up behind my Land Raider to weather the storm.  He basically shot me up for a couple turns until I was able to get my rhinos up into his lines.  Anything not in transports got blasted off the table by the TFC's but he had no real answer for my Land Raider as I sat it on the center objective.  Good game, very unique army run by my opponent but I was able to take it.

Game 2 - Protect Your Nuts! - Opponent: Chaos Daemons
The mission was pretty complex.  There were six acorn tokens spread around the board that you flipped over when you got a non-vehicle, non-monstrous creature in base contact with it.  Two of the tokens were objectives you had to pick up and hold more than your opponent for the primary.  Two acorn tokens were called 'yummy' and 'yucky' and you had to carry them either to your opponent's deployment zone or your own.  Two tokens were special shooting attacks that netted you extra points if you could kill an opposing HQ with them and the final one just exploded you.

I had second turn again and was fortunate to have my opponent's second wave come in first.  His army was very front loaded and his one real threat was neutralized when it had a deep strike mishap and I place his Daemon Prince in the back corner.  The game was pretty tense at first but a combination of the mission and horrible rolls eventually doomed the Daemons.  I was able to score an objective early on and just pound his monstrous creatures with focused fire due to his piecemeal deployment.  The other thing that I think hurt him was he chose to deepstrike on to the tokens and spread out rather than deal with my threatening units and get the tokens after softening me up.  I am loving playing as and against Daemons more and more.  After this game, I was tied for first.

Game 3 - 1+2=Firetruck: Transformation Complete - Opponent: Space Marines
The primary was kills points with HQ's giving you d3+1 kill points a piece.  The other big change was that you assign one unit champ as the "Squirrel Lord" who gained +1 to all stats and his unit is given feel no pain.  I gave it to my Berzerker unit and he gave it to a Sternguard unit.

He had first turn and I used heavy reserves with a couple bait units set out to lure him into my charge range from the board edge.  As expected, his Venerable Dread and Sterguard unit dropped down and opened fire on my bait units.  He had a lucky lascannon shot from one of his Razorbacks and laid into my Plague Marines with two TFC's and all his Sternguard.  After rolling great, I had four left.  I immobilized his dread with a rocket and blew up a Drop Pod with my Plague Marines.  That's about all I accomplished on turn one and had to weather another round of shooting from his army, which now had it's second squad of 10 Sternguard with Pedro come in.

My reserves came on piecemeal over the next couple turns but the turning point in my mind was when the Land Raider with Berzerkers came in.  I moved up and wasn't in range to charge his Squirrel Lord unit so I attacked his other Sternguard unit with a Terminator Librarian w/SS.  The way I had it positioned is that if I wiped the unit, I would be able to consolidate back behind my Land Raider and use it as cover.  Unfortunately his Librarian had other plans.  I wiped his marines but the Librarian refused to fail a save.  He was stubborn Ld10 and rolled a 10 to stay.  My unit had to pile in and that brought them into charge range of Pedro's unit.  After the dust settled, my super unit was dead and he had a dominate position in the middle of my deployment zone.  Over the next couple turns I scrapped as much as I could out of the game with my remaining units but I lost both HQ's and just didn't have the firepower to kill that other Sternguard unit.  Final kill point score was Chaos:8 Marines:15 (8 from HQs).

I ended up finishing 4th out of 14 so I'm plenty happy with that.  Big thanks to Adam for running this awesome tournament.  I bought myself a Baneblade to traitor up as a reward for getting my 2k Chaos army painted and based.  After doing nothing but Chaos the past few months, I think I'm ready for a change.  Let the debate and list writing begin!

Back in action!

After an almost 2 month layoff, I'm writing again.  Basically what happened is the Hobby Triathlon was very disheartening for a number of reasons and I got stuck trying to write about it.  I had been working on a full report from it but its taking so much longer than its worth, I'm just going to scrap it and move on. 

A lot of stuff has happened in the past couple months.  The highlights include: painting my first eldar (yuck!), playing with 40k Daemons for the first time (yay!), my brother visiting for a very Tyranid Christmas and more recently a return to working on my Chaos Marines forces.

I've added a number of different units to my Chaos Marines in hopes of countering some of the mech-heavy lists that operate at my shop.  Adam is running a tournament called Squirrelfest 2011 next Sunday for 16 veteran hobbyists in the area which I'm going to play in.  The list I'm going to run is a variant 1750 version of my Hobby Triathlon list.  It looks like this:


1,750pt Chaos Undivided

HQ
Daemon Prince
-Warptime
-MoT
-Wings

Troops
(10) Chaos Marines
-2xMelta
-Champ w/PF
-Icon
Rhino

(8) Plague Marines
-2xMelta
-Champ w/PW
-Personal Icon
Rhino

(10) Khorne Berserkers
-Champ w/PW
-Personal Icon

(5) Summoned Lesser Daemons

(5) Summoned Lesser Daemons

Elites
(3) Terminators
-2xCombi Melta
-Chainfist
-Icon

Heavy Support
Land Raider

(2) Obliterators

(6) Havocs
-3xMissile Launchers
-Icon

It lacks a hammer unit and doesn't dominate any particular phase of the game but I'm hoping that versatility will carry the day.  Hopefully I can get a practice game or two in.  Either way, I'll try super duper hard to remember to bring a fully charged camera to the tournament.

-Noah