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

Hobby Hangover

Just a quick update to prove I haven't forgotten about the 'lil blog here.  I went down to the Chicago Battle Bunker for the Staff Hobby Triathlon and went 1-2.  I won my fantasy game against Bretonnia, lost my 40k game against Ultramarines and lost my LotR game to Dwellers Below.

The tournament started well when I got matched up with a fairly inexperienced Bretonnian player.  Bretonnia has always had a tough time dealing with the unbreakable nature of VC and this was no exception.  He had two units of Knights of the Realm, one Grail Knight unit, a huge block of men-at-arms and a trebuchet.

I made a last minute adjustment and put three Cairn Wraiths into the list, which was a mistake.  Not only were they useless against all the magic attacks of the Bretonnians, but I had never played with them before so didn't really know how to utilize them.  I'll try them again but they didn't do anything in this game.  The game basically was a repeat of him charging me, killing tons of ghouls and then me raising them back up and grinding him down.  I did manage to get my general killed but it was late in the game and the crumble checks weren't debilitating.  By the last turn he had his general and two KotR running away and I had lost a 20 man ghoul unit and some raised zombies.  I would have gotten full points but the 8th ed. rule that you don't get credit for things fleeing screwed me out of getting points for his general.

I don't have time to post the about the other two games, got to get to work.  To be continued...

Triathlon Roadblock

I'm beginning to see why most bloggers don't make multiple posts a week.  You try and save up enough info to post, then forget half of it before you write it down.  Anyway, I've run into a problem.  In order to run my 40k list that I used against Alpha, I have to have two more obliterators.  Well, being the procrastinator that I am, I left off buying my other two obliterators too long and one of my hobbyists came along and bought all mine before I could.  No big deal, I'll just buy another prince instead...oh wait, he bought me out of those too. 
Store Sales - 2, My Tournament Army - 0

So I think tonight, I'm going to build a couple more plague marines, to add to my squad of seven.  I'll put those in with either plasma or meltas for objective sitting and sub out my thousand sons for another squad of normal CSM's with 2xflamers.  The list would look something like this...

Daemon Prince
-Wings
-Warptime
-Mark of Tzeentch

(10) Chaos Marines
-Champ w/Fist
-2xMeltas
Rhino

(10) Chaos Marines
-Champ w/Fist
-2xFlamers
Rhino

(10) Berzerkers
-Champ w/Power Weapon
Land Raider

(8) Plague Marines
-Champ w/Power Weapon or Fist (don't have my new list in front of me)
-2xMeltas or 2xPlasma Guns (depends on what the champ has)

(2)Obliterators

I think that's it.  I have all of it painted except for the finishing touches on the second Rhino and the two special weapons plague marines.

In other news, I played a game of fantasy last week!  I forgot my army list aaaaaand my army book when I went so I kind of had to patch it together from memory, but it went pretty well.  I played against dwarves with the mission where the table is divided from corner to corner and you stay 6" away from the center line.  The quick version is this. 

He lined up on a hill near the center, I used the ghoulkin vampire power to take a free 8" movement towards him.  He shot me a bit, I summoned them back and charged.  I killed his stuff over the next couple rounds and only lost my 20 ghoul unit due to some direct hits with the grudge-thrower.  The blood knights had the best game ever and I fully expect them to do nothing in the next 10 games I use them to make up for the ridiculous rolls I had.  I can't remember much else, it was a week ago and this post is getting pretty wordy.  Here's a rough outline of my list as I remember it.

Vampire Lord
-Master of the Black Arts
-Wristbands of Gold
-Raise Ghouls power
-Other stuff I can't remember

Konrad

Vampire
-Mounted
-Blood Drinker
-Other stuff that is cool

Wight King
-BSB
-Drakenhof Banner

(20) Ghouls
-Ghast

(40) Ghouls
-Ghast

(20) Grave Guard
-Full Command

Vargulf

(5) Blood Knights
-Full Command

I think that's about it, not a very good list overall but I do alright with it.  Mostly I just use the models I have painted as much as I can. (I like painted minis if that isn't apparent by this point)  I was considering picking up some cairn wraiths to use instead of the blood knights.  The knights are very cool but the are just huuuuugggggeeee point sinks/targets.  We'll see.  I'll try and post one more time before Sunday's event.  If I'm on the ball, I'll remember to take my camera to take some pictures.  If I forget, I'll at least post up pics of my armies next Monday/Tuesday.  I think this has gone on longer than I meant, time to go paint!  Again.

-Noah

Once more unto the breach...

As planned, I had my rematch with Alpha's space marines today.  The mission was seize ground with spearhead deployment.  I used the same list as before except I remembered to bring my daemon prince, which turned out to be the difference.  It wasn't so much that the prince went out and killed a bunch of stuff as much as he was bait in a trap for the terminators.  He got charged while hiding behind my land raider and managed to take two of them down and then...dead!  Luckily I had a squad of berzerkers and chaos marines near enough to fire into the remaining five and kill them in assault.  After they were down it was still a close battle but I managed to squeak out a 2-1 win.  Overall a really quick and fun match.

Too quick.

After the game, Alpha offered me the chance at taking on his double-lash chaos marine list.  I reluctantly accepted and then spent the next hour cowering behind blocking terrain and trading long distance shots with seven obliterators while trying to avoid being lashed out into the open.  I had a chance to at least tie it on turn 5 but my upset bid failed when I couldn't get enough marines into combat with his weakened daemon prince to finish it off and proceeded to get sweeping advanced by it.  Let me just say, playing against lash of submission may be the most frustrating thing you can face in 40k.  I think it would have been a lot worse at 2000pts too.  In any case, I can't see myself using it unless I was running a pure Slaanesh chaos army and even then I'd strongly consider not fielding it.

All in all I'm feeling much better about the list than I did last week after my short-handed loss.  I still don't think that second set of obliterators is the answer, but they will probably do for this tournament.  I'll try to get the rest of the berzerkers and the next two obliterators painted this week so I can focus on my Vampire Counts and LotRs armies next week.  That's all for me,take care!

-Noah

First Pics!

As promised, here's some pics of my latest project.  I definitely need some practice at photographing models but I don't think these turned out too bad considering I was using our back-up camera and didn't really prepare the lighting at all.  These were just taken in the empty cabinet of my display case.

Just a quick note on my painting philosophy in general since this is the first sample of my hobby ever to hit the 'net.  I definitely paint to a tabletop standard, lots of dry brushing and washes, nothing too fancy.  I like to have things look nice but I also like to finish models in a timely manner before I get sick of seeing them.  My chaos marine army is a good example of that compromise.  I think of it as my "quick and dirty" army.  I paint it to get it done because I enjoy playing with them.  Some day I may find an army or project that I can put the full effort into, but right now I bounce around too much.

I tried painting a chaos star on the side of the land raider using Dave Taylor's guide, super helpful and I love the look.

The obliterators I just wanted to bang out in a night and went with a rusted look instead of aligning them to a particular chaos god.

All in all, glad to have some eye candy up on here at last but like I said, I'll work on getting rid of those shadows with a real light box and a better camera.  Alright, enough messing around with the blog.  I need to get some more work done on the berzerkers tonight if I want to have this army ready to go come the 21st.

-Noah

More Chaos

I finished up the two obliterators I've had sitting primed and unpainted for the past 18 months.  Nothing like a tournament to get models painted.  Anyway, I'm going for a rematch with Chad's marines tomorrow and I'm considering changing out a few things in the list to better deal with TH/SS terminators and other super assault units.  If I drop two berzerkers and two of the four obliterators, I could just field Abaddon.  Once again, I'm faced with leaving a weak point in my list or falling back on using named characters.  While it would also help me get my painting done faster with three less models, Abaddon has a very dated model.  Decisions, decisions...

I'll post an update tomorrow after the game and I'm going to do some fiddling with posting some photos because, well let's face it, blogs without cool pics suck.

-Noah