Trees and Buildings.Our latest table layout.

I wasn't really motivated enough to get a battle report for the game we played on this table but I did want to get a couple of pictures of the table. We currently have 3 buildings using templates that we grabbed off of Confessions of a 40k Addict. I have to thank Scott for putting these together for us and from the last time we talked about them it sounded like he had a couple more and possibly some ruins as well. If you like the buildings you can pick up the templates from here: STC

Another reason I wanted to get a couple of pictures was for the fact that I now have some trees to cover the tree stands and the city park that I had started. At the time if the pictures I didn't have anything to cover them with so they are a bit stark. We joked that it was winter.

Plans surviving first contact?

Yes the Tau are dead will not be joining us this weekend. So the plan to have the 2 games this weekend seem to be ending up as a 2v1 battle between Dark Angels/Blood Angels and Eldar. Scott and myself will be running 1250 points each of Angels while George seems to think he has 2500 points of Eldar, we will see.

The funny thing about that picture is that my Imperial Guard have actually won a couple of assaults. Go figure.

Plans for the weekend. 1v1x2 I think.

It is Tuesday and we think we have a plan and unfortunately it does not include my Imperial Guard since they are now retired until they grow up to be the Astra Militarum. It does include my Dark Angels though, 1250 points worth of them and a lot of randomness.

Friday if everything goes as plan two side by side games where we chose our opponents and our missions randomly. It will be 1250 points a side and all list should be done before Friday. So I get to take a experimental list of Dark Angels against....well I don't know yet. My wife claims that she will be the person that randomly determines opponents and I think I will let her do just that, not sure how she plans of determining the outcome. This is good then, we don't know who our opponent is, we don't know what our mission will be or the mission of our opponent, and we don't know what table we will get. We will just do everything in a random fashion.

So this is the plan. I am taking a DA list that is out of my norm and there is no knowledge of the battle ahead. I guess I have a bit to think on in the coming days. Maybe I can come up with a way to counter every possible list my opponents can bring to bear or maybe I will just go take a nap. A nap sounds good actually.

Weekend Battle: Tau/Imperial Guard vs Iyanden/Blood Angels

So the Tau/Imperial Guard were just barely victorious and it took me until Saturday morning before I remembered that I got a VP for each fast attack unit that I destroyed (Thank you Scott for taking that Land Speeder). So the game was long and very Chaotic and for for our part the Tau/IG side should have lost, but by chance along we won it. Did we have tactics? NO. Did we have good dice rolls? NO. Did I just happen to draw "The Scouring" and then Austin kill that Land Speeder? Yes. Now if Scott or George had drawn "Big Guns Never Tire" we would have lost by about 4 VP. So we are going to call this simply a lucky win and probably the last game I will play with my Imperial Guard. Yes I am retiring them with a win for the two or so weeks until the new codex. The next time they play they will officially be Astra Militarum.

I had meant to get some pictures but once things got started I completely forgot in the excitement of actually getting to play again. Sorry. Hopefully I can get some picture of something up soon. I will be doing so work on my Daughter's Sisters this week.

Wrecked Vehicles

I have never been one to mess with wreck templates or marker or really do anything else to show that a vehicle of mine was destroyed other than pull the turret off and/or flip the tank, but then I came across these and thought wow those are kind of nice, I may have to try that.

Upcoming Battle: Tau/Imperial Guard vs Iyanden/Blood Angels

Yes Chaos! for that is what this battle is going to be. 2000 points per side or 1000 points per army which ever you would like. Two Warlords per team so that is twice as many points for Slay the Warlord. We are running with the random missions and the deck now has 2 of each of the basic missions in it so each team will have two missions. Each player has to complete their mission individually and all VP is added up at the end of the game to determine the winning team.

We have done the random mission deck before and it works pretty well but this will be the first time that each player will have their own draw of the deck instead of just one draw per team. So while their will be no Chaos armies on the field of play this evening, Chaos will most definitely be on the battlefield.


Victory Points

Primary
- Objectives - Once per Army
- Kills - Once per Team
- Relic - Once per Team, Double VP if in owning Players Deployment Zone

Secondary
- Slayer the Warlord - Once per Team
- First Blood - Once per Team
- Line Breaker - Once per Team

Win, Lose. or Draw (Tie)!

I have officially killed the old Win/Lose list on the site since it really didn't show anything and I didn't really care for the way I formatted. I also figured it was a good time since we should have a good game tomorrow and since everyone should now mostly be caught up on the rules it would give us a better indication of where everyone is at. This time around I have it list by player and then their army, if someone plays a different army I will simply add it beneath the player.

Time Lost

So it appears that Christmas happened and then a sever lack of gaming followed. Not sure why but it happened. With the lack of interest in Tyranids and Imperial Knights and little time to actually paint anything I haven't really had anything to post nor have I wanted to post something just for the sake of posting something. Fortunately a bit has changed, we now have some rumors about the some to arrive Imperi.... Adeptus Militarum (think i spelled that correctly.... oh well) and I also have a compressor and airbrush. With this I should soon have new rules for my motley band of Guardsmen and the speed at which I can get them painted should be much increased (having to hand base 40 guardsmen was kind of depressing).

This weekend should see our first game in quite a while. At this moment it looks like a 2v2 game between Blood Angels and Iyanden versus Tau and Imperial Guard (They aren't Militarum yet!). The plan is to have each player draw a random mission and the team with the most VP at the end is the winning team. So that would be 2 missions per a team and since there are 2 cards for each mission it is possible for both players on a team to get the same mission for double the VP. Figured it should at least be interesting and probably rather chaotic if nothing else.

Oh and has anyone noticed that one of the new Ogryn for the Militarum kind of looks like Sloth from the Goonies?

New Print and Play Building over on Confessions of a 40k Addict

OK firstly, I meant to post this over the weekend but due to some personal issues I never had a chance to do so. Secondly I really like the buildings and the fact that Dave took the time to put out another one is just great. Yes I understand that this is just a a color variance on his other building but when you have two or three of these on the board it is so much nicer than having all one color.

If you missed Dave's post over on his blog then here you go

Terrain is everything - Hail the Omnissiah a new Print & Play building scheme

Allies for my Imperial Guard

A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to have found several boxes of old miniatures from when I played what is probably over a decade ago at this point. One of the things I found in those boxes was enough Adepta Sororitas figs to fulfill a promise to my Daughter. Over the weekend I was able to sit down and look at what I had and compare them to the new rules. What I found much to my Daughters delight is that I had enough stuff for a 250 point Allied Detachment.

Hopefully I will have the time sometime soon as well as a camera on hand to get these figs together and primed and possibly even a pic or two.

Planetstrike Campaign

So I spent the morning looking over a copy of the 5e Planetstrike Expansion and it looks like my group may run through the 6 mission campaign in the near future. We will be running two teams with a total army value of 2500 points to be split between the two armies on the team are the players see fit. At the moment that I type this the groups look to be Scott and George with Blood Angels and Iyanden Eldar as Attackers against Austin and myself running Tau and Imperial Forces (Imperial Guard, Dark Angels, Adepta Sororitas) as the Defenders.

I will say that we are still in discussion about what we are going to be doing but if all goes well we should have our first game in two weeks.

Missed a Week, Blood Angels vs Iyanden, and how armies differ between Editions....

So I missed a week, sorry. We didn't have a game the previous week so I didn't have much to say on the matter. On top of all that I am not really that interested in Tyranid at the moment since I cannot find my HQs and I have no interest in the Fantasy Dwarves at all. Ok so some of the new figs for the Dwarves look pretty nice.

Fortunately this week we did get a game in between Scott's Blood Angels and George's Iyanden armies. They ran with the random Missions Cards, Scott getting Purge the Alien and George getting Big Guns Never Tire. We gave Scott a chance to see what his Blood Angels may look like in 6e by allowing him to use the point values from the Space Marine Codex for any units that actually showed up in that book. It gave him approximately another unit and a half which seems to be a major difference in point values to me. I guess i will need to go back and see if the points for my Dark Angels were that bad as well. An y how, the Dice Gods hated George with a passion and after about 8 or 9 "1"s in Scott's opening turn, George really didn't have a whole lot of Scoring Units left that weren't in reverse. I must say though that while George did take a hit with the dice this last game he fought hard and still had a chance up until turn 4 when he had to concede.

Last Friday's Battle - 2nd Variable Mission game

As you may or may not know, our group has been running a couple of games with variable missions. We are currently running with a single deck of 6 cards that each represent one of the 6 basic missions from the Core Rulebook. Last Friday night we played our second game using this system and it seems to work great, or well it did for Scott and myself.

So a run down of how this works, you get 6 cue cards or similar sized item and put the names of each of the missions on a card, shuffle them and put them to the side. Set up the table in what ever manner you see fit, we usually just have someone do the whole thing up in as even a manner as possible. Place a marker for the Relic and then 6 markers (with the variable point values for the Scouring) as evenly around the table as possible. Determine all the normal stuff such as Warlord Traits, Deployment, etc. and then each side chooses a card.

Now we talk a lot while we are playing so in order to not give away our mission we tend to talk objectives in a way that it can be any mission. Oh I forgot to say this but, DON'T SHOW YOUR OPPONENT YOUR MISSION CARD! What fun would it be if he/she knew what it was. Also we have always played where in the Scouring you don't flip the Objective Marks to determine their value until the end of the game. I guess we are just weird like that.

So how did our game play out, Scott and I played Blood Angels and Dark Angels against George and Austin who were playing Eldar and Tau. Austin and myself were the Warlords with Austin drawing the Relic mission and myself drawing Purge the Alien (I had to refrain from doing the Happy Dance). Deployment saw Scott and myself just outside of range for two objectives and our opponents a little further back. We blocked Infiltration by getting first deployment for them and I set up a group of scouts on the Relic (remember we didn't know they had the mission). Our battle plan was rather simple, march straight across the board and hold as many objectives as possible while attempting to eliminate what ever presented itself. Austin and George were going to flank to our rear, slay the warlord and retrieve the relic from there. Well that was a great plan except my Librarian decided that he was going to Perils of the Warp himself to death in turn two (2 turns of double 6s). This kind of broke their battle plans and they never did recover from it. Mean while my Scouts sat on the Relic for 5 turns and in the end we walked away with more than their 3 VP for First Blood, Slay the Warlord, and Line Breaker. I didn't think it was necessary to do the math once we counted 4 kills.

So if you want to change up your game a bit I definitely suggest giving the mission cards a try.

I Found my Stuff

So last week saw the conclusion of a long time attempt to find several boxes of very old 40k figures. In this massive pile of boxes I found some of the following

1x Armorcast Reaver Titan
2x Armorcast Warhound Titans
3x Armorcast Baneblades
1x Armorcast Shadowsword
Several Imperial Guard Tanks (both LMR and Chimera chassis)
Several Space Marine Rhino Chassis Tanks
Box full of Old Eldar and Chaos Space Marine figs
Box of Old Tyranid models (including 59 Genestealers)

and most importantly

My Old Dark Angel Army!

Which with the IG Tanks is what I was really looking for. The old Eldar and CSM stuff is most likely going to get sold as fast as I can in order to make some room. Actually the Eldar and some Ork stuff I found will be sold as soon as George comes by with the money. The CSM stuff I am still going to have to sort through though and on first glance it appears that I had one of the old Skull Faced Chaos Dreadnaughts.

The only problem I have now is the box of tyranids. After looking through it I wasn't able to find a single HQ option so either my Hive tyrant, warriors and carnifex are in another box or they are lost to the warp and while I wouldn't mind fielding the swarm again, I am not sure I want to buy another hive tyrant.

Scenery

So I am back to working on scenery again, sat down yesterday while my daughter was doing her homework and did a little of my own. Designed the templates for my catwalk towers as well as the walkway to join them. Need to make the templates for the part that will hold the walkway itself up but I wanted to see how sturdy it was before I got to that. Unfortunately I probably wont get back to working on this again until the weekend but hopefully I can get at least one of the tower put together and grab a picture or two.

Kill Team

So we played two games of Kill Team last Friday. I took notes and pictures fully expecting to do a battle report for at the least my battle against Austin, but..... as much as I wanted to enjoy the game and as much as I tried to bring my self to write up the report I just couldn't do it. My game against Austin turned out to be an easy game well in my favor. IG versus Tau with Tau as an Attacker, yeah I won that with absolutely no issues. The next game was Austin against his dad, Scott (Tau vs. Blood Angels) and Scott was destroyed in turn 3. Now we have played a lot of 500 point battles and even then the 6e rules are rather balanced, so if you play well and the Dice Gods don't hate you any army can win but at 200 points just one bad roll can completely destroy you. I DON'T LIKE THAT!

That got me thinking though, can I do something to fix this. OH YEAH! Necromunda! yep that's the ticket I can update Necromunda to fit 6e and give it a test drive. So there we have it, I am working on a conversion of Necromunda to allow for a true skirmish based 40k game using a merger of the rules. Yeah it may be a bit more complicated than a normal 40k but not so horribly simple as a game of Kill Team. If I get it right then I should be able to balance the system to allow a nice 90 minute game of 40k using approximately 100 points.

Our New Gaming Table

Just wanted to take a moment to show off our new gaming table. This is just a hold over until the Ping Pong Table gets freed up and at this rate it may still be a while.

We took a 4x8 piece of ply wood, cut it in half and slap a piano henge in the middle.We kind of needed the henge for ease of storage since the wife wouldn't let me keep it as the new kitchen table (in truth I didn't even ask, sometimes it is safe to assume)

Variable Missions and last Friday's Game

Firstly let me start off with saying that the game took forever. I am not sure if that was due to the Variable Mission selection or if we were just slow. I know I had to step back a second and give the game a thought or two on occasion since I wasn't sure how I was going to counter a mission from my opponents I didn't have knowledge of. I guess that is were the challenge comes from though. Not knowing what mission your opponent has forces you to counter every mission in the deck and I must say it was an ugly game with units scattered everywhere. I think we are going to have to try this format out a couple more times before I can say whether or not I like it or if the format caused the slow down that we faced during the game. I would definitely not suggest this if you are on a time limit for your game unless you are none for speed playing.

So in a week or two, we will hopefully get another game or so with the variable mission selection under our belts and I should have a better feel for the format.

Variable Missions and tonights Game

So I know we are having a game tonight but I did something scary, I had a thought. I try not to do such things if i don't have to but it happened anyhow. My group has been playing about once a week for a couple of months now and personally I am up for a bit more of a challenge. So I am going to write down each of the missions on a card and set them aside. We will then set up the table as usual but then we will place a center objective and five others to represent a Relic and well 5 other objectives. Once table edge is determined, each Warlord will draw a mission card and set it aside, yeah it is going to remain a secret until the end of the game. We are going to use tonight's game as a test to see how this works and if we like it then I will write up two cards per a mission (so it will be possible to get the same mission) and maybe come up with a standard for table and objective setup just so we can keep everything straight. I know there is at least one mission I would like to add beyond the standard missions in the rulebook but I think I will one thing at a time.

Day 1

So two things happened on the 1st of the year, I was able to play a very good game against Austin's Tau and Scott made some scenery. Yeah OK that doesn't sound all that exciting but since the game was against our youngest and least experienced player and he almost won as well as the fact that Scott has made the first bit of scenery that I didn't have to build I was pretty happy.

So first off, the almost loss to Austin's Tau. I screwed up and I did so bad, I deployed my Aegis horribly, I gave up turn 1 to Tau, I deployed the rest of my army in the most heinous way possible and then Austin exploited ever bit of my mistake. By the time my bit of turn 2 came around I had less than half my army and fortunately for me my Veterans and the Vendetta they were in made it to the board. I did get very lucky in that we were playing the Scouring and the two objectives I was sitting on were a 3 and 4 point objective while Austin was sitting on a 2 and 3 point objective.

So now for the scenery, Scott built one of these.

Ok so maybe not this exact one but it was a Print and Play building from http://40kaddict.blogspot.co.uk. Just print out the template, glue it to foam core, and then cut/glue it all together. It made a beautiful building. So if you are looking for easy to make building, definitely go check out the site and look through what is in the STC section. I believe we will be adding a couple more such buildings to our scenery box before to long.