We Start by Clubbing Baby Seals: Tournament Report Game 1

As reported in an earlier post I recently won 1st place in a local tournament. This will now be chapter one in a three part series detailing each of my games on my path to victory.  To preface this a  bit the TO is going to be running the Youngbloods tournament at Adepticon this upcoming April and wanted to use the missions for that in order to get some preliminary playtesting of them. We found mistakes aplenty, but the overall idea behind the missions was pretty cool with the results of one mission tying into the next mission to create an overall story arc feel to the tournament. After some tweaks and playtesting I think this will make for a very fun event for the youngsters next April!

I brought my Knights of Blood. I have been pretty much playing and working on them exclusively lately and felt more comfortable with them than my Eldar. Unfortunately they are still a work in progress so I would not be eligible for the 'best painted' award. Guess I would just have to play well if I wanted to win anything. A tall order for me indeed! My list looked like this:

Librarian with Jump Pack, Shield of Sanguinius and Blood Lance

3x Sanguinary Priests with jump packs and power weapons

2x Sanguinary Guard units with 1x infernus pistol and 1x power fist

Red Squad: 10 man Assualt Marines with 2x melta guns and power weapon on the sergeant

Blue Squad: 10 man Assualt Marines with 2x melta guns and power weapon on the sergeant

Green Squad: 10 man Assualt Marines with 1x flamer and power weapon on the sergeant

1495points

The flamer unit was supposed to have 2 flamers which would have used up the last 5 points, but when I went to unpack my army upon arrival I discovered that I had accidentally only packed 1 assualt marine with a flamer and had to just run a regular assualt marine in his place. Oops!

Game one saw me matched up against a young player named Teddy. Teddy was probably in middle school, at best, and was playing in his first tournament ever. He was visibly nervous, and kept apoligizing for it, but he knew his rules well and had an Ultramarines army that was fully painted and quite nice looking. In fact Teddy ended up winning the best painted award. (He had tied for 2nd, but the 1st place finisher took 2nd in the tournament so wasn't eligible for 2 prizes thus the award, a $40 to the Warstore.com, fell to Teddy.)

Teddy's army, though nice looking, was very far from an optimized list. In fact it was basically a beefed up Assualt on Black reach army.  It looked something like this (I didn't get a copy of his army list so have to do this out of memory)

 

Captain with Combi-plasma, and storm Bolter

Librarian with Terminator Armor

5 Terminator squad, 4 power fists and storm bolters and sergeant with power weapon

2x Tactical squads. 5 marines with sergeant with power fist

Ironclad Dreadnought with 2x hunter killer missiles
Dreadnought wtih multi-melta and storm bolter
Autocannon Predator with Heavy Bolters Sponsons
Devastators with multi-melta, lascannon, heavy bolter, plasma cannon and sergeant with plasma pistol

I don't want to go into too much detail about the missions because they are still works in progress, so I will just say that mission one was primarily an objective mission that used Dawn of War deployment. The game would last 6 turns with a 7th on a d6 roll of 4+.

Teddy won the roll to go first and elected to take it. He deployed both of his Tacticals and his Captain behind a small copse of trees in his left corner. He declared that his Librarian would be deep striking in with the terminators and that everthing else would be moving on from his board edge on turn one.

I held everything in reserves to come on via deepstrike. Each assualt squad would be joined by one of the sanguinary priests. The librarian went with the squad with the single flamer. This would become my standard deployment for all of my games throughout the day, sometimes combat squadding, sometimes not depending on the mission and opponent.

Turns 1 saw Teddy move his forces on and begin maneuvering to good firing positions. I of course did nothing. The terminators and librarian showed up on turn 2 and landed near the middle of the table, while the rest of his army continued to try to gain good firing lanes. The devastators though had some terrible terrain and run rolls and would end up needing turn 3 in order for all of them to be able to gain the 2nd level of the building they were in in order to gain line of sight for all of them as the bottom level had no windows. At the end of his 2nd turn Teddy's forces were arrayed as follows:
Devastators moving through a building in his right corner, The predator deployed near the center of his board edge being flanked by the ironclad dreadnought on the right and the regular dread on the left with the tacticals and captain still near their copse of trees in Teddy's left corner and the Teminators near the center of the table.

On turn 2 for me I made my reserve rolls and got in everything but one of the sanguinary guard units. I dropped red squad in near the Ironclad dreadnought and managed to destroy it with a couple of well placed melta shots. Blue Squad and the Sanguinary guard unit landed near (but outside of charge range of) the terminators. They would run in the shooting phase to spread out and make sure that the terminators would not be able to get the charge on them in turn 3. Meanwhile Green squad with the librarian dropped in the corner near the tacticals and dropped a flamer, a bunch of bolt pistol shots and a blood lance on them. The blood lance managed to kill a marine from each of the tacticals but the captain managed to make his 4+ invulnerable saving him from instant death. The flamer and pistol shots managed to kill all but 2 marines from one of the tactical squads.

On turn 3 Teddy was finally able to get the Devastators into good firing position in their building, while the terminators advanced towards Blue squad and the Sanguinary guard. Their storm bolters were no match for the power armor and feel no pain combination on the assault squad and not a single model was lost. In the corner both tactical squads opened fire on Green squad with their bolters to much the same effect. The captain chose to fire the plasma shots from his combi-plasma, but due some terrible rolls failed to do any damage either. The dreadnough moved up on red squad and killed one with his multi-melta, while the predator unloaded all of it's shots on Red squad killing another. With everything either out of charge range or having fired rapid fire weapons Teddy, rather dejectedly, handed me the turn.

My reserve rolls saw the last sanguinary guard unit arrive and they landed near the dreadnought, and with a lucky infernus pistol shot at it's rear arc they managed to destroy it. Red squad moved over and destroyed the predator with their melta guns. Blue squad and the Sanguinary Guard moved up to charge the terminators, wiping them out before they even got to swing back.  Green squad, meanwhile moved over and pulled off the multi-charge against both of the tactical squads and the captain, making quick work of them.

Turns 4 and 5 saw the majority of my scoring units moving around to start collecting objective markers, while Red squad moved towards the devastators in their ruin (which happened to have the final objective marker in it!) taking heavy casualties all the way. Due to some bad terrain rolls I didn't manage to quite make it into assault with the devastators on turn 5 though. Turn 6 saw all but the priest and one marine from Red squad killed, but they passed morale and in my turn finally got into combat with the devastators. They killed a few, with no casualties back, but the dev's passed their morale check and locked the assualt marines in combat away from the final objective. I had by this time secured all three of the other objectives. We rolled a die to see if there would be a turn 7, but there wasn't. The game ended with me winning the primary 3-0, I also won the secondary and managed to achieve both of the tactical bonuses for the mission for a total of 17 out of 17 possible battle points.

I have to say that I feel a little bit bad for Teddy. His lack of experience was clearly evident, but beyond that I don't think he had ever seen anything that worked even similarly to my army. He had no idea how to defend against it. To make matters worse I had some of the best (if not the best) dice of my life in that game. I don't really think it would have mattered who or what I was facing that game I think I would have won. We have all probably seen in at some time in our gaming careers where regardless of the skill levels of the players or who outplayed who, the dice just decide that one of the players is going to win. Well this was one of those games!

Teddy was a fun opponent who remained gracious in defeat. He was a much greater sportsman than many of the adults I have played in my life (and than I have been in some of my less proud moments, to be truthful.) He was complimentary of both my army and of the paint job on the models I did have finished.  I also heard that he did manage to win at least one of his matchups throughout the day. I am very glad that he managed to get the award for Best Paintjob and hope it will encourage him to continue to participate in our tournaments. I look forward to seeing him progess as a player.

Go Teddy!