New Blog launch: The Battlebarn

So as anyone who reads this blog should know I play at a place affectionately known as 'The Battle Barn'. We are a group of gamers in West Michigan who gather weekly to play in one of our members barn. Well we now have a new blog. You can check it out here


http://battlebarn.blogspot.com/

Look for a wide variety of articles in the future as we are fortunate enough to have a wide variety of gamers with different focuses in the hobby.
I will be one of the authors for the blog and am looking forward to the opportunity to help share our little community with the interwebz!

Give me a pound, dawg!

Yeah, they're just that cool!

So after my final round at 'Ard boyz I was showing Sarah some of my conversions and paint jobs and she took these two and set them up this way. I had to snap the photo!

And finally some pics from 'Ard Boyz

So since I left my memory card at the store I wasn't able to post pics right away. Since I have gotten it back I've been lazy :)  So anyway, here they are...

First up some pics of a Mawloc with an awesome custom base. Some of the pics it was still in the stores display case so have some reflections. They then took it out so I could get some better ones.

These next two are from early in my first game against Rodney's Space Wolves.

This next one is against John and his Imperial Guard. This was a really close game and was one by his Rough Riders. Who says they suck? ;)

These are from my game against 'Classic' John and his Haemonculi coven Dark Eldar.

The rest are some pics the TO took since he forgot batteries for his camera. I let him pull the pics off my memory card and forgot to get it back which is why all these pics are so late in coming (that and my laziness!) [Please note: I try to make sure there are no faces in any of the pics I take. Since I didn't take these I had no control over it. If anyone in these pics doesn't want their pics on here let me know in the comments and I'll take the pic down]

Hey, there's me packing up my Knights of Blood after my loss to 'Classic John'

'Ard Boyz Results

So things did not go so well for me yesterday at 'Ard Boyz. The list actually performed as I had hoped it would. My dice were actually fairly hot, but glory was simply not in the cards for me on this particular day.

Sorry, no pics today. I brought my camera and took a few, but the game store owner forgot his and asked if he  could use my memory card  to use the ones I took. I lent it to him but I think I forgot to get it back. It's not in the camera, and I can't find it anywhere in the house or car. Unfortunately the store isn't open on Sundays so I won't know for sure if he has it till tomorrow at the earliest. Anyway, onto the Games.

My first game was against a Space Wolves player named Rodney. Let me just say the Rodney was a great guy to play against. His dice were horrible. Every time he needed to allocate a wound onto a model with special wargear they inevitably rolled a one. It seemed only regularly armed Grey Hunters were the only ones in his armor actually wearing armor! Things in this game went very well for me. The Death Company Dreadnought came in turn one and wrecked a Razorback carrying a squad of Long Fangs. The Death Company came in and  exploded a whirlwind. They then managed to take out the Grey Hunter squad that the traitor was in before finally succumbing to the might of his Thunderwolves and Lord on T.wolf mount. Meanwhile my Assault squad that contained the traitor sat in their drop pod and waited till late game to show up. As planned I dropped them into a corner of his deployment zone well away from any of the action. This action set me up for a big win, but with my opponent getting the last turn he managed to kill a couple of Razorbacks and both of my land speeders to pull it close again. In the end I got a minor win and 5 bonus battle points for a total of 18.

This was actually enough to set me up on the top table against a player named Jon (one of 4 in the tourney of 10 people!) Jon was playing Imperial Guard. He won the roll for first turn and gave it to me. Doh! I almost always prefer to go second, but especially in objective missions. Throughout the course of this game I managed to take his army apart. He did a fair job of destroying mine as well. In the end this one came down to my ability to take out a squad of Rough Riders. (Yes, Rough Riders!) I had one of the objectives in the non-deployment zones and was sitting on the one in the center. He meanwhile had one in his deployment zone and the one in the other non-deployment zones. When I was unable to wipe out or break his unit of Rough Riders in the last turn they had the movement to come in and contest the center objective giving him the minor win. I had been Eldar'd by Rough Riders. Argh!

So despite only a minor win and a minor loss it turned out I was still in contention by being in fourth place going into the final round. This game saw me pitted up against one of the other Jon's in the field. 'Classic' Jon. He was running a Dark Eldar Haemonculi coven. It had Urien and Lady Malice and a squad of 10 Grotesques. With Urien being named as his General and both characters joining that squad I pumped everything I could into it trying to kill it. I came close getting all but one Grotesque and Urien himself. Had I gotten them all it would have been worth a total of 945 victory points. I had planned on avoiding them as much as possible but when he immobilized a couple of my Razorbacks early on it not only put that plan to bed, but also jammed up some of my firing lanes. We had an epic battle between my Death Company and his Incubi. Not really a plan of mine, but unfortunately that can happen with the DC. The Death Co. was eventually wiped out, and so was the Reclusiarch, but not before they killed all but the Klaivex. The turn after he landed the Dreadnought was immobilized. He did manage to wreck a Raider containing a squad of Wracks, but then spent the rest of the game howling in frustration. In the end I lost this game by about 600 victory points, taking another minor loss. It was a fun game. And Jon's wife (or girlfriend, I didn't ask the  extent of their relationship) wasn't playing, but she paints and Jon's army was very well painted. There were still a few models left unfinished, but hey it's 'Ard boyz. This is not a usual points level. I had never faced a full on Haemonculi coven before and let me say it is tough. That army is unbelievably resilient for Dark Eldar.

In the end I finished up in a paltry 6th place, so no Semi-finals for me. Rodney, my first opponent did well for himself the rest of the way and managed to just sneak into 3rd place. 'Classic Jon used his victory over me to put himself into second and Jon from my second game came in first overall. So in the end I somehow managed to square off against the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place players in the tournament. All of my games were very close and very enjoyable. I had never been to that store before. But despite it being nearly an hour away I think I will make it a point to make it out there occasionally for some Saturday gaming.

Looks like Glory will have to wait for next year.

Hey look, another 'Ard Boyz list!

So it's that time of year again when we trudge off to our local game stores to do battle in GW's annual slugfest known as 'Ard Boyz. Last year was my first time playing in it, and despite all the hype of it being loaded with douchebags and WAAC players I had a blast in both the preliminaries and the semi's. So I have really been looking forward to this years.

This year I will be taking my Knights of Blood. After looking at the preliminary scenarios I came up with a list that is, I think, uniquely suited to both my play-style and the missions at hand. Two of the three missions are all about killing things. The first one uses kill points, but with one twist. You trade one troop model from your army with one from your opponents. This is known as the Traitor. Instead of being worth a kill point though it's worth five! So along with killing your opponents forces you must keep the survival of the Traitor in mind. The other downright kill shit mission uses victory points with a selected HQ choice being worth double VP's. The middle mission uses objective markers. One in the center of the table and then one in the middle of each table quarter. All three missions use the Night Fight rules at some point. The first and third during turn 1 and the second mission uses it late in the game.

So with these things in mind I built this list.

HQ:

Reclusiarch with infernus pistol.

Elites:
 2x Sanguinary Priest with Jump Pack and Power Weapon
 1x Sanguinary Priest with Lightning Claw

Troops:
2x 10 man Assault Squad with 2x Melta and Power Fist
1x 5 man Assault Squad with 1x Flamer and Hand Flamer in Las/plas Razorback with Dozer Blade
        searchlight
 1x 8 man Assault Squad with 1x Melta and Infernus pistol in a Drop Pod
 1x 9 man Death Company with 2x Power Fist, 1x infernus pistol, 1x power weapons in                                                                            
          in a Drop Pod
 1x Death Company Dreadnought with Magna-Grapple and searchlight in a Drop Pod

Fast Attack:
2x Land Speeders with Multi-meltas. (Taken as separate Squadrons)

Heavy Support:
2x Devastator Squad with 2x missile launchers and 1x Lascannon in a las/plas Razorback
       with Dozer Blade and searchlight
1x Devastator Squad with 3x plasma cannons in a las/plas Razorback with a Dozer Blade
       searchlight.

So all the Razorbacks and the Dreadnought have searchlights to help out with nightfight in all three missions.
The Death Company and the DC Dreadnought are there for pure killy-ness. The reclusiarch goes in the pod with the Death company making them even more killy. I have two ten man squads with jump packs and priests, 1 mechanized assault squad and the drop pod squad for my scoring element for mission two. The Razorbacks and Devs provide long range fire support, and the plasma cannons just add some more killy. As far as the Traitor in mission one goes, we have room in the drop pod for both him and the Lightning Claw priest. This allows me to keep the traitor off the board for awhile, then when he comes in he has a decent sized body guard with Feel no Pain to help keep hime alive. As a bonus there are bonus battle points if you get the traitor into your opponents deployment zone, with the pod I can pretty much just put him there if I have cleared a 'safe' area for them to land in by then.

I played a couple of practice games with it on Friday night and was quite pleased with how it worked. It beat out a Dark Eldar list and just lost to a Tyranid list. In the game against the Tyranids though I was able to see where with just a few minor tactical changes I could have turned things in my favor.

All in all I can't wait to see how it performs this weekend.

So what do you think? Also, what plans do you have for 'Ard Boyz? Have you made any changes to your normal lists (aside from adding 500pts or so) to account for the various missions or are you just kind of adding in 500 points of the same?