Monday, May 2, 2011

Battle Report: 2v2 Shananigan's - 2k point teams

12 players and 6 teams: Tau/Blood Angels, Space Wolves/Dark Angels, IG/IG, Space Wolves/Grey Knights, Dark Eldar/Space Wolves, Tyranids/Space Marines. We didn’t end up playing a couple teams, so I’m guessing on the SM variants.

Round one: We were placed on the table with the colonial building themed terrain. This was a seize ground scenario and we placed two, they placed two; opposite corners.

Tons of LOS blocking for the LC Razorbacks and Long Fangs. You can see Brian posted up in the top right with a view underneath the nearest building. I placed the Land Speeders and Terminators directly across from the opponents’ corner.

We all unloaded on each other for a couple turns with my Terminators being torn down before making it to their objective (damn psilencers). However, I was able to take out their Land Speeder unit. Very helpful at the end of the game.

In the meantime, they brought in the GK HQ with several ghost knights in tow, deep striking right in the middle of the board with no scatter. Luckily, we were able to tear the whole squad out in one turn between LC fire and Terminator THs.

I doubt we would’ve fared well had he made it to one of our objectives. Or had the opportunity to spawn more ghosties.

A GK squad outflanked right onto one of our objectives at the very end, but suffered a perils and the unit got wiped by counter-attacking SWs.

A final turn flat out contesting move by my lone Land Speeder won (stole) the game.

Round one victory and we were sitting in first place.

These are the untouched GK squad holding their middle objective at the end of the match.

While all this was going on, Jeremy and Adam were fending off Dark Eldar and Space Wolves(?).

According to them, the DE flyer on the left came out of reserves and unloaded a barrage of fire. It almost changed the tide, but the Tau/BA combo stole a victory on this one as well. I think…

Look for a Dark Eldar army coming from Jeremy. He bought the codex over the weekend and is ready to go!

This was the first round IG vs. Tyranid/SM game. I think almost every bug ended up dead by the end but the match was a draw, or close to one.

Notice all the tanks. They had 10 of them, by my count. Wish I would’ve paid more attention to this one…

…because here we are playing them in the second round. Not much in the way of pictures and for good reason. Before our first player turn, they scout moved three Vendettas into assault range for the CC squads within and wiped out pretty much every Razorback and many of our troops.

They didn’t actually use the Vendetta models on the table so the whole “out of sight, out of mind” thing kind of bit us on the ass in this one. The mere bases for the flyers didn’t accurately represent the terror about to be brought down.

It was basically game over before we moved our first model. You can see my wee lone standing Termie below. Poor guy. BUT, he and his recently deceased buddy did take out a couple Hydra cannons. Praise the Emperor!

Saving grace, you say? How were we still in the top two after this debacle? Well, part of the scoring was based on kill points. Which we lost. Soundly.

The scenario was entitled King of the Hill though. And we rushed everything we had left up to the middle and took the hill on the last turn. This desperate (and only defendable) move provided for a mere one point loss (somehow!) and kept us in the running overall, thanks to a good first round victory.

Meanwhile (in my best Super Friends narrator voice), Adam and Jeremy were facing the same GKs we just played, with very similar results; essentially stealing a late game victory here as well.

This was the concurrent Bug vs. Dark Eldar match going on the third table. Not sure what happened over there… but it looks like fun!

Going into the final round, we were informed that both us and our opponents were well within first place. And our opponents were the two gentlemen we had been practicing against for the past three weeks… Jeremy & his BA and Adam’s Tau. Sadly though, we had completely switched up our 2k point lists days before the tournament and didn’t know what to expect.

Playing on the ice world themed table…

I made two poor decisions on this one. First, I passed on going first even though we won the roll. Shortsighted, I read the rules as an objective based scenario again – seize ground-style, and I figure go second for the late game grab.

But instead, I missed the fact that you gain points at the end of each PLAYER turn for every objective held. So going first was our only real shot…

We had trouble deploying. This is just before the pain is brought… Yeah, that’s everything we have up at the top…

Second terrible decision? I deep strike and reserve everything, leaving my partner to be torn apart by Battlesuits, Baals, and lascannons.

Last shot of Brian looking down the barrel of doom… Railguns at both corners, Battlesuits up the gut, and red guns everywhere. This is right before the first volley…

And then, one player turn later… see the destruction, observe the blood spilled!

Several Long Fangs dead, wrecked and exploded Razorbacks, weapons destroyed. All while my boys are chillin’ in the orbiting Strike Cruiser.

And as the Tau and Angels proceed to take the objective and mow down Termies as they trickle in for reserves, we see any hopes of placing in the tourney dashed away.

They were even so kind as to pay our graveyard a visit and pound a few more of us to dust… in person. (See top of picture.)

We fended them off as best as we could, even saving our two designated “saboteurs”, but it was only to save some face.

We were unceremoniously slaughtered, thanks to some extremely poor decision-making on my behalf (apologies to my partner, who was nothing but a great sportsman the entire day).

Jeremy and Adam walked away with second place and $30 a piece, which they reinvested in a Dark Eldar codex and Land Speeder respectively.

Long day of gaming that ended on a somewhat sour note for me. Shenanigan’s is a great little store with some stand-up players attending the tournament. I think we all had a nice time and would consider making the trip again sometime for the right event.

6 comments:

  1. In the last game, since you were going second, weren't you able to see their deployment and then consider not deepstriking?

    Also, I love the amount of LOS blocking terrain they put out. Next club meeting = make tons of large rock formations!

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  2. Also using valkyries bases as valkyries is kinda lame. TO should have taken care of that

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  3. Nice report Dustin. Mine version with less photos is in the queue at mi40k.

    I know you guys would have played it different going first in that last game. I prefer to know the mission scoring rules before the day of the tournamen.

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  4. They did have the Vendetta models, but kept them under the table. For ease of movement, I'm guessing.

    Don't know why we kept everything in reserve on that last game. We were pretty shellshocked following the IG beating from the previous round, so that probably didn't help. :)

    Look forward to seeing your report, Adam!

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  5. We were happy to have ya'll come down. We try and keep the tourneys around here friendly (though some peoples competitve side gets the best of em sometimes).

    Look forward to the next time ya guys come down.

    aww, no mention of the employee who took 3rd who randomed off his winnings to those who didnt place (shameless self plug lol).

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  6. That is so true! One of the friendly employees at Shenanigan's came in third and gifted his winnings to a random player...

    Who happened to be me! Much appreciated and I'm an idiot to not have mentioned that.

    Good people at Shananigan's.

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