Whilst I’m in England, it seems a shame not to try and squeeze in a few 40K games in preparation for ASMOH in May. First up is a visit to North West Warriors in Windermere.
This is a great group of guys who mostly play Warhammer Fantasy, however they also have a few 40K players and run a tournament at Warhammer World entitled A Gathering of Might. Club regular, Dan very kindly volunteered to help me relearn my Grey Knights (I haven’t played 40K for nine months).
For our 1750 point game, Dan had Space Wolves including two packs of Grey Hunters, a pack of Long Fangs, a unit of Wolf Guard in Terminator armour (in a drop pod), two Librarians, a Wolf Priest, a Land Raider Redeemer, a Vindicator, and various other transports.
My Grey Knight army was smaller. Coteaz and a Grand Master led two Strike Squads, five Terminators, 10 Purifiers, four henchmen, a flying brick, Land Raider and a Dreadnought sporting an assault cannon and heavy flamer.
The mission was Capture and Control with Dawn of War deployment, and I won the choice of sides and first turn.
With Coteaz the chance of my opponent seizing the initiative was 1 in 36, which Dan promptly did! So with a Strike squad exposed in the middle of the board Dan put the Wolf Guard Terminators and a drop pod almost on top of them.
Somehow, I only lost two of them.
My first turn was rather curious. The flying brick sped also the board dropping the Dreadnought in assault range of Dan’s Terminators’ Drop Pod. The Land Raider sped up and disgorged the Purifiers which failed to kill anything with psycannons, and then mowed down half of the terminators with storm bolters.
Dan’s second turn set the tone for the rest of the game when he took down the Stormraven, stranding my Terminators and Grand Master in my half of the table. His Vindicator also made a mess of my Purifiers, making them easy prey for his Wolf Priest and Grey Hunters the following turn.
My Terminators had a long walk to Dan’s objective, however they ate every unit along the way to contest it. On my side of the table, Dan’s Vindicator (having blown up lot of my army), could not quite contest my objective before a Strike Squad teleported next to it and blew it apart with a psycannon.
In the end I won the game with one objective, and almost holding the second objective; however I can tell my army didn’t work perfectly and I made some mistakes with it.
One of these mistakes was in my first turn when I did not turbo-boast the Storm Raven straight across the board. The other big thing was the lack of long range firepower in my army. Before this was provided by two las-cannon totting Dreadnoughts, however to make the points work, these have been replaced by a single assault cannon equipped machine. Although it has to be said, it performed extremely well tying up one of Dan’s critical unit for a large part of this game.
The other big mistake was dropping the Purifiers too early which resulted in losing them for relatively little gain.
Anyway, early days yet and I’m looking forward to getting a few more practice games in with these guys. Even with the weaknesses in the army list, I’m going to plough on and actually learn how to use it effectively.
The next task is to paint a couple of Dreadnought arms and get the model for Coteaz.
Oh, and play some more games, that would be helpful…
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