Upcoming 40k Tournaments

Not all tournaments are about
winning at all costs!

I've just returned from a fun weekend at the Caledonian Uprising tournament, and have promptly signed up for another two tournaments!

Whilst the Scottish ETC team's Caledonian Uprising was a competitive affair, it was also good fun and a real social event, where like-minded people (ie us 40k-playing geeks) can have a good laugh together. I've made a good number of friends at tournaments in the last year or so, so I always like to have a tournament or two on the calendar to look forward to.

The next two events I'll be attending are Open War XVII, which is the  First Company Veterans club tournament, and Blog Wars III, which is an independently-organised friendly competition.

Open War is on Saturday 14th April (my birthday, no less!) and comprises three games at 1,750pts. In keeping with the current zeitgeist, special and unique characters are allowed, which I think is great - a lot of the recent codexes rely on special HQ choices to unlock certain army builds, so I'm hoping to see a lot more variation at tournaments in 2012 than we saw last year, where cookie-cutter Space Wolves, Grey Knights and Leaf-Blower Guard forces ruled the roost. This tournament features three unique 'in-house' missions, which also adds to the fun. You'll find the tournament pack (inclding the three missions) here.  

The second tournament I've signed up to is Blog Wars III, which is my personal favourite of the year. It is organised by Alex of the 'From the Fang' blog, and is really a chance for us 40k bloggers (and our gaming mates) to get together, play games, swap stories, and generally have a good laugh together. The feel of this tournament in particular is friendly and easy-going, which is a big draw for me. Alex also goes to great lengths to devise new missions for each tournament he runs, and this is another reason I like it so much.

I'll probably also try to make it to one or two other tournaments this year too; one I'm very keen on is Tim King's Summer Skirmish, which is a twelve-game 500pt weekend cometition. Last year's inaugural event was great fun, even considering the 8-minute tabling delivered to me by the UK's top player, Josh Roberts, in the first round. Ouch! Humbling, to say the least.

I am also thinking about checking out an 'away' fixture. All the tournaments I've entered have either been held at Warhammer World (our club's home) or at Maelstrom Games in Mansfield, which is a superior venue for wargaming, in my opinion. So my targets for 2012 are to concentrate on getting better at playing (you'll notice I still haven't mentioned my position in the final standings of this weekend's Caledonion Uprising) and to play at an away tournament - possibly it'll be Vanquish V, on 31st March to 1st April in Bristol.

If you're interested in getting involved in a tournament, the best place to start is here: Warhammer Forum 40k Tournaments List. And if you've played at a tournament recently, or you're thinking of attending one, let us know!  

Going Green

The Ramones: The Perfect
Band for the MTV Generation?

As you may know I am a true product of the MTV generation, and as such my attention span is short. This manifests itself most obviously in my inability to stick with one army for more than a period of a few months, which is unfortunate as my modelling & painting time is limited to only a few hours per month. This means that I have several armies which are partially-completed and playable, or very much works-in-progress. Let's see:

Chaos Space Marines

My first 40k army since rejoining the game in 2009. The Chaos Marines are actually a finished and fully-functional army and total over 3,000points, although they are certainly not optimised for tournament use (ie no Lash-Daemon Princes). This army are in hibernation until Games Workshop delivers us a shiny new Codex!  

Eldar

Ahem. Anyone who knows me knows I cannot play Eldar, any more than I can rub my stomach and pat the top of my head at the same time. The debacle at last summer's tournament is testament to this fact. The 2,000pts of Eldar I have are in deep storage until either I get a LOT better as a player, a new easy-to-play codex arrives, or until I decide to sell the lot. The last option is a distinct possibility.

Tyranids

Now my main army, and one I enjoy playing, especially now I am using as an all-reserve 'Drop-Spore' force. I have a couple of additions to make to this army - a Trygon and a Mawloc - and then this army will be completed.

Pre-Heresy World Eaters

This is my 'suitcase' army which I take away on longer work-trips in a shoebox so I can get a few games in, even when I'm a long way from home. This army performs reasonably at about 1,500pts, and really only needs a couple of Dreadnoughts with Blood Talons, and attendant Drop-Pods, to finish it off (though I don't think Drop-Pods will fit in the shoe-box, but that's a problem for another day).

Squats

Finally, my labour-of-love, the Squats-as-Imperial Guard. For almost as long as I've been back in the hobby (about two and a half years now) I've been boring people with how I'm going to bring Squats back, and how I'm going to make all these fantastic conversions. Well, the army is.... nearly there! I have about forty infantry painted and another twenty on the painting table waiting for some attention. In the last two weeks I have also converted five Chimeras into heavy support tanks - specifically, two Hydra, two Medusas and one Manticore/Colossus (depends how big a gun-barrel I fit to this last one). Pictures will appear over the next few weeks to prove I have actually done these! In addition, I have already made two Termite Transports and two Skylord Airships, although these all need repainting. Finishing off the Squats is this summer's job, and my target is to have a good 1,750pt force ready for Alex's Blog Wars III tournament this summer.

So What Next?

...apart from finishing off the above four armies, you mean? Well, I fancy doing a few one-off modelling pieces, for example a dinosaur-riding Eldar Exodite which I have wanted to do for ages now. After that though.... it'll be Orks!



Orks

To be honest, I think I should've just started with Orks two years ago and that would've been that. I really think that Orks could be the perfect army for my highly-complex 'heads-down-and-charge!' tactical mentality. Therefore, I had a quick look on ebay last night and I may have bought a few models (better not say how much I spent, in case Mrs. Grazer is reading). Suffice to say I now have enough Ork models to keep me going for quite a while!

Ork Tactics 101: Chaaarge!

The exact models I have are:

HQ choices:

1 x Warboss

2 x Weirdboys

3 x Meks

Elites Choices:

5 x Nobz

3 x Painboyz

8 x Bikes

Fast Attack Choices:

4 x Deffcoptas

2 x Half-Trakks

1 x Scorcha

3 x Buggies

Troops Choices:

60 x Gretchin

42 x Boyz

5 x Trukks

So there you go! This will be my 2013 project I suspect, once the Squats-as-IG are finished. Now all I need to do is think about army lists... ...and that is where you guys come in! I have played against Orks a couple of times, and all I can remember is a terrifyingly-fast green horde devouring my forces at lightning speed.

What Ork army builds have you successfully used? Or had used against you?

Based on the above list of models, what army builds would you recommend to a novice Warboss like me?

Sneak Preview! Codex: Squat Stronghold

Over the last month or so I have put a fair bit of thought into my Fandex: Squat Stronghold. I've had the luxury of working away from home for a couple of weeks, and I've put the time to good use - the document now stands at some eighty pages and at the last count was exceeding sixteen thousand words (I didn't realise I even knew that many words...).  

Anyhow, for those of you loyal, interested or just plain curious, I have decided to post up three teaser pages, each one detailing a particular unit:

Termite Transport

Squat Engineer Sappers

Iron Eagle Gyrocoptor

 Just click on the image to open up a larger JPEG image of the page (I'm not bright enough to work out how to publish a pdf on the blog - if anyone knows, please feel free to let me know the secret!).

As for the three pages, please feel free to read 'em and let me know your comments. They are very much first drafts and completely unplaytested, but I thought it would be good to show everyone that I have been working, and there is something to show for your patience!

Codex: Squat Stronghold - Progress at Last

I have wisely spent the festive period (and a dull week working in Glasgow) coming up with some great ideas for my meisterwork, Codex: Squat Stronghold. I won't be revealing all my secrets here now, as I'm really hoping to get the Codex itself to a point where I can publish a first online draft in the next 6-8 weeks, but you'll find below a list of things that I have been thinking about and developing recently:

• Full Warhammer 40,000 timeline, from 9,000 B.C. to the 41st millenium
• Comprehensive description & background material for the Squat race
• Detailed history and back-stories
• Unit types
• Stats for all units
• Special rules for all units
• Style of play analysed and worked into army design & unit rules

In particular, I have made major progress with two things:

BACKGROUND

For me the most important thing to get right is to give the Squats a valid and realistic reason still to exist in the 41st millenium. We all know (and I for one personally despise) the lazy cop-out explanation that the Squats were eaten by the Tyranids. What utter bunkum! It is totally unplausible for the Tyranids - a race that exists only to consume biomass - to expend time and energy on devouring worlds that are devoid of any indiginous life, and populated solely by a relative handful of frontiersmen, miners, traders and warriors, all of whom live in inpossible-to-detect subterranean cities. 

Ok, calm. Rant over... 

One main aim of the codex is to create a more satisfying backstory for the Squats, one that doesn't ask the reader to suspend their normal, rational beliefs (such as one can when reading science fiction). One of the most important things when writing fiction is to ensure that a character's motives, decisions and emotions are realistic - so that, even though he or she may exist in a fantastical universe, their reactions to a particular set of circumstances are entirely rational and realistic. This is in fact one of my major grumbles with corporate/primetime TV, and Eastenders in particular. It is not that I object that much to soaps and dramas per se, it's just that the protagonists' reactions are usually either totally disproportionate to the severity of the given situation, or their decisions are completely at odds with what I would consider to be a rational or logical thought process. This in fact led me to deliver a ten-minute rant (on Christmas Day evening, and directed at my pregnant girlfriend and her mum, no less) on why the current kidnap & subsequent house-fire Eastenders storyline was utterly unbelieveable and why 'real' people would never make those decisions. To their credit, the girls laughed at me, told me to shut up and continued watching. So I collected my toys and placed them back in my pram. Ahem. 

Soooo.... Long story short, I have come up with several different backstories to explain the Squats' continued existence in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. They all start with the invasion of the Homeworlds by Hive Fleet Nemesis and the Imperium's abandonment of the Squats to this fate. The different variants of the story then seek to explain how the Squats survive the Tyranid scourge. Suffice to say that so far, Chaos, the Demiurg, the Ultramarines, the Warp itself, and countless others are all involved in the story!
STYLE OF PLAY

The second major aim of the codex was to develop a totally unique style of game-play for the army. Very quickly I decided that the Squats would most likely favour a stoic, break-us-down-if-you-can attitude in war, so the army is designed to be a lot like Jose Mourinho's Chelsea team - very strong defensively, but with a vicious counter-attack ready to strike on the break.

To that end, I have developed special rules for many of the specialist units to suit their defensive nature. The psychic units - Living Ancestor and  Spirit Lords - have powers which allow army units, or even scenery, to be moved around prior to the game, during deployment. The engineering units - Guild Engineers and Sappers - allow vehicles and weapons to be upgraded with either universal special rules or the ability to twin-link shots, or re-roll scatter dice for example. The Sappers also allow pieces of scenery to be rigged with mines and boobytraps, thus ensuring the Squat player has a good chance of whittling down the enemy before they reach the doughty defenders. 

TIL NEXT TIME...

Hopefully then, I've whetted your appetites with a few tasty morsals to tease you until I've fleshed out the Codex a bit more. Til then, keep watching this space!   
   

Tyranid 'Drop-Spore' Army Increase to 1850pts

I am due to attend the Caledonian Uprising at Maelstrom in Mansfield in January, and army lists need to be submitted by 22nd December - next Thursday! To say I am in a quandary would be an understatement. The list needs to be 1,850pts, with Special Characters allowed - all to suit the prevalent ETC tournament scene, it would apprear.

The core of the army is largely fixed - I will be taking a modified version of my very own 1,750pt Drop-Spore Tyranid force which I had so much fun with at Blog Wars II which Alex of From the Fang organised and ran last month. The 1,750pt army is as follows:

HQ - Hive Tyrant with Wings & Hive Commander

ELITE - 2 x Zoanthropes in Mycetic Spore
ELITE - 2 x Zoanthropes in Mycetic Spore
ELITE - Doom of Malan'Tai in Mycetic Spore

TROOPS - Tervigon with all the trimmings
TROOPS - 10 x Termagants
TROOPS - Tervigon with all the trimmings
TROOPS - 10 x Termagants

HEAVY - Carnifex with Heavy Venom Cannon & Twin-Linked Devourers with Brain-Leech Worms in Mycetic Spore
HEAVY - Carnifex with Heavy Venom Cannon & Twin-Linked Devourers with Brain-Leech Worms in Mycetic Spore
I have tinkered with the list slightly to remove the Tervigon upgrades I didn't use (ie Onslaught), which leaves me with 120pts to spend. I really want to keep with the deepstriking modus operandi of the army (only the Tervigons start on the table, and only then in objectives-based missions) so I do not want to add any foot-slogging units. The army has a decent firebase, consisting of the 'dakka' (I hate that term!) Carnifexes and the Zoanthropes to deal with tanks, and good anti-infantry capability courtesy of the flying Tyrant and of course Doom. All in all, the army works and I'm afraid to tinker with it!

So, what are my options?

I have thought about adding 8 x Genestealers - they are my favourite model in the whole hobby after all, so they don't need any justification! However a unit of 8 is likely to be dealt with very easily, even if they arrive from reserve via a board edge using Outflank.

the other viable option I have thought of is to add 7 x bases of  tunnel-swarming Ripper Swarms, with Spinefists. They complement the deepstriking theme of the army, are multi-wound troops (ideal for objectives missions), have multiple short-range shooting attacks which may surprise a few folks, and can be used to tar-pit strong opposing units for a turn or two.

So, I need your help!

What would you suggest? Genestealers? Ripper Swarms? Or something else entirely?

All positive comments gratefully received!

Sons of Taurus Reveal 'Fandex: Lost and the Damned'

Legendary Legions

It's no secret that I am a big fan of home-grown Codexes, so I was delighted to see that the guys on the Sons of Taurus blog have written their very own Lost and the Damned book.

I've not had a chance to read it yet, but I wanted to share the news of it's release with you so that you can read and enjoy it as much as I hope to!

You'll find the Sons of Taurus blog here:

http://sonsoftaurus.blogspot.com/2011/12/codex-lost-and-damned-designers-notes.html

...And the Fandex here:

http://sonsoftaurus.blogspot.com/p/codex-lost-and-damned-wip.html

Check it out, and let me know what you think!

Query: How Effective are Psyker Battle Squads against Space Marines?

One of the units I'm thinking of including in my Squat 'counts-as' Imperial Guard army are Psyker Battle Squads, possibly two units of 6-7 each. I've seen them used to devastating effect against some armies, however I am unsure how well they perform against loyalist Marines, bearing in mind they automatically rally the following turn with their ATSKNF special rule.

Have you used Psyker Battle Squads against Marines? Or had them used against you? Opinions and thoughts gratefully received!