Brothers in Arms - Tournament Report and an Explanation

I haven't played a game of 40k since 28th October, but despite my lack of effort in getting back into playing, I'd like to write a bit more. As such, here is a tournament report from the last event that I went to. It was a doubles tournament, with 750pts per player.

Epic Procrastination - Happy 2nd Birthday

2 Weeks ago this blog turned 2. Huzzah! 2 weeks ago it was also Blog Wars, which I didn't get an invite to again, which tells me something. This is still pokey little blog. But I don't mind that, less pressure. I'd hate to be stuck writing every day in fear of the demanding masses. Luckily, this seems extremely unlikely.

Intense Concentrations

Yes I am aware that terribly vague titles are indeed, well, terrible, and are something that I used to do back in the early days. But never-the-less, I can't think of a better name for this post.

Today has been really productive. I went and did some group work for University, then came back, played some Minecraft with my mates including standard Tom Leighton level dumbassery (letting the farm animals out, then egging the house for my mate being annoyed, allowing hordes of monsters to spawn on my island and solving the problem of Skeletons by diving into the deepest ocean I could find with all my stuff). Then I played a couple of games of 40k. To give some perspective here, these started in the middle of the afternoon and finished at 1:00am, and one isn't even finished.

Gone off Batrep

Just noticed that this is the 101st post of the year. Meh. Anyway, with the GT Heats coming up I'm really loath to talk about anything really. I have a super secret plan with a super secret list and super secret new toys for it. So I'm being super secretive to make sure that it doesn't get out what I'm bringing. If anyone who knows me personally posts what I'm doing in the comments section I will personally hire a bodyguard just to slap you when we next meet. After deleting the comment of course.

In other news, I bought the new Marine Codex, and went to an unvailing 'tournament' at my local store, where only loyalist Marine codecies were allowed. Everyone was using Vanilla bar me with pure Wolves. First game was the Relic. Big ass Chapter Master on bike with more Bikes, I just kept jumping on the Relic with my multitudes of Troops and dragging it back while my Lone Wolves fended off the Bikes to close out the game with a win.

Then I played a Salamanders list, discovered how terrible Assault Centurions are as Long Fangs with my Rune Priest beat them in combat and charged after them cutting them down eventually. The Lone Wolves got around the back. One smashed Vulkan in the face and the other tied up his remaining Marines. Won that.

Then played against a really nice army, which won the local Armies on Parade, in the final. Ignored the Centurions, took a turn of shooting then grabbed First Blood, before pounding forwards knocking him off his objective and claiming 2 of my own. So I won the event essentially. I'll probably be doing a Codex Analysis of them. I hate that segment now but I know Marines are popular so I'll do it.

In non-40k related news. I have a game of Fantasy tomorrow. In addition, my mates have banned me from League of Legends until my new Computer arrives. The number of 'cardboard PC' jokes is tremendous but I keep disconnecting because even League on low settings crashes my 2.2Gb 6 year old Laptop. However, my new 'Overkill PC' 16Gb Desktop arrived on Tuesday.... In Sheffield, so I have to wait until Saturday before it makes it back down to Oxford.

But back to the main topic. In May I photographed a Battle Report, and I have never got around to actually producing it. This has warranted a degree of nagging from my opponent, and now it's got to the point where I either put it up or I buy him a beer. So here you are. If it's wrong, drop a comment in the bottom but don't expect me to change it because I'm far too lazy. I also hope I've got the pictures in the right order. This should be an interesting memory exercise.

Throne of Skulls the Third - September '13 40k

So, I've just got back from a tiring weekend at Throne of Skulls, this one has really taken it out of me and I have no idea why. So, instead of going through each game individually, I'm going to blast through them one at a time in this post. Still in depth to a degree, but not individual post worthy. Pictures will be coming the moment I have enough internet usage left on my phone, I don't have very much left.

My list was a variation on my GT List. 2 Rune Priests, naked, pretty much, 2 Lone Wolves, 3 packs of Grey Hunters, 1 Drop Pod, 2 smaller packs of Long Fangs, Primaris Psyker, Guard Blob, Manticore.

Surprise Throne of Skulls

Ok the surprise is for me, if it were for readers it would be a pretty terrible surprise especially considering that I'm the one going. One of my club mates bought a Throne of Skulls ticket, and recently discovered that they wouldn't be able to go, and so they have been attempting (with the permission of the organisers) to offload it.

Throne of Skulls is next weekend, and I'm meant to be moving back down to Oxford then, but I just dropped £700 on a new PC and ideally I'd like to take it back with me, so I thought, what the hell, I'll buy the ticket.

Invasion II Game 3 - Tournament Report

Going into the final game we are now on the top table, and our severe lack anti vehicular weaponry has come to sting us in the table once again, this time in the form of a dual Eldar list. It was a strong list, but not broken. The had a Spiritseer in a squad of 5 Wraithguard with D-Scythes in a Wave Serpent. They had 2 squads of Bikes, Baharroth, 10 Howling Banshees which he tanked for, a Night Spinner, Fire Prism, and that was about it.

Invasion II Game 2 - Tournament Report

In the last post I may have alluded to our list's inability to deal with vehicles, well, when you have 3 AV13 vehicles facing you across the battlefield, you definitely can't deal with vehicles. We were playing against a Chaos Marine and Necron List, comprising of a Black Mace Lord, a 5 man Nurgle squad, a 10 man standard squad, a Vindicator, 10 Immortals with Tesla, 10 Warriors, a Lord and 2 Annihilation Barges. The mission was Crusade with Dawn of War.

Invasion II Game 1 - Tournament Report

Wow I have a lot of posts on the go. None of them are finished but there are a lot half complete. Although the amount of content coming out of here is currently a bit minimal, it should pick up hopefully towards the end of the month.

Anyway, yesterday was the day of the Invasion Doubles tournament for the Oxfordshire and Wiltshire stores, with 6 stores coming up to Warhammer World to compete. All in all 68 teams. As I've been living in Sheffield for the past couple of months I've been unable to acquire a ticket, but I went down to Warhammer World anyway to see everyone. As it happened, Oxford were one player short, and one of their guys was left without a player. Using my special ringer powers, I thus partnered him. Let the tournament commence!

Toy Soldier 40k Tournament Report - Game 1

Now that's the longest hiatus I've had in a while, I can assure you though that I've been storing up my posts to release them in one big burst. I have a good excuse for this however. Much hobbying has been done. There hasn't really been much build up to Toy Soldier here, and there has been a good reason for this, I didn't actually decide what to take until last weekend, when I made the foolish decision to take my Chaos Space Marines.

Cry of the Wind Tournament Report - Game 3

As a one day tournament, we were into the last game, and there were 4 players left that could still win it. A Chaos Marine Nurgle player, with some Heldrakes. A Tau player with some Space Marine Allies, a Wraithwing player, slash, AV13 wall. And me. To be honest none of those match ups sounded terrible to me. The Heldrake player didn't have 3 of them so I was confident that I could deal with them (watch the YouTube battle reports a few posts back). I've been practicing against a lot of Tau, so I wasn't too afraid of them, and then the Wraithwing isn't a terrible match up for my army, although the AV13 may cause me a problem.

We were still playing Swiss system, so with me currently sat in second place it meant that I was playing the Wraithwing. The mission was Kill Points with Dawn of War Deployment (I would have preferred to have a Hammer and Anvil mission but it's fine).

Cry of the Wind Tournament Report - Game 2

I spent the lunch break eating burritos with the friend that I went to the tournament with. He had just faced the Dark Eldar list that I really didn't want to face. The guy who was running it thought that facing my army wouldn't be as clear cut as I thought it would be, however I remember the last time I faced this kind of army, when I first met Nathan at Battlefield Birmingham (I was tabled turn 4). All the Dark Eldar player would have to do would be to kill my Long Fangs then sit at 36" range sipping tea and shooting things. In addition, we had both scored 9 points in our previous game, so I knew that a showdown was highly likely.

Luckily however, we were joint for 2nd place at the time, meaning that one of us would have to fight it out against a Wraithwing army on table 1. This meant that I would not be facing Dark Eldar this round. Instead, Space Wolves with Allies. Almost a mirror match, Vanguard Strike deployment, the Emperor's Will mission.

Cry of the Wind Tournament Report - Game 1

There may have been a lack of posting over the last couple of days. The reason for this is that I attended a tournament yesterday, and went with a friend, so I spent the previous evening prepping and making sure everything was ready to go. Plus I was at the club getting some last minute practice in.

The tournament in question was the Cry of the Wind event at the Outpost in Sheffield, a gaming store with a good gaming space upstairs where they hold tournaments. Kind of like a mini-Maelstrom. The tournament itself was a 20 player event, at 1,750pts with pre-determined missions. Unfortunately for me, I couldn't get onto their website the evening before so had no real idea what I was doing. I was taking a variation of my GT list, I was a little more fluffy the last time I went which cost me when I actually discovered what everyone else was running so this time I went for hardcore. The list was as follows:

Space Wolves vs Chaos Marines Video Battle Report Part 4

The final part of the game. This part encompasses more than one game turn.

Space Wolves vs Chaos Marines Video Battle Report Part 3

Getting into the meat of this game now.

Space Wolves vs Chaos Marines Video Battle Report Part 2

Here is part 2 of the battle report. I did make a bit of a mistake with how many Guardsmen died in the combat but that is highlighted.

Space Wolves vs Chaos Marines Video Battle Report Part 1

On the left of this page you may see a little icon which links to a YouTube channel entitled, 'DarkListGaming'. This is a channel dedicated to Chaos Space Marines run by my friend John. The last time I played him was at the Steel City Wargaming tournament back in August, where I won to secure a top 5 finish.

However, with the new Chaos Marines Codex out, and with us both back in Sheffield temporarily over Easter, we decided to organise a rematch, and this time it wasn't interrupted by snow. The stakes were still high however, as the game would be forever immortalised on the internet - although these may have been a little higher for John as if he lost he would be forced to watch it during production.

The battle report itself is split into 4 parts, and as for some reason the videos don't show up on a search to embed them into the post, they'll have to go in one by one. The parts are: Deployment and Turn 1, Turn 2, Turn 3, and Endgame. Here is the first part. (I am running the Space Wolves with Imperial Guard allies).

Guard Blob Vs Black Mace

Weekly batrep today, this game was from Friday, where I played against a Chaos Space Marine player, who we shall call G for now, at 1,800pts.

Before getting into lists and other details important to the game, there is a bit of backstory to this game. It was being played at Steel City Wargaming, the club that I attend in Sheffield, UK. In the last 40k tournament that they ran there, I played G on table 2 in the 2^nd round, playing with my Space Wolves which had just returned from their first proper outing at July's Throne of Skulls. Due to a hefty lack of terrain on this board, and a few dumbass mistakes on my part, G won the game, and this has been a gloating point for him ever since. He then went on to lose on table 1 whilst I was knocked to table 4 where I got a big win meaning that we finished 4^th and 5^th respectively. Therefore, this was a chance to even the score, properly.

Space Wolves Development

News! This blog now has a Twitter feed. You can follow it at Wargaming With Rampage, or @TomL40k. I don't really understand how Twitter works. But what this is designed to do is just provide quick snapshots of what's going on, what I'm painting up, individual tactical points as I realise them and then get overly excited, etc. Also, you will be kept in the loop as to which articles are in the pipeline and expected date of release, so make sure you follow that, as if no-one follows I will get lazy and not 'tweet'. But onto the meat of the post. 

When I first built my Space Wolf army, it was on the back of the transfer between 5th and 6th edition, and was designed to be a 1,500pt project with 250pts of Thunderwolves on the side in case I needed to go higher. Things have changed a bit since then, with the Space Wolves more comfortably occuping the 1,750 - 1,850pt slot. With my Chaos on the go, and due to the nature of that list, the Wolves are the natural choice to bring back down to about the 1,500 mark again, not that I won't use them at higher points levels, but I'd like to be able to use them at lower ones too.

UK 40k GT Army List

It has struck me that I haven't actually posted up the list that I used, so here it is: