Death Guard at the Grim Dice Tournament

Hello!

Been a little while since I've updated here, and since last time I wrote about my Death Guard toughing it out in tenth edition, I thought I'd continue with a brief overview of the Grim Dice Tournament, and maybe some bonus Death Guard content at the end!

The event itself was a pretty standard 2k one-dayer with about 12 players. I took a list featuring Mortarion running up the middle and a series of small units to try and play the missions, including three Blight-haulers, three units of mostly melee Plague Marines, two lots of Blightlords, a single Plagueburst Crawler (if I had more I would definitely have taken more), Rhino, Bloat Drone, Tallyman and a load of cultitst and poxwalker chaff. At time of writing the balance update has just come out so this list now would have an extra 250 odd points and a powerful new army rule, so I'm well aware I was playing as the underdogs!

First game was against Tim with Chaos Daemons. It was a high scoring win for the Death Guard, 93-89, only a few points in it. The army did what it was supposed to do, spreading out and hoovering up points, while the Daemons slowly murdered everything, but couldn't quite catch up.

Second game was against Robin and his Orks, started fairly even but Mortarion got beaten up badly by Mozrog Skragbad (which I wasn't too sad about too be honest, that guy should be pretty beefy!) and the game went drastically downhill from there. I think the final result was 93-53 to the Orks. My opponent here was a younger member of the community, and I think it's worth saying in case he reads this, I was impressed with both his tactical ability and his Orky spirit!

Last game was against CJ and his Necrons. This one went downhill pretty quickly, Mortation got stuck on the terrain then died fast, while the rest of my army was unable to compete with the 'crons either in their damage or their defences. This game above the others really highlighted the flaws in the index for me - they just can't deal with heavy firepower or really tough targets. Or at least they couldn't - the balance pass might have given them a big boost there. I don't remember the exact score but it was 90-40 ish.

In the end I managed to get roughly in the middle with the highest score of the one-winners. A little disappointing to have the games get progressively more unbalanced as the day went on, but I was ultimately happy to have won a game here. Looking back now on the day of the balance update it does throw it somewhat starkly into focus, the list I would have taken now would have been significantly larger and dramatically more dangerous. Regardless of results, I still had fun, it's always nice to have a day throwing dice!

And as for that Death Guard bonus content - I had a bit of a desire to have a big stupid tank to go with the collection, so I dipped into the Heresy range for this one:

The Typhon Heavy Siege Tank! Kind of like a big Plagueburst Crawler right? In any case, it was a lot of fun to paint up a big dirty rust bucket of a warmachine, using all the weathering techniques I've picked up over the years.

The Lord of Virulence approves! Now I need to play a game with legends allowed. Luckily most of my opponents seem to be pretty cool. Legends let legends use legends! Anyway, thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed, and stay safe out there!

10th Edition 40K - First Game, First Thoughts, Reflections on 9th and Blog Update

Hello!

Apologies for the mouthful of a title, this one is going to be a bit of a disjointed collection of thoughts, but hey, here we are. Kicking off with my first game of the new 10th edition 40k: Orks vs Daemons!

This was a 1500 point game playing the standard Only War mission at the end of the free Core Rules. I was bringing the Orks, as is only right and proper for a first game, against Tony aka the Narrative Wargamer with his primarily Khorne based Chaos Daemons.

I took a mix of unit types, but keeping it fairly simple in terms of numbers of extra rules, with no enhancements. Three units of 20 choppa Boyz, two units each of three Killa Kans and Deff Koptas, a Battlewagon and a selection of characters: Weirdboy, Painboy, Warboss and Waaagh! Banner Nob (represented by the Goff Rokker!). The Boss and Banner went together with a unit in the Wagon.

The Daemons were a mix of infantry and big scary monsters. Two units of Bloodletters and a squad of Plaguebearers with a couple of support characters were backed up by a Skullcannon, a Daemon Prince, a Soulgrinder and the Bloodthirster.

Orks got turn one, surged forward to touch the middle objectives while leaving some Kans to guard the home one, did a bit of light shooting, and that was it, turn one of 10th edition completed!

Daemons responded in kind, leading to a couple of charges onto the objectives. Bloodletters cut into the 20 Boyz with Painboy, killing ten, but were stomped out by the return attacks. On the other flank the Soulgrinder went in to stomp a number of the Weirdboy's Boyz but took no damage in return.

Ork turn two meant WAAAGH! time, and the Weirdboy and friends sneakily jumped out of combat in order to charge the Skullcannon and take the daemon home objective! I'm pretty sure I didn't get Da Jump to work out this well for me in the entirety of 9th edition!

I plugged the gap they left with Killa Kans and the Warboss unit. Extra attack Kans punched some holes in the Soulgrinder before the WAAAGH!-boosted Warboss finished it off with nine strength eleven powerklaw attacks! Elsewhere the Painboy unit got a model back and then charged the Plaguebearers to ensure they didn't wander onto an objective - this mean the daemons were scoring no points on their turn!

The counter attack came in hot, with the angry Bloodthirster jumping over to mess with the Kans on my objective. The second Bloodletter squad turned around to go back for the Weirdboy/Boyz, and the Prince helped out the Plaguebearers. The big lad obviously did his thing, murdering the Kans and then killing a nearby Kopter with bonus mortal wounds, however the other two combats went a bit differently. 

Bloodletters cut down a load of Orks, but in the WAAAGH! turn the remainder fought back hard and killed the entire unit! This scrap would eventually result in the Skullcannon killing off the remaining Boyz and the weirdboy, and only just suriving the resulting deadly demise! The Daemon Prince had it go a bit differently - he used a big 14 attack sweep, but between the new 5+ save and 5+ Feel No Pain, he was unable to make a real dent in the Boyz, though was essentially immune to most of their attacks with a FNP of his own added to high toughness and 2+ save. At the end of the game the Plaguebearers were all gone but the Prince had still not managed to completely wipe the unit!

In turn three most of my remaining forces swarmed the Bloodthirster, including a second WAAAGH! being called for the Warboss/Banner unit. The 'thirster took his toll but eventually the Warboss smashed him down, leaving the daemons with not much, just the remnants in the ongoing combats around the objectives mentioned above. As a result Tony picked up his first victory point in turn four (as a Boyz mob failed battleshock) and the eventual score was, I think, 11-3 to da Boyz. WAAAGH!

So, my thoughts? Overall I really enjoyed it. It certainly felt like it will be a generally smoother and slightly quicker game once we've all learned the rules properly, and though there were a few weird rules interactions we weren't sure about, it seemed like a lot of the fiddly little details had been taken out. Simplified but not simple, as they say. My big takeaway however was that most of the units seemed to do more or less what they were supposed to, in a way that 9th tried to achieve but didn't quite. The big tough daemons took a lot of killing with T11, decent saves and loads of wounds. Rokkits were bouncing off them and buckets of dice from choppa attacks were only chipping off the odd wound occasionally. Similarly a mob of 20 Boyz with a character was a bit of a wall, taking a serious sustained effort to remove. Anti-elite Bloodletters were cutting down around 10 a time and then getting battered by the return attacks, and all the characters were adding powerful abilities. I could see myself running quite a lot of them!

Aside from the specifics of this game, I am excited to play more 10th and experiment with more stuff, though it's not all perfect. Balance is clearly going to be way off initially - and it always was going to be with a reset regardless of play testers, but I think the decision to 'power level' the points didn't help. I certainly don't hate it, it is nice and easy to just pay single costs for units, but I don't love it either. There's a lot of stuff that's just a no brainer, like the Deffrolla on the Battlewagon, that just hurts you for not modelling it that way (or alternatively encourages breaking WYSIWYG). I'm fairly confident that these sort of issues will be sorted in time though, through points updates and the full books.

Looking back over 9th edition, I can honestly say that I really enjoyed it, though it was clearly flawed. Once the complexity and power started ramping up it became very hard to keep up with and it clearly was not designed with the 'casual' player in mind. It had moments of actually being very well balanced and interesting from a veteran 40k player's perspective, but it must have been an absolute nightmare to have tried to get back into the game after a break of several years, only to come up against peak Drukhari or Tyranids and be wiped off the board in a slew of badly costed units and stacked special rules.

I think 9th had a bit of a reputation for being a tournament focused edition, but that's not strictly true. 9th brought is Crusade, and many, supplements with narrative rules - a lot of which I've spoken about at length! I'm glad GW decided to refine the Crusade format however, it seems like it will be much more balanced for random games between mismatched Crusades, and it also looks like the narrative element is kind of baked into the system a bit more. 

I feel like 9th will be remembered as a bad edition by many, but I think it was quietly important. This was the edition where GW decided to allow themselves to change decades-old rules and try to make units play like they are actually supposed to. Orks are supposed to be really hard to kill, so they got toughness 5 after having T4 since the early 90s. Same with regular (and chaos, eventually) marines getting two wounds, and multi-meltas having two shots, and Eldar covered head to toe in armour getting a 4+ save. So many changes to rules and stats that were almost set in stone before, so that the models in the game felt just a little bit more like they 'should' do. They didn't always get it right of course, but I think that will be the positive legacy of 9th, being carried forward into 10th and beyond.

Now, with all that said, for me personally the shift to 9th also signified a shift to not recording every battle on this blog. Some get summarised as part of a larger post, some just get posted to Instagram. I don't always have the time or energy to do big write ups anymore, and though I did beat myself up about 'missing' a few, it is ultimately something I've decided I'm perfectly happy with. As I've always said, this blog is mostly for my own benefit, so I make no apologies for not getting out content regularly or to a specific standard. So what this means for the future is... not a lot really. I will continue with sporadic posting with no intent to cover everything, just a general overview of what I've been up to. I hope that if you are reading this you will find it entirely reasonable on my part, but even if you don't, thanks for reading and please stay safe out there.

The Grim Invasion Continues - Ork Crusade Updates

Hello!

Last time the Orks were out and about doing some krumpin in the Grim Dice Crusade league, Da Vipers got stuck in with limited success, but Boss Redtoof himself was proving to be a very tough cookie! Once again, here's a quick summary of the next three games...

Game four was against the sneaky Aeldari from the Ulthwe craftworld. They brought a selection of infantry units, plus a grav tank and a Wraithlord, led by a Farseer, who was attempting to complete a ritual...

Redtoof got seperated from the rest of the force and once again got stuck in, while most of the Boyz got caught in a crossfire between Guardians and Dire Avengers. The Squighog Boyz were once again able to hunt out the enemy warlord, but it wasn't quick enough to stop the ritual from being completed, earning the Aeldari a close win, with much blood shed on both sides.

Heading to game five it was time to escalate once again to 75 power. In part because I'm already going into 10th ed mode and I didn't really want to think too hard, and in part because I wanted to see 9th out with a bang, I decided to add Nipper the Gargantuan Squiggoth!

So with that decision made, of course I had my next game against an Imperial Guard gunline...

The Guard got turn one and took out both Squiggoths with relative ease. Ouch! Redtoof and his lads did get stuck in with the tanks, krumpin a few of them with the Tankbusta Bombz stratagem, but it was really decided on the first turn roll. Nipper did look splendid during deployment next to his son though!

Game six was a real krump-fest though, as the Vipers were taking on the World Eaters! Lots of choppa marine boyz with some Helbrutes for support. Mission involved taking each other's home objectives and burning them, so there was nothing for it but for both forces to go forward and meet in the middle!

In this game Nipper played a big part, smashing through a Rhino, goring one of the Helbrutes to death, nearly killing the other in melee (but for blood tithe points giving it a 6+ feel no pain) and between shooting and falling over, wiped out a unit of Eightbound! Elsewhere the Orks and World Eaters were trading units, but Redtoof had his sights set on the similarly buffed up Lord on Juggernaut. They went several rounds in a duel, shrugging off blows, before finally Redtoof fell (though in part due to an assist from a couple of Berzerkers, chaos cheating there clearly!) and the game was lost.

So three more games continuing the theme of smashing stuff up but lack of mission success, leaving me sitting at 1-5. Not that winning was ever the goal - though Redtoof has now died three times in this, in spite of how tough he got! Still, a lot of silly fun to round out the edition.

With tenth edition around the corner, I'm not sure if I'll be continuing with the league, so this very well might have been my last games of 9th. With that in mind I have had a lot of fun with this admittedly flawed edition, and at some point I'll do a bit of a retrospective/looking forward post, but suffice to say I am very excited to start playing 10th! In any case, thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed, and stay safe out there!

A Grim Invasion - Ork Crusade So Far...

Hello!

Looks like I'm finishing off 9th edition with some Crusade! Once again, Grim Dice are running a Crusade league, and I decided to join in with the Snakebite Orks this time, after previously running AdMech and Tyranids. Since initially at least Crusade games tend to be quite short, and the last times I had a few byes so didn't actually play all the games anyway, and I'm kind of lazy (no one is paying me for this!), I'm just going to do a quick summary of each game, and this first post will be the first three of them.

This time rather than using a GW narrative pack the guys at Grim have decided to run their own narrative, which features special attacker and defender bonuses and a system of boons for your warlord to accumulate over the campaign. With this in mind I decided to lean into a bit of Warboss hero hammer and make Redtoof as tanky as possible - I used the Beast Boss and gave him both the Super Cybork Body and the Half-Chewed warlord trait. In the initial 25PL force he was leading up thirty assorted Boyz and some Squighog riders from Da Vipers tribe. 

The first game was against Grey Knights, bringing a couple of regular power armoured squads, some cheap servitors and a big beefy Dreadknight!

The Knights carved through the Boyz, while Redtoof went on a bit of a rampage chopping through marines everywhere. Thanks to teleport shenanigans the Grey Knights were able to pull ahead on points but by the last turn only two models remained - both warlords! The Dreadknight teleported over to have a duel (and pick up a load of XP) but Redtoof survived and managed to cut him down in return, having previously lost wounds from a fight with the Squighog Boyz. Technically a loss for da boyz but Redtoof killed basically the entire enemy army so got to feel pretty good about himself.

Second game was against Space Wolves, running the Phobos armoured Vanguard army of renown. Lots of sneaky tricks but that might not help them up close and personal with the boyz...

The Boyz got stuck in quick this time after some generally disappointing Space Wolf firepower (aside from the Eliminators removing the Squighog Boyz in one volley), coving the objectives with boots and their choppas with blood. The marines fought back with an outflanking squad of specialist Hounds of Morkai, but they were too little too late and the collective bosses got together to krump 'em good. Solid win for da Boyz.

After game two it was time to increase to 50 power level. I opted to add in a couple of big fun models in the Squiggoth and Killrig, and three of my recently painted Warbikers. During the first two games Redtoof got to Blooded rank and I picked up the Ded 'Ard armour and a WAAAGH-Boss upgrade to make him even tougher. With the custom boons he's now sitting at 9 wounds!

Game three was once again vs Space Wolves. Narratively appropriate that they would come to avenge their brothers. This time a more heavy hitting melee focused force with Wulfen, Thunderwolf cavalry, a Dreadnought and jump pack Wolf Guard, plus a beefy lord and some primaris units to fill the gaps. It was also a sabotage mission so the Orks would have to do actions on the objectives to destroy them and score points.

The Orks got to charge in first this time, with the Kill Rig and Warboss Redtoof making contact immediately. This time however the Wolves punched back hard, and it quickly turned into a bloodbath, all thought of objectives forgotten. Redtoof was felled for the first time this campaign with the combined might of Eradicators shooting and the veteran Dreadnought charging - though he did take out the Dread in return! The Squighogs managed to return the favour and down the enemy Warlord, though it wasn't going too well elsewhere and the last Squighog was the final Ork model surviving before getting cut down by Thunderwolves. A loss, but a good scrap none the less! The Squighog boyz did get a battle honour for their troubles, becoming Veteran warriors.

One win, one moral victory and one tabling, a reasonable start for da Vipers who are just here for a big fight, and a good start for Redtoof who has accumulated plenty of XP so is likely to go up again the next game, and has picked up 6 unit kills already! WAAAGH!!!

Anyway, thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed, and stay safe out there!