Tournament Report

I showed up to the Bellevue Bunker around noon and sat around waiting to see if three people wouldn't show up so that I could be moved from wait-list to player. In fact at least ten people didn't show so everyone on the wait list got to play.

I played the list I specced out in the last post with the exception of the Inquisitor Lord since I forgot the WYSIWYG model.

Game 1
The first game was against a black templar player. I don't think I've even ever read through the Black Templar's codex before so I was wholly unprepared. Mike, my opponent, had three blocks of ten marines, a chaplain and emperor's champion, and a razorback/predator (It wasn't painted so I can't remember for sure) with twin linked lascannon turret and heavy bolter sponsons. The mission had something to do with killing a select enemy squad.

So I guess Black Templars have a whole bunch of rules that let them make extra moves. They swept across the battlefield and by turn six had wiped out my entire army. That isn't to say that I didn't give a good accounting of myself. By the end all his squads were below half strength, one squad had only a single member left, and the tank was wreckage. Still, as the first tournament game I'd played in an awfully long time, a massacre didn't have me hopeful for the rest of the day.

Game 2
The second game was against a beautifully painted ultramines army commanded by a pleasant fellow named Timm. It was comprised of a tactical squad, scout squad, devastator squad and command squad all of which had every single option and loadout. We played on a fun ruined city location. The mission was a straightforward cleanse with some sort of extra gravity rule that we both forgot about.

This game went much better. I was generally able to exert overwhelming force on each of his squads individually, taking his army apart piece by piece. I will also admit that the dice were very much in my favor and I think that my tanks scared him because his command squad spent the whole game shooting a single lascannon at the demolisher. In the end I wiped his army off the table and only lost five or six guardsmen.

Game 3
Game three was played against an unpainted ravenwing-centric dark angels army. There was a tactical squad, scout squad, two squads of three bikes, a dreadnought, and the master of the ravenwing in his land speeder. The mission was Suicide Squads where we each had a squad that we wanted to get killed for extra victory points.

This was a total slug fest. The dark angels won the first turn and the bikes and speeder zipped forward to lay waste to my infantry squads. After that there was mainly just a lot of back and forth blasting at each other with my army having a bit more firepower and luck. In the end I had the inquisitor lord, russ, demolisher, immobile chimera and stormtroopers left, and he had half a tactical squad detachment, an immobile dreadnought, and the land speeder. It was a victory for me, but far from a resounding one.


I had fun. In the end my army performed as I predicted it would when I made the army list. Against the hand to hand templars I crumpled, against the straight up vanilla marines I dominated, and where I had to fight against a land speeder with fourteen armor on the front and sides I had a really hard time dealing with it. If I had to do one thousand points again I'd definitely tool up my command squad for close combat so that I could have some sort of response to an assault.