The New Ones Always Go First

Our escalation league is still going strong with last week marking the 600 point mark. It was nice to finally play a standard game finally. Kill Teams are fun, but everyone was itching to bring out the heavy firepower. I haven't played an unpainted model in our "official" games yet, but I wanted to try out the storm raven so bad I decided the his to my points for the day were worth it.

Having just build my storm raven I was itching to give it a go and went with the following.

Librarian - Blood lance, Str 10
5 man Assault Squad - no upgrades (x2)
Land Speeder - Muti Melta / Heavy Flamer
Storm Raven - Hurricane Bolters, Assault Cannon, Heavy Bolter

Since the games were so small we played on 4x4 tables with 3 objectives spread diagonally. In an effort to get everyone into the tournament mindset, kill points were also in effect.

I ended up playing against Kung Fu Joe and his Sisters of Battle. He was running two large squads of battle sisters along with Repentias and a squad of 2 penitent engines lead by a Palatine. We started with table quarters for deployment and he went first, moving his engines and repentias toward my storm raven sitting on the back of the table. He rolled well for his extra movement but I still felt secure that I could take down his heavy hitters and get away.
When it came to be my turn I opted to sit still and show my opponent the full fury of the Blood Angels gunship!
Boy was I wrong! After four blood strike missiles, four assault cannon shots, and three heavy bolter shots at his AV 11 walkers all I had to show for it was one explodes result and a shaken walker that ran up to punch my ship right out of the sky on the next turn! They don't get used much but boy those penitent engines are fast!

Lucky for me, my Librarian jumped out of the ship as it exploded and punched his walker right back! If not, I think I would have been hard pressed to deal with it for the remainder of the game.

My assault squads deep struck out of his troops line of site and managed to make a combined charge clearing out one objective as the rest of my force moved to take the midfield uncontested and the game ended up being a solid victory for me but I think the real moral of the story is this.

When you have that super shiny new toy you want to try out for the first time, it's going to miss a lot and get blown up in the most embarrassing possible way!

Playing catch up

I know, I know... I haven't posted in forever it seems. Things have been crazy lately for our gaming crew but finally all the babies have arrived for everyone and life is starting to get back to normal. (Except for sleeping. New babies never seem to want to let you sleep.)

So in new news my wife had our third baby! And while I was at the hospital for three days I built a storm raven!

My youngest brother thinks shes beautiful!

My wife likes this one better!

I meant to post these pics a few weeks ago when it was new and exciting but my one year old daughter decided to pull the SD card out of the laptop and eat it. After drying the card off and putting it back in it appeared to be empty. " Great", I thought, "there goes all of the baby pics and my spider WIP shots." After a week in some uncooked rice (It helps to pull the moisture out) the pics were still on the card thankfully!

Back when it was the hot new black box item, my local red shirt lat me take the new Arachnarok Spider home to build and paint.  I jokingly went to take it as I was leaving the store that day and said, "Well I'll just go home and airbrush some gradients on this..." To my surprise he replied, "Really! Here take the other sprue too!"
So that's how I ended up with this a few days later.

I ended up having a baby in the middle of painting and took it back to the store before it was finished but they thought it was so good when I took it back to the store that no one wants to put the chariot on top now. The model was a lot of fun to work with and it was a nice change of pace from painting 40k. I can't wait too see what they have done with it next time I stop by the store.One word of advice if you plan on getting one. DO NOT glue the legs on before you paint. it makes getting in all the recesses nearly impossible.

Deathwatch, The New Hotness

When I picked up an early copy of the Deathwatch role playing game at Games Day back in August I knew we would play it. I knew we would all make models for our characters and set aside time on our monthly gaming day for it. I did not know it would become the main event! During the slow time between summer and Christmas attendance has been sporadic at best during any of our gaming related fun times. Every few weeks enough of us would be around to try out the game here and there. The immediate response was always something like this, "HOLY CRAP! THAT WAS AWESOME!", or like this, " I JUST DID HOW MUCH DAMAGE!", or ," WE ARE THIS POWERFUL AT LEVEL ONE?!"

Having played more than our fair share of role playing games over the years we all found the game to be both unique and refreshing. It can be played as a space marine kill fest but there is also plenty of room for depth of storyline like you would expect from any well done role playing system. Did I mention how AWESOME space marines are at level one? Its very refreshing to be able to start a new character and not worry about getting killed off in the first combat you come across. Not that you are invincible, mind you. Space Marines can still drop dead rather quickly given the right circumstances as our first group quickly found out. (Genestealers are serious business when they get a crit to your head.)

On the flip side when your team works together using the squad mode abilities you can deal with overwhelming threats almost with ease. When we were surprised by a Lictor while moving to a new area we brought it down so fast the GM was shocked and gave it more HP for a few rounds just so he could at least get a few attacks off. Running the game takes serious adjustment in planning simply because your players are no longer weak nobodies. They are the champions of mankind! They are space marines!

A big bonus for tabletop 40k players is that you can use your models and terrain to really make battles come alive. Many times throughout the missions we would see the map of the area we entered and make an approximate recreation with whatever terrain was available. I'm one of those gamers who really enjoys seeing painted models bring a battlefield to life and it really made the game that much more enjoyable. Defrolla Dan showed up with an old deathwatch squad he nabbed form ebay which some people used but many of us are working on our own custom figures.

If you have yet to give deathwatch a try you should. They have a free starter mission with abridged rules available here.

Soon you too could be hot wiring a chimera and rocking it like this!

This wasn't even the epic finale.

Rune Priest Yimeron Ready to unleash his power.

This is my Blood Angel apothecary. He's got magnets!