So...Kill Team!?

So I had the pleasure of playing Kill Team a few days ago...it's pretty fun. It plays very much like War Machine but you get to use all of your cool 40k models. I have only managed to win 2 games thus far, but it is cool. A run down for those who don't know the basics:

-The game size is limited to 200 points
-You may not take anything with a save better than a 3+ and no model can have more than 3 wounds
-Your army is composed of up to: 2 troops, 1 elite, 1 fast attack
-No flyers
-No reserves of any kind except for outflank
-Everything scores (even vehicles!) unless it specifically says it does not (example death company)
-You play on a 4x4 table

You get to select 3 guys to be "specialists" meaning they get to pick a special rule from a table. You also nominate one guy to be the "leader" who gets to roll for a leader trait each game.

In the game every model acts independently so units that naturally are of size 1+ are great as you can just buy the 1 guy. Things like guardian squads are iffy as they come stock standard with 10 guys...but each guy alone is less than spectacular. Anyone some early lists I have been playing with:

Dark Eldar:
3x trueborn w/ 2x splinter cannon and a blaster in a venom
1x beastmaster w/ 5x khymerae

This list worked alright, although I have found that space marines are just the fucking shit at this game. As expected a guy in power armor functions in this game much like how they did back in the hay day of 40k. The lack of 2+ saves and the fact that power weapons and low ap guns are fairly rare makes having that best of saves really really nice. Also space marines naturally have loads of special rules (sterngard...jump packs) etc etc.

So with that in mind I played against my brother wielding this list:

Raven Guard:
5x assault marines w/ 2x flamers
5x scouts w/ a melta bomb in a land speeder storm

In almost all of our games he was able to crush me due to his entire army having combinations of infiltrate, scout, and outflank. Outflank is retarded good in this game. As each model acts independently they come in on their own and with the smaller table size and moving 12 inches...assault marines are just really really good. With the basic marine kit (grenades, bolt pistol, close combat weapon) they can threaten just about anything and with the alpha strike they do really really well.

So...the list I finally managed to win with is similar but I used Dark Angels.

Dark Angels:
3x black knight
5x scouts w/ a heavy bolter

Basically I went second so my outflankers out flanked his outflankers and used their plasma talons to rip apart the assault marines.

I highly recommend anyone who plays 40k to pick up this little book from GW as its a cool fun game. It also only takes about...20 minutes to learn the rules if you already play 40k and each game takes 20-30 minutes tops to play.

In other news I am working on painting up more of my Tau stuff to help me combat the new Astra Militarum book...which is pretty freaking awesome. You can cram something like 33+ las cannons into a single list...and with easy access to prescience and ignore cover orders..you should wreck most things. I will need to play test more against this new threat before I can determine if my warlocks and/or my beast pack can handle them.

So in closing... TRY KILL TEAM! It's alot of fun and it is a nice quick game to play when you don't have the time or drive to play a full game of 40k.

-Farseer Tsarith

De La Warr!!! Asymmetrical Missions!? Results?!

Hello,

It has been a crazy two weeks with Adepticon last week and the De La Warr Open this past weekend. I attended both and as I mentioned I did decently well at Adepticon last week and again I think I performed quite well at the De La Warr Open. So to start this event utilized all of the new asymmetrical missions that Mike Brandt and the other TO's have been working on (the goal of these missions being to allow the weaker army builds (non death stars!) to excel). I honestly think that the goal was pretty successful, yes a death star did win the Best General Prize, but battle master was won by a non death star list (it was actually a fluffy Ravenwing army piloted by Matt Defranza). There were also a number of Daemon FMC armies in attendance, actually none other than Justin Cook (the NOVA GT winner) was running Nick Nanavatis Adepticon army which did JUST LAST WEEK win Adepticon. So these missions are very complicated and need a bit more refinement in the wording still but I highly recommend using them, they can be found at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XJ20WB96DzRE635aokDX3XbhOHzw4Xt0UobUZ5j56JM/pub

So the games:

I was running my exact Adepticon list:
Shard Seer (warlord)
Eldrad
Baron
Beast pack (20x khymerae, 2x razorwing flock, 5x beast master)
1x5 kabalite warriors
4x3 windrider squads
2x wraithknights
sky shield landing pad
2x6 swooping hawks
inquisitor w/ 3x servo skulls

My first game was against:
a fairly old fashioned Draigo-wing army.

Lord Draigo
Coteaz
10x paladin w/ 4x psy cannons, apoth, some halbards, and some swords.
1x1 paladin (scoring unit obvi)
3x3 henchmen units
1x10 interceptor squad
dreadknight w/ flamer and teleporter
ordo xenos inquisitor w/ 3x servo skulls and liber heresius

The game:

I got solid powers (that means fortune and invisibility wooohoooo)

It turns out the invisibility was clutch for the game as it basically neutralized any shooting he could have done to me and it crippled his combat power. The game was pretty much my beast pack fighting his paladin unit in the center of the table for 8 rounds of combat with me slowly wearing him down and my hawks and wraithknights running around killing everything else. It would have been much more difficult but I was able to kill the dreadknight turn 1 due to it failing 4/8 armor saves. The army is actually pretty solid if only those pesky tau riptides didnt exist (they really do a number on paladins). But over all it was fun, my opponent was friendly and we had a good time. I made baron do a cool epic challenge with draigo in the bottom of turn 6 or 7 which was legend....wait for it....DARY LEGENDARY! Anyway I advanced to round two with a full 15 points from round 1.

Game 2:

This round I played a well known GT winner Matt Defranza (he is most well known for his very powerful seer council list which he plays quite well). But for this event he was running his Ravenguard which he has been running on and off to my knowledge at his local game store but this was its first appearance at a GT. Anyway I again received decent enough powers. This game was the relic or you could do turn by turn objectives (every turn you hold it you get a point etc etc). I chose the relic and he chose the turn by turn objective as his army was well suited for board control. He had:

Shrike
command squad in drop pod w/ 5x melta
2x10 scouts
4x10 tactical marines in rhinos w/ melta gun, multi melta, combi melta, melta bomb
10x assault marines w/ melta bomb
2x thunder fire cannon

He combat squad-ed the whole army and rushed his rhinos forward to block me from grabbing the relic early. I mitigated round one shooting by hiding under my sky shield. Sadly he got a bit out of whack and thought my beast pack scored this round so he hesitated on the mid field and i was able to get my pack all over the objective and start killing rhinos and marines. If he had realized it didn't score a turn sooner he could have just dumped 40 marines on top of it which at the least could have kept me off it until turn 4-5 which would have let him get enough ahead on points so it wouldn't matter if I picked up the relic. In the end I won 11-10 (mostly because I got line breaker and he did not).

Game 3:

This round was straight kill points and I was playing against NOVA local Brad Voorhees and his Ovesa Star list. I have actually played and beaten Brad before but this time would be different.

Brad's list:

Farsight
buff commander (no hit and run, this confused me and ultimately tempted me to make a huge fatal error, so good job brad)

O' Vesa
heavy burst cannon riptide
2x ion accel rip tides

1x6 fire warriors
1x3 suits with flamers
4x1 suits (half of them had flamers)
3x sky ray
inquisitor w/ servo skulls

I did well early by killing all the sky rays and getting a riptide. I should have backed off after that (note I did not roll fortune this game, this was probably the only game I actually NEEDED to have it...so boo for me i suppose) anyway I would have actually been fine if I'd done that. I could have drawn brad back onto my side and used characters to soak some damage. But I got greedy and thought I could catch Ovesa who was without hit and run. This led to a 2 turn chase in which I skipped out on 3 easy kill points and let brad pummel me with fire power. The lesson is to keep the focus on the mission and especially in these new missions, 1-2 tactical errors will lead to a quick defeat. I ended up losing but Brad only got 5 points off of the game so I did manage to really keep him from pulling ahead of me battle points wise.

Game 4:

This game was against a space marine/dark angel army consisting of:

Beat face chapter master
1x10 tactical squad in a rhino
2x5 tactical squad in a rhino
2x5 scouts (one of these was the dark angel troop choice)
2x2 attack bike squads
2x5 devastators w/ las cannons
thunder fire cannon
Ravenwing command squad
Dark Angel Libby on a bike

I pretty crappy powers but I did manage to swing fortune on the last roll...so that was nice i suppose. Our HQ's all met in the middle of the table round 1...bounced off each other and then I spent about 2 turns killing the bike command squad and the chapter master. While my beast pack dealt with that my wraithknights ran up the other flank and killed off the thunder fire and the devastator squads. At the end of 4 my opponent conceded and we took an early lunch. I proceeded to round 5 with a total of 41 battle points and a 3-1 record.

Game 5:

At this point the event only had one 4-0 player (TJ Meyers and his O'Vesa army). He ended up playing Matt Defranza. There game basically was set up like thus, if TJ beat Matt then TJ would be the Best General. If Matt Beat TJ and got a decent amount of points he would win Best General purely on Battle points. If the pummeled eachother and neither got a load of points I would actually have jumped ahead and even with my loss to Brad win the whole shebang.

My opponent played:
Wolves and Tau
Logan Grimnar
2x rune priest
1x wolf priest
3x7 wolf guard in drop pods lots of combi plasma and combi flamers

Cadre fire blade
riptide w/ ion accel
12x fire warriors
3x broadsides

I ended up winning by a small margin and adding another 12 battle points to bring my total up to 53 battle points and a 4-1 record. TJ won his game and claimed the Best General Prize with a total of 53 battle points and a 5-0 record. He received a huge amount of Ork models (pretty much a decent sized army) and the coveted NOVA Invitational ticket. Matt Defranza ended up with the most battle points at I believe 57 (that was a with a 3-2 record). I think that right there shows some good missions with a ton of victory paths. He was able to to LOSE TWO GAMES and still even in defeat in some of the missions you can score 12-15 points. Congratulations to him and the large amount of Imperial Guard he received. I ended up winning Best Overall/Renaissances Man which awarded me approx 325 of Space Marine loot and the NOVA Invitational Alternate Ticket.

A picture of my prizes!

So over-all it was a great event and I hope to attend it again next year. The Icehouse Warriors put on a great event and it was a blast.

-Farseer Tsarith

Adepticon Results! Best Xenos!!

Hello,

I just got back from Adepticon last night (I left after the GT as I was not participating in the Team Event). It was a blast and I will post up some more information about my games later this week. But the long story short is that I did quite well day 1. I went 4-0 and achieved my goal of making it into the top 16 (huge achievement for my FIRST Adepticon!) I also won Best Xenos Showing for day 1 and I was third overall (just a few points shy of best overall actually!). Anyway my good friend Robert Tilly went on to beat me pretty soundly game one of day 2 and then he went all the way to the top two and was defeated by none other than Nick Nanavati who can now claim to have won Adepticon two years running. So overall Adepticon was a great experience and I think I will probably try to attend next year. I want to shout out to my great opponents who tolerated my silly deathstar list and were even kind enough to give me some good sportsmanship points! So without further ado thanks to Curtis Kamitski (playing Dark Eldar/Eldar), Nick
Rose (playing Eldar), Matt Root (playing Necrons), and Jonathan Willingham (playing Tau). I will post up some battle details in a week or two when I get some more time but all 4 of those games were tough solid games against some very strong opponents.

Thanks for a great first Adepticon guys!

-Farseer Tsarith