Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Who won my first 7th ed. game?

Prince did obviously.

Actually, I played a brand new player.  And we ignored most of the rules minutia and just focused on the core mechanics of the game, how it flowed and when to do what.  And it was a draw.  And it was a blast.  Literally, the kid's words after finishing the game were "Oh yeah, it was worth the money."  And that my friends is why I don't care about 4 billion psychic dice summoning invisible death stars.  If that stuff is fun for you, then by all means, seek it out.  You won't find me there.  So I have no idea how different this edition is from its predecessor, but I'll post up a blog as soon as I get a decent battle report.  Our friendly league nights start at very low points and slowly work themselves up, escalation style (the reasonable escalation - not the Lord of War stuff) so those would be worth much anyway.

In other news, I won a recent "friendly" league we held at the local shop and the prize was the new 7th edition rulebook.  That was fortuitous, as I likely would have waited a long time to pick it up, or asked for it as a gift or some other way to reduce the sting of purchasing a new rulebook so soon after 6th was released.  Yea me.

Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Hades Drake the New Terror of the Skies?
 By Chambers:

Sounds Better on Paper

Sunday, May 18, 2014

Vulkan Sighted at Forge World's Heresy Weekender

Vulkan!  BoLS Lounge member DrLove42 posted up some photos of this weekend's Heresy event across the pond.  Lots of juicy Salamander Legion stuff I can't afford such as sweet new terminators, upgrade kits, a Salamander Contemptor Dreadnought, & of course Vulkan himself.  Additionally, there was quite a bit of stuff about the Mechanicum (a Dark Mechanicum list is in the works Chambers!), Knights, and some of the other lesser legions.  Head over to the thread and check it out.

Not the pose I expected, but still very cool.

A bit of paint, and a few of his lads...
EDIT:  Recalcitrant Daze has some sweet pics of Salamandary goodness over on their site:
...such as this beauty right here.  Aerion, the forge is calling.

Monday, May 5, 2014

My C'tan has transcended, what's your excuse?

...and he shall be known as Bocephus
I am slowly plugging away at this whole "Necron Thing" that I've gotten myself into.  I wish all of the models were as easy as this guy was to paint.  (1) Prime with GW white spray; (2) Heavy wash with Thrakka Green; (3) Drybrush with Astronomicon Grey; (4) Drybrush with whatever the hell that new GW white drybrush paint is called.  The base, as with all of the bases in the army, is the Armageddon Dust texture paint with a drybrush of Ushabti Bone over the top.  The bases are simple at the moment, so they can be upgraded if I get the inspiration and/or energy & time to take them further.

No clever name for Lordy McLorderson as of yet.
I believe I regret posting a close up pic.  This guy definitely looks better at a distance...with better light...and a better camera...and a completely different model painted by someone better than me.  :)

We are making progress on our Tuesday night "Friendly" league.  We will model our elite choice tomorrow evening.  Since I'm already finished with that, I'll be working on the albatross that is my necron warriors.  There's always more of them to paint.  Additionally, I'd like to show up to our competitive league night on Thursday if only to take pictures.  It seems that all I'm reading about on the internet is how GW is failing (they are), and how the game is dying (it might be), and how everyone is abandoning the 40k ship (they might be, but not around here, that's for damn sure).

In any event, here's the official Team Snake Eyes stance on the current state of Warhammer 40k:  We don't give a crap.  We've spent too damn much money and time on our models that GW could decree that all hands must play the game in latin and that d100 dice will be used for every purpose and that any model from any book can be grammar school chums and benefit from each other's wargear and rules and we will straight up ignore that trash.  We'll play the version of the game we enjoy, with the models we've painstakingly collected over the years and poured our blood, sweat, tears, & wife-points (married chaps know where I'm coming from here) into modeling/converting and painting them.  Soldier on you ninny's.  Don't let the bad men tell you how to play with your dolls.

Monday, April 28, 2014

Adepticon 2014: Eye Candy (Pic Heavy)

These should have gone up weeks ago, and are likely already posted on the internet by what I call "conscientious and timely bloggers".  I, good people, will never be accused of that sort of recklessness.

My favorite army of the weekend.  Highly coverted "bio-shock infinite" mega nob ork army.

The undersea drills were "trucks", and even the display board looked like the sea bed.

What's cooler than a dakka jet submarine?

TWO dakka jet submarines!  duh...

Sweet converted helo valkryie.

Probably go good with "Codex: Stormtrooper".
Some cat actually showed up with 100 Dark Angels, so if you were ever wondering what that looked like...
And here's some Crystal Brush badassery.  Not sure if they placed, but they caught my eye, and that's got to be worth $10,000 right?

Free hand banner?  Yes please.

Conversion Beamer?  Yes please.


Neat diorama

Yep.  Bretonian Ogres.  Nope.  My picture didn't do this army justice.
Coolest display board ever?  Yeah, that would go to this guy.  I believe it was created by the guys who runs GMM Studios.  Amazing.







Some guys were giving this Chaos Dwarf player grief since this wasn't a GW model, but screw them.  I think it looks badass.

 


Thursday, April 10, 2014

Adepticon 2014: The Friendly Part 2
Sexy Beasts waiting for war


Monday, April 7, 2014

Adepticon 2014: Friendly Tournament Re-Cap


So this year's theme for the Friendly Tournament was "The Dirty Dozen".  There were three rounds, roughly equating to the major plot points of the film.  Round 1 your lads didn't quite get along, Round 2 they were participating in the war game, and Round 3 was the final suicide mission.

I brought, what I thought was, a fairly "friendly" list.  I was a little hesitant to bring my three Centurion Devastators with Grav Cannons, they performed very well for me, but I don't think they ended up being over the top.  My list can be seen here.

My Storm Talon was only shot down once on the day...about three seconds after this picture was taken.
Rathnor used orders, and some timely "6's" to down the aircraft.  Who needs skyfire?
In the first round, I played a list that seemed eerily appropriate.  Rathnor's IG list with Space Wolf allies was my first opponent.  He brought a Creed, Kell, a command squad in a Chimera; a big blob of a platoon with a handful of dismounted regular squads, heavy weapons with lascannons, and 50 conscripts; a squad of vets in a chimera with melta guns and demo charge; Logan Grimnar, and three wolf guard in power armor.  It was an unusual list (for me with my limited exposure to games outside my own shop) with a lot of optimized quirks (Logan's abilities adding to the conscripts, Creed's boatload of orders, etc.) but it was well played and likely not overly optimized (more on that later).
This was "the end".  He had marched across the board, shooting up everything in sight.  The next round would
see a charge that left me with a combat squad and an immobilized Razorback.  The Gods would take pity on me
and end the game (and my misery) shortly after that. 
For this mission, players had to split their army in half, with each half counting as desperate allies.  This did almost nothing to my opponent, but was disastrous to me, as my play style involves castling up my entire army to support one another with short range firepower.  That, plus dice rolls so bad that Rathnor offered up his own dice for me to use in an effort to stop the painful torturing of probability that was my dice for that round.  In the end, I was trounced.  I "earned" a crushing defeat and garnered no points for my team.  Rathnor did have an entire 50 man squad of Rogue Trader era human bombs.  Some with the neck collar, and the rest with the backpack bombs.  Nifty stuff if you're into that sort of thing.  He says it only took him two years to get them all...

For my second round, I played The Bloody Chaos, who happened to be Chambers' opponent from round 1.  He normally plays chaos, but decided to do something different for Adepticon.  He brought a Carcharodons (space sharks) army that was awesome.  As none of you know, I harbor a secret desire to own a Carcharodon army, so this was a special treat for me where I got to live vicariously through TBC's army.

My crap pictures don't do it justice, but he had a Chapterhouse Studios "true scale"
marine with a gigantic chainsword (can't remember the company he got that from)
that was simply amazing.
TBC's list was as follows: Tyberos the Red Wake; a squad of assault terminators as elites, and another as troops; a scout squad in a Land Speeder Storm; 2 Tactical Squads; a Storm Talon; an assault squad; and finally, a devastator squad.  This round's special rule was that ambulances were placed on random tables and they scattered 4d6" every turn with the possibility of moving onto neighboring tables if they had the movement for it.  Any unit hit was either tank shocked or rammed.  We had an ambulance show up at our table during the game, but it promptly drove off with no effect.

This was my deployment.  Notice the gigantic hole for deep strikers.
TBC was easily my most fun opponent on the day.  Beer was exchanged & fun was had.  This was the epitome of what the "friendly" tournament should be.  TBC's army is obviously an assault army with some long gun & air support.  That's probably the type of opponent my list is best against.  He faced an uphill battle all game, but this...

...is where his fate was sealed.  He was only able to get one of his terminator squads in from reserve on round 2.  That meant my entire army, but mainly my Centurions, could focus on that close threat.  And believe me, getting a squad of Carcharodons in close combat was not a goal of mine.  He lost one to quad gun fire on the way in, and the rest were taken care of after that.  The next round Tyberos and his squad showed up, but again, I had no other obvious targets.  Even after all that fire, I still needed to assault him with my own terminators and Vulkan to keep the upper hand.  Some poor rolls in TBC's part sealed the deal.  After that combat, I ran my lads towards the relic and table quarters for the crushing victory.

Round three is where I lost all credibility as a blogger since I didn't take any pictures of my game with Cee Kay and his Tau-Dar list.  I'm not going to lie, this was the weirdest list I've ever played against.  At first glance it seems too optimized for the friendly, but when you look close, he made conscious decisions to weaken his list.
As penance for not taking pics of the game, here's a real life fire warrior that I saw.
He was pale, yet quick.


He brought Farsight with 4 crisis bodyguards with flamers, stim injectors, & vectored thrusters; a crisis suit commander with every piece of wargear available to him (354 points!), a 6 man stealth team; a single crisis suit with flamer; a three man crisis suit with bonding knife (no weapons?), Karandras the Shadow Hunter; & 6 guardian jetbikes.

His plan was to camp weaponless crisis suits & jetbikes on objectives, infiltrate Karandras with the stealth team, and deepstrike everyone else with Farsight et al.  I'll admit, I was pretty nervous.  I shot up the crisis suits as much as I could, but with nightfight, those guys are tough to shift.  He deepstruck right next to my castle (which I deployed with no room for deepstrikers behind my aegis) and proceeded to use flamers against me.  He was unaware of the Salamander's chapter tactic known as "lol flamers" and was disappointed to cause no wounds.  Everything in my army, minus the 145 point Storm Talon, then shot at that squad.  At the end of my shooting phase, he had one Stealth Suit left on that corner of the board.  I spent the remaining rounds getting line breaker, grabbing objectives, and killing his bikes and backfield crisis suits.  I have no doubts that had Karandras and/or Farsight got into assault that it would have been a different game.  This round's special rule was to have vortex missiles moving about just like the ambulances previously.  A vortex missile made it to our table about 5 minutes after the game was over, having no impact on our game.

All in all, I think this year's friendly was an improvement over last years.  Yes, I went 2-1 this year, while going a disastrous 0-3 (finishing dead-ass-last overall), but the lists I saw were more friendly.  My worry was that this was going to become just another 1500 point tournament, but it didn't happen.  That's not to say that it's out of the woods.  Many of the guys who showed up with quirky or overly friendly lists were saying that they wouldn't make that mistake next year.  The friendly walks a fine line, and I think they need to review lists as advertised.  Early list submissions would go a long way towards maintaining the trust of the community that rock hard lists won't be seen at this tournament next year.