Valentines Day Game

I'd like to hear how it went and all that. Maybe even some great moments.

As is standard fair in any apocalypse game it went roughly as follows:

Deployment phase is really a blending of the army building phase because it would make sense if we previously established the points total and teams and then all brought appropriate lists.

Also, 8x8 foot tables are too small for 15,000 points a side. Both sides were almost required to place things in reserve as they COULDNT POSSIBLY HAVE FIT IN THE DEPLOYMENT ZONE

This means that shooting templates on turn 1 is GREAT, anyway. For a game that was supposed to start at 4, and therefore deploy at 3:30, the bad guys (deploying first) didnt start til about 3:45, and then at 4:00 I was told I needed to expand my bad guy force to equal the points taken by the good guys. So good didnt get to deploy til 4:05, which, for writing up exactly 1000 points and deploying them into the ONLY 2 GAPS ON THE TABLE, wasnt bad on my part

Good took a while to set up, in part because their deployment zone was the MIDDLE of the table, meaning no one could actually reach a significant portion of it. The good side had 4 different baneblade variants, and evil had a stompa, a brass scorpion, and a nurgle plague-baneblade (there is a real name and real rules, I just suck at remembering)

Game starts with evil due to rules, and in an odd display of logic, we targetted a significant number of the smaller tanks (ie, leman russes and such) instead of the super heavys, especially because we had alot of exposed backs of tanks due to being on both sides of the good guys. Our double super secret strategic assets did some interesting things, as colby took a 10" D template that scatters D6 feet, and managed to do a fair bit of damage. Zach took a 10 inch EMP template that only affects vehicles, and took out a rhino with guys in it, and shook a couple leman russes.

Mine was a 7" D template I used to knock a structure point off the closest baneblade variant to the stompa, and coincidently, the only one that could have blown it up. And eventually over the course of the turn I managed to take out 2 Leman russ turrets (good enough for me) and a TON of infantry after using my Lash Prince to bunch up a unit of 10 marines near 2 other units of marines in a line next to each other, perfectly shaped like the HELLSTORM template my baneblade had. Of the 27 models under the template, 23 died (sorry, I rolled 4 1's). and I had 3 demolisher templates (2 vindys and the bandblade thingy) so I took out alot of infantry.

I dont really know what happened on Angelo and Zach's side of the board, but the most epic part of the game for me was watching Colby use the Stompa's silly gatling cannon to kill 6(7?) units of infantry before burning out. And the stompa killed or disabled 3 leman russes, and immobilized the good guy baneblade. Powerful stuff.

Good guy turn 1 saw some return fire, and because I was too busy keeping track of my own stuff, I dont really know what happened everywhere, but 1 of my predators got shaken, 5 missiles, a multimelta, and 4 lascannons managed to not even glance my baneblade.


Bad guy turn two saw Federico arrive with 1/2 his army, and begin to tie up a large portion of the enemy on the other side of the table. The stompa used turn 2 to repair its broken drive train, and its broken main cannon (so I guess the good guys did some damage). My dreadnaught rolled a 1 and blew up one of my own rhinos (THANKS CHAOS!) but fortunately the guys inside could still get out and put some melta lovin into the close good guy baneblade.

I used my mass of melta guns to blow up the close baneblade, and the orbital defense laser in the middle of the table. I know I killed 2 dreadnaughts, a sentinal, a leman russ, and killed 17 more marines and 8 guardsmen with the Hellstorm template. And shook the vast majority of the other tanks in my army area, and even took the demolisher off a baneblade because all previous shots against the main cannon had been saved and I was cutting my losses.

Good guy turn 2 put 2 of 3 structure points on my baneblade, but failed to do anything productive to the stompa, and otherwise only shook one of my predators and took the demolisher off a vindicator. I assume that my army wasnt drawing attention, as most of the shooting did not involve me.

Bad guy 3 brought the rest of our stuff on and saw Abbadon (Angelo's) just miss vortex grenadeing himself by 1 inch, and therefore not blow up the next baneblade. We killed 66% of the newly deepstuck terminators in shooting, and 4 whole enemy squads died to deep strike mishaps from turn 2. I moved all 40 of my troops into the center objective, but even with the help of the baneblade (killing another two whole squads of marines) we were unable to remove the TONS of points of good guys from the center area of the table and they would inevitably contest it. Thankfully we remembered the Stompa happened to contain GHAZKHULL (or whatever) and some flash gits, who got out and stopped the 10 termies and Lysander coming to hammer the stompa to death. Some more tanks blew up and we secured approximately 50% of the good guy deployment zone, while holding the far corner objective nearest the stompa.

Good guy turn 3 (being the last possible turn due to time constraints) saw them move a fair bit of grey knights into the center for a contest on the vital objective, and some lucky deepstriking near some ruins in the far corner for another contest on a bad guy objective, but alas not enough as evil still won 2-1 on objectives. Most of Colby and My side of the board was removed following our turn as nothing could have been done to contest our table side in just 1 turn, and we deemed wasting 30+ minutes rolling dice only to not impact the game was counterproductive.

sounds like a lot of waiting around

thedenver(admin) wrote:

sounds like a lot of waiting around

Ya, there was. But the timed turns helped with that.

As for the game I'll not go in to the play by play but I'll show a few pics to give context to the deployment of the game, and a little bit of the game I was involved in.


The Imperial Forces started in the middle of two tables put together with little to no cover. (But not much can be done about this as our GW store doesn't have much in the way of terrain.

Imperial started between the to red lines, with xenos starting on the table edges, also with little to no cover.




As you can see there is no real cover, and most of the troops where out in the open. ( which is why I didn't deploy 1,000 points of my troops; just guardsmen anyways)

We lost most our terminators from deep strike mishaps and not enemy fire. I lost a terminator lib and 7 Greyknight terminators from rolling a 1 on the mishap table, as did a Dark Angle player with 5 of his terminators. I also have my cc terminators redeployed in due to mishap in front of a vindicator, lol. But from shooting I only lost 2 normal terminators from a massive amount of ork attacks and chaos marine lascannons, but the vindi hit dead on and took out the chaplain and 2 more cc terminators. So from enemy shooting I only lost 5 of 27 terminators, while 8 of them where lost to mishap.





I must say my best shot of the game for me was the last turn with my baneblade when it fired its main cannon and hit lots of chaos marines and ork bikers covering the objective. I know I only killed two bikers and an untold number of marines because I'm not sure if there covers saves where ever taken or not.

But the last turn of the game for the Imperials wasn't even really played as everybody just started taking stuff of the table on both sides, and I decided not to bring the 2nd half of my reserves on to the table so I could get packed up and out of there as it was getting late and I was starving.

Over all the stompa was an awesome site on the field and the only target for my terminators. But once they got locked in CC there goal was never going to be reached.

It was fun but I think I would like apoc games pre planed. To know whos playing, set number of players, number of points, what armies, and have the number of super heavies disclosed. Plus the normal set up rules, unless proper terrain is used for scenarios.

Yeah, Michael did a pretty so-so job of managing the game. For one thing, he didn't tell us what the objectives were until AFTER the "bad guys" deployed. >_< He also allowed Fed and someone else (the guy with Necrons and the Duff hat) to join in on turn 2 even though the table was almost completely covered with units already (thus why there was so many deep striking mishaps). Crowd control in the store got pretty hairy at times too, with bystanders crowding in and blocking the movement of the players. I literally had to man-handle a few spectators out of the way so I could move my units and get around the table to let Josh, Tory, and others that I was shooting at/assalting their units so they could defend themselves.

As David pointed out, the highlight of the game for me was getting to control the Stompa, as it literally blew the crap out of the good guys in the first turn of the game. The Mega-Gatla gun worked stupidly well and I managed to kill 5 units outright and severely wound another two, basically removing 80% of the good guy infantry from my half of their deployment zone in a single round of shooting. For those that don't know, the Mega-Gatla is a S6 AP3 48-inch range co-axial gun that fires 2D6 shots that automatically hit. The kicker is that as long as you don't roll doubles for your number of hits you can fire at another unit within 12 inches of your previous target, all in the same shooting phase. Thus I rolled a 3-4, 4-5, 2-5, 3-5, 4-6, 1-5, and finally a 6-6 on a lone un-attached Space Marine captian. OUCH!

The Stompa also had 3 hunter-killer missiles (the unlimited range ones) that hit on a 2+ (cause they're piloted by kamikazi grots) and managed to destroy the battle cannon off of one of Tory's Leman Russes and wreck another outright since I could see their rear armour from across the table (yay unlimited range!).

That game ALMOST convinced me to buy a Stompa, but given that A) I still haven't gotten my first paycheck and B) we hardly ever play APOC around here, I had to pass.