My First Game of Warhammer 40k

Two forces have dug in and fought to a stalemate...

- Warhammer 40k Core Book

 

Welcome back to The Art of Caesura!

Frequent readers will know that, over the past couple weeks, I've been building up to telling you about my first game of Warhammer 40k (well my first game in a decade and a half - 5 or 6 editions ago!), today is the day!

So, I had my 500 point Black Templars army and JP had his Necrons (you can check out our lists in last week's post). 

Here is the board we played on. I used two of the mats that came in some of the Imperium magazines that I had picked up. JP supplied all of the terrain - much of it he had made from scratch. 

The mission that we randomly selected was Incisive Attack (see below). This mission has our armies setting up in a "French Flag" configuration. We started off on opposite ends of the table from each other with the four objective markers (the coin-like tokens on our board above) equally spaced around the board. Our main objective was to get our guys onto as many of the four objective markers as possible.  

Below, you can see the state of the board at the start of the game after we had set up our guys.

Starting from the north west, you can see JP's Destroyers hiding in the alien foliage. South of them - cowering in a ruin - are his Overlord, Plasmancer and Warriors. 

On the eastern front we have my mighty Black Templars. In the North East are my Assault Intercessors, south of them (out of view in this picture, but equidistant between the Assault Intercessors and the Bladeguard Veterans) is Marshal Grymm and then stomping its way through the forest in the south-east is my Redemptor Dreadnought. 

I'm not going to lie, I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I was generally trying to keep most of my guys in cover in case he got the first turn so that he wouldn't be able to shoot the pants off me straight away. But I also wanted to play aggressively, ready to valiantly charge up the battlefield to seize those objectives (and stomp those xenos scum). I really wanted to keep some kind of firing line open for the Redemptor as the vast majority of it's prowess is in shooting. 

As I mentioned last week, I hadn't had a chance to look up what each of his units was capable of, so I didn't have a strong sense of which threats to avoid / obliterate (I think this is what hurt me most in this game).

Now, looking at the picture above, I got the first turn (I actually would have preferred to go second, because much of my firepower (bar the Redemptor) is only medium range and I was too far to charge into his guys. So I threw caution to the wind and dashed my Assault Intercessors out of cover towards that Northern objective. The Bladeguard advanced out front to act as a shield wall for the Assault Intercessors and Marshal Grymm behind them. I created a bit of a traffic jam for myself at that choke point at the top of the board. 

The Redemptor trundled its way around the forest, trying (unsuccessfully) to line up a shot.  

As you can see above, JP moved all his guys towards the Northern Objective. And that was the end of Turn One. 

Turn two saw the wheels come off the wagon for me. The picture below is taken after we both finished our second turns, and it is quite different from the picture above...There are a lot less Black Templars for starters!

So, at the beginning of the second turn JP infiltrated in his sneaky sneaky Flayed Ones behind my Assault Intercessors in the North-east corner. I can't remember if they charged me or if I turned and charged them in my turn, but the end result was that they made mince meat of my Assault Intercessors. I managed to kill a couple of them, but in the picture above only my Champion of the Feast (Assault Intercessor Sergeant) remains. 

Also, in a shockingly fast turn of events, JP's Destroyers scurried over to my Redemptor Dreadnought and easily sliced and diced it. It was like a hot knife through butter. I was totally unprepared for how far those guys were able to move and for how deadly they were.

My Bladeguard Vets sauntered down to try to hold my Southern Flank and manged to take down one of the Destroyers without losing any of their number. 

Marshal Grymm, in a grim last ditch epic effort, charged JP's Overlord to have a battle of the bosses. Despite each of our leaders being relatively equal in point's cost, his Necron Overlord bested Grymm, Marshal of the Black Templars. And as Marshal Grymm's last breath left his body, I conceded the match!

I know I only lasted two turns (which took a couple hours - due to my need for heavy instruction) and that I got thoroughly trounced, but I really enjoyed it. Having been beaten so soundly (before I even got to fire my big robot's massive gun!) only lit the fires within me to learn from my mistakes and try again. 

We actually did start a slightly bigger game (750 points) but ran out of time before we got too far in. Already by the second game though, I had a much better sense of target prioritization (I knew to try to blast the Destroyers away with shooting before they were able to close with my troops) I learned not to leave any room in my back field for the Flayed Ones to pop up behind me - and myriad other hard-learned lessons. 

Above, JP and I show off our models of the match - his were undoubtedly his Destroyers which sliced and diced half my army. Mine was actually probably my Champion of the Feast for holding up the Flayed Ones by himself, but the only model that I had painted was Marshal Grymm, so he was the one who got shown off!

Reading: The Swarm

Playing: Transmissions, with my family

Next Week:

It has arrived...