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I went to an 1850 tournament at a local GW store (Alamo, CA) on Sunday and had a really great time. It was a killer deal, no entry fee and tons of prizes, including $100 for first, $50 for second, $25 for third and $50 for best painted.

I really like this trend of separating painting from playing as it allows people to still do well even if they are not good at both parts of the hobby. It makes tournaments more inclusive, which in my opinion, is only a good thing.

Anyway, I busted out the bugs and fought against a field of I think, 22 or so other players:

HQ:
Prime, lash and bone sword, d.spitter

Elites:
H.Guard x 3
Zoeys x 2
Ymgarl x 6

Troops:
Gants x 25
Steelers x 16: Poison
Steelers x 16: Poison

Heavy:
Trygon, A.Glands
Trygon, A.Glands
Trygon, A.Glands, Prime


Game 1: Pitched Battle Kill Points, every unit that gets into the enemy deployment zone earns two kill points.
Opponent: Grey Knights

HQ:
Draigo
Corteaz

Elites:
Vindicaire
Death Cult Assassins x 10: Rhino

Troops:
Paladins x 5: various, expensive kit
Paladins x 2
Grey Knights x 5: Rhino, Psycannon
Acolytes x 8
Acolytes x 8
Acolytes x 9

Heavy:
Dreadnought: L.Cannon, M.Launcher
Purifiers x 10: Psycannon x 4, Rhino

My first game against Grey Knights. I have been out of the game for a while due to work, but I took one look at the list and the missions and was just about certain I had the game in the bag baring bad luck.

I won the roll to go first and gave it to my opponent since he only had 2 units that could shoot over 24" and I wanted the last turn to move into his deployment zone for the double kill points uncontested. I outflanked all the steelers and reserved the ymgarls and seeing that he had put his big nasty squad of Draigo, Corteaz, and Paladins in the middle, deployed my Trygons and shooting units on one flank, and the Gants and Prime on the other. Those guys were too good in combat, better to just avoid them and make them wasted points.

The game went pretty much exactly as I had imagined it would. I advanced up both flanks staying away from Draigo and crew, took out his easy kill points with my shooting units (Rhinos, small squads, etc.) and when my steelers and ymgarls arrived, they ate his flank support and then sat in his deployment zone for double points. The Trygons ate any GK squads they got close to them and the game ended in a pretty large victory to me.

Great opponent though, and he was still working the kinks out in his army.


Game 2: Dawn of War, Kill Points, hidden deployment (both players deploy simultaneously while a blanket is held across the board so that neither player can see the other's deployment)
Opponent: White925's Nurgle CSM army.

HQ:
Deamon Prince: MoN, Wings, Warptime
Deamon Prince: MoN, Wings, Warptime
Greater Daemon

Troops:
Plague Marines x 7: Rhino, Champ, Fist, Melta x 2
Plague Marines x 7: Rhino, Champ, Fist, Melta x 2
Plague Marines x 7: Rhino, Champ, Fist, Plasma x 2
Plague Marines x 7: Rhino, Champ, Fist, Plasma x 2

Heavy:
Oblits x 2
Oblits x 2

White925 is currently the top ranked player in the country according to Ranking's HQ and has been for a while. He is also my teammate and one of the guys helping to organize the Bay Area Open GT http://bloodofkittens.com/bayareaopen/ . He is a really good player, obviously, and our games are always super close. This is also the army he won the Broadside Bash GT with, and I know it is rock solid.

I lost the roll to go first and the hidden deployment was kind of a bummer since going second you get to see what the other guy is doing and helps mitigate going second. I just reserved everything apart from my shooting units which hid and infiltrated my Steelers so I could deploy them after the "fog of war" was gone.

I knew that I had to use maneuver to win this war as White925's army would beat me up at close quarters. I used a false retreat with my Steelers to lure him into the middle of the board where his units got in the way of one another. On turn two, I got quite a few units form reserve and bum rushed him in the middle. It turned into a massive scrum and my steelers were able to kill all his heavy hitters (Janthkin, thanks for convincing me to use Poison on the steelers, I will never go back to non-poisoned again!). But I took a beating in the process and his counter attack with PM's really kicked me in the nuts. By turn 5 I only had one trygon left with a single wound, and 2 steelers left out of my assault units, and White925 only had 2 units of plagues and both units of oblits left. My Trygon managed to finish off one squad of PMs and then ran and hid from the oblits and my 2 steelers failed to kill a single remaining PM but survived the 3 power fists swinging back at them!

I ended up winning a really close, fun game by 2 KPs.


Game 3: Pitched Battle, Kill Points, double kill points for Elite and HQ units. Night fight first turn.
Opponent: DoA Blood Angels

HQ:
Libby, J.Pack, Blood Lance, Shield
Libby, J.Pack, Blood Lance, Shield
Honor Guard, 4 x M.Guns

Elites:
Sanguinary Guard: Fist, I.Pistol
Sanguinary Priest x 3: J.Pack x 3, L.Claws x 1

Troops:
Assault Squad x 10, Fist, M.Gun x 2
Assault Squad x 10, Fist, M.Gun x 2

Fast:
Vanguard x 5: Shield x 5, Fist
Vanguard x 5: P.Weapon x 4, Fist

I have played DoA BA with my bugs numerous times in tournaments and it ALWAYS goes the exact same way. DoA vs. Bugs or Daemons is a wipe out. Even if they charge they get owned because they are simply inferior in HtH and they cost more. This game was no different.

I let my opponent go first as I figured he'd be using DoA rules. He did. I then reserved everything myself so that he would drop down onto an empty board. This forced him to deploy defensively. I threw out bait units for him to charge and he took it (what else could he do in a KP game?) and got eaten as he came out. Even charging steelers with two units at once, the BA still got owned. Then my supporting Trygons came in and ate any survivors.

The end result was a near tabling, but honestly, in a KP game that is going to happen 9 times out of 10 in this match up. Bugs and Daemons just beat the crap out of MEQs in combat. My opponent was a great guy though and just laughed about it, knowing there wasn't much he could do.




So, that put me 3-0 and tied for first. My only complaint was no objective missions and night fight in two games. There should have been at least 1 Objective missions, IMO.

As a Tie Breaker for first and third place, the TO had a cool idea of running a "Hell Pit" where each player put his HQ in single combat against the other guy's HQ....which is cool if you have a tough HQ. My prime is decent but I was going up against Castelan Crowe who has an invul save and kicks ass in combat.

There were 6 tokens in the Hell Pit you could get to buff yourself, but half of them were negative. In our game my opponent got a melta gun and +2 attacks. I got teleported across the board and then got a token which exploded, wounding me. Sweet. Then I got into combat with Crowe and he cut me down with ease. So, I got second....sort of. I would much rather have played the guy as I am confident I would have won, but oh well.

The Hell Pit for 3rd place was pretty awesome, though. 6 Players fought it out and in the end, against all odds, an IG CCS won as he ran and hid in the corner, waiting for everyone else to kill each other, then shot the surviving Wolf Lord down before he could get charged. Nice one! Also, the BA player's Libby jumped onto a token which turned out to be a bomb, exploding and killing him. Bummer!

In all, a fun tournament and I was glad to knock the rust off and get some games in.

He's Alive!!!!!!

Well played buddy, well played. I'm looking forward to seeing you at the Nova.

Ugh that GK list you battled is horrible. Wish I would've known about the Bay Area Open earlier, I would've loved to dust off the army and sign up

unityvybe wrote:Ugh that GK list you battled is horrible. Wish I would've known about the Bay Area Open earlier, I would've loved to dust off the army and sign up

The bay area open is July 30th and 31th. Still a lot of time to sign up and be apart of the event.


Anyways good job reece. To bad i couldnt make it out.

1st mission was not well designed at all, playing daemons once all your transports are blown leads to an auto-lose.

See? Poison on steelers is like butter on popcorn - you COULD leave it off, but why would you?

Thanks for sharing. I'm always happy to see BA on the table, as they pay a lot of points to be inferior to 'nids in HtH.

Yeah, I am alive and playing 40K again, thank goodness! Work was crazy for a while but I have free time again which is nice.

@Unityvibe
Sorry for the ocnfusion, the Bay Area Open is a two day GT coming up, like Italiaplaya said. You should come out! We have over 80 40k players signed up already.

@Fuegan17
Yeah, the missions weren't bad, but needed some adjustment. That was a bummer you lost in the hell pit after killing everyone else, but it was cool to see the underdog win it!

@Janthkin
Yeah, you were totally right on that one. Screw my math hammer, in practice poison was amazing.

Congrats on the tourney. Always good to see nids do well. Seems as if your nid list got better since the last time we played. Then again, that was only 1.5K.

That GK list was quite interesting, though not very coherent. I'm not surprised you beat them. Nids will own normal MEQ's in assault. But tomorrow, I will show you what a competitive GK is like.

Frankie's nurgle CSM seems to be really tough. I've played against Nurgle marines only a few times and each time was a tough fight. One of these days, I would like to go up against him again.

As for the BA list, they really are a mismatch. The only assaulty BA army that stands a chance against an assaulty nid build is either FNP/furiously charging assault terminators or pure death company with a bunch of death company dual-blood talon dreads. Otherwise, forget it.

Looking forwards to our upcoming battle. Will batrep it, if you don't mind.

Yeah, MEQ assault armies just don't work against Bugs and Daemons unless they are T.Hammer/SS termies.

Yeah, for sure bat rep the game, I think it would be very interesting data for people to go over. To uber shooty, tournament armies taking each other on! I am looking forward to it.

The hell pit was funny as hell, in true IG style, he backed off and let everyone else kill each other and shoot the remnants.

I would agree with the GK list, I looked at his dread and was like...why? he could have gotten a psyfleman for those points and the 2-man paladin unit made no sense at all, the acolytes just died and did nothing. my dice were crap the entire game against it but I still won by a large margin.

Nice Bat Rep's Reece; really well played too man, shame you didn't get 1st like I would believe you should've. Really well played though man, it seemed like you barely broke a sweat (except against the Daemons).

Good to see you're back Bat-repping!

Not a surprising result, your list looked pretty solid and had all the tools needed to win. And yeah poison on the stealers is great since oyu can re-roll to wound in most combats and that adds more chances to rend

Nice brief btrp.

I hear a lot of people moaning how the bugs didn't get the justice they deserved with their new codex, but you prove them wrong by tying first in a tournament.

Congrats and thanks for sharing.

Nice game I actualy started playing at Alamo much better store then Stoneridge though I haven't played since fourth edition and have to get my small amount of skill back..

You took second place. congrats.

SabrX wrote:I hear a lot of people moaning how the bugs didn't get the justice they deserved with their new codex, but you prove them wrong by tying first in a tournament.

Oh, there are a couple of problems with the Tyranid codex - over-loaded Elite slots (where almost all the useful AT lives), and disturbingly over-priced Carnifexes & Tyrants are a couple of the major issues. (The other really major issue is in another codex entirely - JotWW is just stupid against all the I1 support bugs.)

But it's a lot of fun, and there are quite a few different builds available.

quite supprised you killed those plaguemarines, altough i'm a bit supprised he played a GD, more oblits would have been painfull for your small and big guys

hidden deployment (both players deploy simultaneously while a blanket is held across the board so that neither player can see the other's deployment)

Verrry cool, must try that out sometime.
Gratz on the wins.

Ratius wrote:

hidden deployment (both players deploy simultaneously while a blanket is held across the board so that neither player can see the other's deployment)

Verrry cool, must try that out sometime.
Gratz on the wins.

That did seem neat...except they paired it with DoW, which involves very little deployment. A little strange, that.

Actually the blind deployment mission was pitched battle, I do admit that mission was rather funny.

If anyone wants to see the "hellpit" I have a few pics from the last game at the bottom of a blog post. Scroll down to the bottom..

http://armyundecided.blogspot.com/2011/05/alamo-games-workshop-tournament-1850.html

@Fuegan
Thanks for the correction, my bad. The last mission was DoW.

Thanks for the kind words, guys. It is good to be back and gaming again.

Bugs don't suck, I don't know why people say that. Hulksmash did well with them at Adepticon and Jay from Da Boyz made it to the second to last round in the Adepticon finals. They are just a different army these days. They can still kick butt, they just aren't the press go army they were in 4th ed.

True indeed. I still love me bugs. And honestly I'm 50/50 on dropping on my MEQ geared silliness right now and going back to them. Can't seem to find anything that entertains me right now that is as consistant as my Bugs. I also really need to paint my Raveners

Hulksmash wrote:True indeed. I still love me bugs. And honestly I'm 50/50 on dropping on my MEQ geared silliness right now and going back to them. Can't seem to find anything that entertains me right now that is as consistant as my Bugs. I also really need to paint my Raveners

I have 20 more Gargoyles, 10 ripper bases, and the Parasite to paint by the Slaughter in Space. Should be hilarious!

I have more fun with Tyranids than with the other armies I own. (Kan-wall comes close, but I don't actually own that, and I'm much less interested in the other Ork permutations available.)

Yeah, I keep finding myself playing bugs, too. I am thoroughly enjoying playing them at the moment.

Everytime I am playing my space wolves I'm wishing I was playing my bugs. They were my first 40k army and there is just something about the image they induce that makes them fun to play. They aren't as point and click as other armies, but have no problem pulling stuff that surprises even the most veteran player.

Grats on the second place! The missions seemed a bit weird though... All KP's and no objectives, might as well play 4th ed.

Ozymandias wrote:Grats on the second place! The missions seemed a bit weird though... All KP's and no objectives, might as well play 4th ed.

As someone who played a list with a ton of KPs I was a bit disheartened to see no objective missions.

spireland wrote:

Ozymandias wrote:Grats on the second place! The missions seemed a bit weird though... All KP's and no objectives, might as well play 4th ed.

As someone who played a list with a ton of KPs I was a bit disheartened to see no objective missions.

Local GW tournaments ran by GW employees tends to be unbalanced. The tie-breaker HQ game is another perfect example. It's rare to find a GW employee who has ultra-competitive tournament experience. I'm not sure who ran this tournament, but all KP's missions is brutal against armies that have limited alternative builds.

Glad to see you've got some time to play again, Reecius! Always enjoy your battle reports.