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I'm the guy who took the pink Necrons to the Gladiator tournament. My pink armies have been to a lot of UK Grand Tournaments and now I'm in the US I've started taking them to tournaments here. Some of the players on these boards played my team-mates in the Cold Steel Mercenaries over the weekend. Unfortunately I didn't take any photos of the event but the standard of painting and modeling was generally really good.

I don't play many 2,000pt events and so decided to take an army with a few units I wouldn't normally take rather than build a killer list.

Nightbringer
Destroyer Lord with VoD
12 Warriors
10 Warriors
5 Destroyers
5 Destroyers
10 Scarabs with d/fields
2 Heavy Destroyers
2 Heavy Destroyers
2 Heavy Destroyers

Game 1 was against an Inquisition army with marine support. It was being run by a father/son team and in addition to a lot of marines they had Karamazov, 3 Daemonhosts, an Eversor and a large Inquisitor retinue geared up for close combat.

Despite the game being escalation I didn’t take much damage in the first turn and on turn 2 my units started dribbling on. This unfortunately meant that while good, my shooting was not as devastating as it could have been. Nightbringer sniped the Eversor though and in turn three piled into a marine squad who had forgotten he ignored cover when he moved. He finished the game wiping out the assault squad in combat.

Return fire from the marines dropped a bunch of the heavy destroyers but I was still confident of a win, as Nightbringer was where he needed to be and I still had a lot of mobile firepower. Unfortunately we only got to play 4 turns. My opponent was a really great guy who clearly enjoyed sharing the game with his son and it was just a shame we missed two whole turns, which was probably down the amount of time the dice rolling took. The net result was a win to me on the primary and a tie on secondary and tertiary.

Game 2 saw me face off against a Hive Tyrant, 5 Carnifexs, 3 Zoanthropes and 40 Genestealers. This was going to be a tough one to win as I couldn’t send my scoring units anywhere near the middle until I’d killed off the monsters and stealers and then hope I could do that with enough time to spare to get to the middle and grab some points. To make things even harder he got the first turn and charged in a broad rush across the board.

As hard as the mission was for me, my opponent didn’t seem to recognize how good a position he was in. I don’t complain or grumble throughout the game about opponents’ armies or special rules even in regular matches but my opponent apparently felt my force was so abusive as to merit complaints even in Gladiator. Nightbringer excelled himself and killed an entire stealer squad and 3 carnifexs (which started the complaints from turn 3 onwards) but the damage was done and I couldn’t claw back the points for being in the centre of the board. I settled instead for secondary and tertiary and left the stealers with 2 zoanthropes and a wounded Hive Tyrant at the end of the game. I actually ended up with more points at the end of the game as my opponent had not based any of his genestealers.

So after a less than stellar game I was hoping for something fun and interesting in game 3. Was I in for a surprise when I discovered I was due to play the same guy I played last year and this time he was using Enslavers backed up by Tyranid Monsters!

Cal took the time to explain how the rules for Enslavers worked and when he showed me the models for these things I saw that they were the perfect size to hide behind the wall of monsters that were sure to be running towards me. He also let me know that he had the Red Terror, but frankly after hearing how Enslavers worked I didn’t care about that.

The game went entirely the way I thought it would. The monsters took positions in a building in the centre of the board while I kept my distance with everything but Nightbringer and within 2 turns I’d killed everything that wasn’t an Enslaver or a monster and had Nightbringer fearlessly running forwards. In the meantime I’d had an enslaved Nightbringer kill some warriors, by heavy destroyers shoot each other after killing the Red Terror and my Lord kill the Destroyers he was with after the Vod’d behind the Tyranid lines to get line of sight to the Enslavers. I killed 1…

Part-way through the game Cal mentioned that if he took control of a model 3 times in a game he got to permanently enslave it and it counted as dead at the end of the game. Since one of the objectives was to kill the enemy HQ Nightbringer immediately started backing up…

Cal picked up the major win but I managed a tie on vps for the secondary (I actually scored 50 more than him) and a tie on the tertiary so I did end up with something at the end.

My final game was me play a 40Kwreckingcrew guy called Donovan, who I would meet again in the team event. He was fielding a three-Prism Eldar listed supported by Fire Dragons in a serpent, lots of bikes, the Avatar and Eldrad. Since we could choose one enemy model to start the game in reserve I chose Eldrad and he chose the Nightbringer.

Focusing on the Fire Prisms I gradually tore their guns off, immobilized and then killed them while wheeling around the board chasing the jetbikes. As soon as he started getting shaken results on his tanks Donovan started tank-shocking my units with his star engines. Normally I don’t worry about tank shock but some shocking results saw 4 of the heavy destroyers start to run and a block of 12 warriors leave the board. To make matters worse Eldrad caused a break test on my other unit of warriors and they all fled as well. By turn 4 I was 4 models from phasing, and almost none of it caused by casualties…

Luckily for me Donovan had nothing left that could permanently kill any more necrons and I killed the last of his models (Eldrad shot by fleeing heavy destroyer) in turn 6. For such a close game it was a shame the result was 32-0. Lots of laughs were had during the game and I was glad to finish the day against such a great opponent.

Nice report, Alex!

I snapped a couple of shots of your stuff while I was wandering the hall between and after games of WH Escalation on Friday, including an action shot during your fourth game.

Hey Alex, its Dave. We played last year in the gladiator and the RTT. I had the LatD and the Death Guard. Im sorrywe couldnt do our game 3, but family obligations prevented it.

Looks like you had fun. I will be there next year, and hopefully we can finish

I see you got to play the WC too. I anxiously await Donnovans batrep of your game. I'll probably stop by the LGS and get it first hand.

Its THAT Necron army!

Pretty sweet army and well fought battles. The enslaver battle sounded quite cool, though full of potential WTF?! moments

Thanks for the report, and to Manny for the pics. Like the look of the Eldar you faced off against, were they brass?

- Salvage

Hey, Dave. Nice to hear from you. Sorry we couldn't play our third game - next time for sure! Donovan's a top bloke and we had a great game. Best moment was probably when a shaken Fire Prism tank moved 36" and shocked 4 units (breaking two heavy units) before piling into a building to shock the last warrior squad. It crashed right in front of them

The WC guys were great on Saturday. Hopefully you guys will be up for a rematch some time.

@Boss - the Enslaver game had a WTF moment every turn

The Eldar were brass coloured and looked really cool on the snowy table we had.