ended up playing against mass daemon engine Word Bearers. His list threw up some issues to do with a lack of high strength weapons, as I didn't really have enough in the list to deal with a Discolord, maulerfiend, forgefiend, a rhino and two venomcrawlers.

The mission was Rise of the Machine Spirit from the grand tournament mission pack and I chose bring it down, engage on all fronts and deploy scramblers as secondaries and he picked engage on all fronts, raise the banners and bring it down.

I realised by my turn one that bring it down was a bad move against his list, as I didn't have the best tools to deal with his daemon engines, and his masters of possessions were extremely good at buffing their invulnerable saves and providing them with rerolls. Something other than bring it down would have been much better.

He managed to get a turn one charge charge off with his warptimed maulerfiend and make an 11 inch charge into one of my falcons and pop it after other units had plinked a few wounds off it. The other falcon got reduced to one wound and effectively neutered it for the remainder of its life. My turn one was underwhelming, the disadvantage of getting charged turn one, failing to deny his psychic powers and generally poor rolling put me on the back foot. I made the mistake of charging his discolord with my shining spears, who I'd protected and quickened to cause a bit of chaos and doomed the discolord. I managed to get it down to three wounds, but a 3++ was hard to get past, even with shots from the CHE, laser lances and the extra attacks from Hunters of Ancient Relics. If I was smarter, I'd have gone for his other daemon engines as I would have more reliably killed at least one of those off.

In turn two, he knocked 10 wounds (I failed 5, 4+ armour saves) off my CHE with a forgefiend and cleaned it up with a squad of havocs. Needless to say, I didn't have board control and getting him shifted off objectives was tough going but when I got to my turn 2, I focused on forcing the objective game by dropping in the hawks and scorpions in his deployment zone, and the warp spiders in my own to start deploy scramblers and guarantee engage on all fronts.

I managed to start turning the game in turn 3 by dragging my opponent off objectives or contesting the ones I couldn't shift him off. By turns 4 and 5, I was scoring 15 points for the primaries while maxing engage on all fronts and giving him 0 points for the primaries.

The game ended with a win for me, scoring 77 points to his 65. It was fun, but had I picked some other secondary over bring it down, I would have likely scored more points. It was my fault in turn one for even giving him the opportunity to make a charge with any of his units on turn one, and that would have likely made the game a bigger win for me.

In terms of the units I ran, the war walkers with the AML/Starcannon combo were excellent, providing decent fire and eating his troops and an obliterator and knocking the last four wounds off a venomcrawler and knocking wounds off a rhino. For 75 points, the fire they took and the points they killed made them completely worth it by the end of the game. I actually really liked the Scorpions, Hawks and Warp Spiders. For their cost, they were essential in achieving scramblers, engage on all fronts, helping to shift marines off objectives and in general, being a nuisance for my opponent. The fire dragons were okay, two of them died when getting out of the falcon when it went down turn one, but they did help against the vehicles and plinked a few wounds off a few things before they died. I misplayed with the spears, I shouldn't have charged the discolord turn one, so they were an expensive loss.

I'll probably need to play some more games with the list to work out some of the kinks, but so far, it did what I want by getting an easy 25 secondary points in engage and scramblers.