Hey all,
So I am afraid that rather than a full report, this is a brief summary, followed by a whole load of pictures. I won’t be doing a full narration for this, simply because I don’t have the notes or photographs to do that justice, but hopefully the pictures will please.
Me and three friends decided to do a doubles game, with 4000pts per player, Tomb Kings and Skaven versus Elves. This resulted in around 800 models hitting the table, including a new Verminlord Deceiver, Thanquol, Malekith the Eternity King, Teclis, Alarielle, no fewer than four Tomb King monsters, and enough Skaven Slaves to start a colony with. We agreed on a few house rules –
4d6 magic dice, hidden deployment (using a pair of bedsheets, no less) and each army only using its own general and
BSB bubbles. We didn’t use End Times magic, but we might for the next one, which we are thinking of holding next month.
For deployment, myself and my Skaven ally decided to keep our armies mostly separate, with an Undead Legion march bubble emanating from the Tomb King in the Halberdguardstar, and Thanquol keeping the Skaven Slaves formation in good order. Our allies had a much more mixed formation.
Upon removing the bedsheets, we discovered that the hidden deployment had ensured that the Skaven Slaves formation was ranked up against the hardest units in the Elven armies, including Malekith and a White Lion unit full of wizards, while my Tomb Kings were arrayed against a bunch of Wood Elf archers and cavalry units. We opted for a general advance, aiming to shut down the enemy shooting and magic by punching them repeatedly until dead.
The buildings inevitably caused some traffic jams, with the Snakes in particular being having to swift reform to get past the shed. Thanquol was badly wounded by Elven magic, while a unit of Dryads got turned to Skaven Slaves, and the Casket bounced through about two feet of units, doing mild damage to multiple units.
When combat was joined on our left flank, the Skaven units rapidly started crumbling. One unit of Slaves did manage to hold Malekith up for several turns, however. Good lads. The Dragon Princes managed to escape from the Tomb Guard by charging through a Warsphinx and into the Hellpit. The rest of my army continued to advance on the Elven shooting units ranged against them, taking no real damage in the process. I repeatedly cast bubbled Protection, giving whole swathes of my army a 5+ ward, and healing most of the limited damage that I did take.
I continued to smash forwards, though I struggled to get into combat with anything worth fighting. The Skeleton Horse Archers managed a long charge on the Bolt Thrower, and I used bubbled Smiting and my archer units to take down surprisingly large numbers of the Wild Riders before they could reach combat. Thanks to the Dragon Princes heading into the Hellpit, the enemy centre totally collapsed and my constructs and Tomb Guard eliminated all of the tiny Wood Elf units in short order, before advancing into the gap. Sadly this would be too late, as we ran out of time before I could swing over to the left flank, where a bunch of Elven infantry units had steamrollered the Skaven Slaves, following the death of Thanquol, leaving things looking bleak.
The game ended with a solid win for the Elves, as they took a 2000pt lead over us. I only lost 700pts, mostly in Sphinges who died to the Dragon Princes and the Casket, while my Skaven allies lost a mighty 3500 points, thanks partly to a Skaven Slaves block exploding and killing the Verminlord. The Elves lost something like 2000pts between them, of which I took about half in the process of sweeping my way through the little things on the right flank.
Thanquol, though cool, turned out to be a fairly bad general for this game, as he simply died too quickly. Malekith didn’t make a huge difference to the game, only managing to kill a handful of Skaven Slaves, but he was pretty intimidating regardless. The Undead Legion rules were very beneficial – though I didn’t heal the constructs very much, I did a whole load of marching, and was able to close the gap in time to at least kill
some stuff.
In terms of what went wrong, ultimately we simply had the wrong units in the wrong places, as we couldn’t get my Tomb Guard or Sphinges into the Elven infantry blocks that held all of the enemy casting power and points. I maybe sucked up too many power dice by casting bubbled spells on my army, but we didn’t realise how dangerous the Skaven situation was on the left flank and thus didn’t prioritise that area for magic. Meanwhile the powerful Skaven units – Plague Monks, Hellpits – either got eliminated quickly or were in the wrong part of the battlefield to help out the Slaves formation. Hidden deployment is totally worth it though, not only because it massively speeds up the deployment time, but because you do end up with some really interesting situations to try and fix via movement or magic.
Thanks for reading!
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