Battleground Doubles, and Players Choice

Mark and I played three great games this weekend in a doubles tournament at the Battleground Games in Plainville. We went in with a plan, played well, and ended up winning the Players Choice award, which I believe is a combination of overall sexiness, coolness, and wicked awesomeness.

The tournament used the Adepticon missions, and army construction rules, with each team (or Coalition) comprising a pair of 1250 armies. I used a Deathwing list made up of Belial, an upgraded terminator squad with an apothecary, three standard terminator squads, and a pair of melta/typhoon landspeeders. Belial and the terminators all had the standard thunderhammer/storm shield load out, and there was a cyclone missile in each squad. Mark ran Grey Knights; a librarian, a 10-man terminator squad, a five man terminator squad, a five man strike squad, and a pair of psy-bolt rifleman dreads (I don't know all the details of his list of the top of my head, maybe he can fill them in later).

The plan was simple: line up the Deathwing, give the Grey Knights cover, march forward, and kill everything in sight. Speeders and dreads provide cover.  In general it worked.

Game one vs. Necrons and Space Wolves was going our way, the primary objective was having as many victory points within six inches of the table center. Near the end game however, things took a dramatic turn when Mark's libby and 10-man squad, still at nearly full strength, lost an assault against a C'tan shard, and due to a bad leadership check, and fell back. They could not regroup the next turn because of a single Thunderwolf Cav locked in combat with a strike squad near the table edge, and as a result we lost.

There's not much we could have done to prevent such an outcome, other than roll better. Deploying the big squad as two five-man combat squads may have helped, but it also makes each one more subject to falling back from shooting losses.

Game two was thematically one of the best I've played: Deathwing and Grey Knights Vs. Fallen Dark Angels and Chaos Marines. It really couldn't have been more perfect. The game itself did not go well for our opponents though; the Dark Angels were Samael (in a speeder) led Ravenwing, and the Chaos Marines were mostly Khorne Berzerkers in rhinos with a lash wielding Demon Prince, and a few obliterators. With all of the missiles and strength 8 shooting we had, the bikes fell quickly, followed shortly by the demon prince. We shot up all the vehicles we could see, and the Berzerkers didn't last long out of assault range. Our opponents had some bad dice, and our lists were an unfortunate foil for theirs, but they were good sports and it was still a fun game (more so for us than them).

The final game was against Necrons and Eldar in a mission focused on eliminating one army in the enemy's Coalition--they chose Deathwing, we chose Eldar. It used spearhead deployment, and there was an objective in the center of each unused table quarter. Their Coalition was essentially a "difficult and dangerous terrain" build, with Nightspinners, Imhotek, and some Necron terrain modifying shenanigans. Things looked grim in the beginning, but once we were able to batter our way through, and around, the Necron horde, we were able to start killing the cowardly eldar, hiding near the shadowed fringe of the table. By then end of turn five, the last turn of the game, the Eldar were mostly in retreat, a number of Necron warriors were left since they had been largely ignored, but they were unable to claim the objective near our deployment area due to a last turn speeder steal. We ended up tying on primary, secondary, and tertiary objectives, and loosing (I think) on a tie breaker. It was about as close as they come.

Overall we probably finished in the upper part of the middle of the crowd, which is acceptable considering the fact that we did not read the missions ahead of time, or play a single practice game. Winning the Players Choice was a welcome surprise at the end of the day, earning us a total of $160 in store credit, of which my portion quickly disappeared on some finecast fire dragons, and Incubi. Mark wisely bought some new dice (for use on leadership/morale tests), and I'm going to advise him to throw out his old ones before their garbage luck can rub off on the new.

All in all, a great time. I look forward to the next event.