40k Kill Team

The 2014 CAGE Finals are next weekend, Feb 8th-9th, at Crimson Castle. We'll be kicking things off on Friday evening at 6:00-9:00pm with Warhammer 40k Kill Team. 20 players tops. Everyone welcome, finalists or otherwise. We'll be using the official GW Kill Team rules for list creation and missions.* No tournament structure in place, just pick-up games of kill team, and the first chance for folks to socialize over dice that weekend.

*You don't need a copy of the official Kill Team rules to play, but you need to have access to them for army list creation.  Also, don't forgot about the Single Model painting competition. Local entries are due at the Castle by Monday, and voting will take place all next week. The top three favorites will represent the Castle at the Finals.

~Wraithdrad~

CAGE Qualifier Round 3

Round three is against Tyranids. This is an army I always love playing, because Dark Eldar have so many answers. This will also be my first game against their new book so I'm excited to see what new tricks they have up their sleeve. He has 3 single zoanthroapes, 2 carnifex, a winged wive tyrant, tyranid prime, tyrant guard, some warriors, some shrikes, an exocrine, 2 units of termagaunts and, and one unit of hormogaunts. This match made me love the 700 points of HQ I'm bringing even more. He wins the roll to set up first, I try to seize once and fail, re-roll with Coteaz and steal it with a 5+ thanks to Vect. Eldrad's redeploy is decidedly less than useful when you set up second though.

Thanks to seizing his bugs are all waiting toes on the line for my first turn. The hellions sneak up into the large piece of area terrain and Eldrad casts invisibility and fortune which, with the exceptions of heldrakes and wave serpents, is the best power set up I could ask for. 

 Despite having started the game with most of my vehicles behind the cover, they manage to jump out and take their shots. I take down the flying hive tyrant and the carnifex over on the right. I'm a little worried about the sheer number of bugs he has on the table, but I'm banking on the hellions to be able to play clean up when it comes down to it. They take some shots at some stealers the first turn and kill a handful of them, leaving the unit just large enough to still be a threat.

Pretty quickly we close the distance between us. Turn two sees me kill the rest of the stealers but leave the brood lord alive. My hellions have just stepped out of cover to get ready to mobilize. He assaults in with the brood lord and hormogaunts. Vect steps up and kills the Initiative 7 brood lord before he can swing and then we manage to kill enough hormogaunts that they can't pile in and combat ends. 

I decide that fortune favors the bold and the hellions are going to have to leave their nice little patch of terrain.

 He moves his bugs up closer on turn two, and assaults into the hellions with the hormogaunts again. Thanks to some impassable terrain in the middle neither side kills very many models. The hellions then hit and run out of combat and get ready for the moment they've been waiting all day for.

 The hellions assault all three squads of gaunts to hold them up and start a war of attrition I'm pretty sure I can win. His termagaunts on either side kept creeping closer to points and my rather fragile vehicles, so I decide to go ahead and just tie up his whole front line with my deathstar squad.

 The results of which is that the center squad ceases to exist and the two outside squads barely make it back into base with their pile in.

Over the last two turns the hellions clean up the gaunts, baron manages to beat down the shrikes and Vect goes on a killing spree and kills his tyrant guard, tyranid prime and his warriors all by himself. The game ends on the bottom of 5 with the board being clear of all the bugs, but I'm sure they'll be back for more before too long.

CAGE Qualifier Round 2

This time I'm up against some orks. The two wonderfully orkified trucks are battlewagons. His list had a warboss, big mek, some nobs, some boys, some lootas, and some deff kopters. We get the wonky vanguard deployment. 

I take turn one and proceed to jump the hellion blob up into the cover in the center and behind the big red hill. I get invisibility, forewarning, and prescience off on them. I really like how the fast hellions end up giving my ships some breathing room against more assault based and faster armies. 

His turn sees the deff kopters leaping over my lines and dropping their bombs. At first I thought this was a pretty terrible idea, but then I realized that forces me to deal with them. If he had just tried to sneak them up they'd probably get assault or shot up, but now if I want the hellions to deal with the kopters they'll have to forgo advancing up the board or dealing with his boys. 

Turn two the rest of the hellion unit hugs the cover and takes some pot shots at one of the big boy blobs. I realize there's no way to prevent his 60 boys and 10 or so nobs from all assaulting into the hellions but I decide I'd rather be able to overwatch than get locked in now. 

So yet again I forget to take any pictures of the later half of the game. His units all assault into the hellions, who proceed to kill a few and hit and run out of combat. On my turn the hellions re-assault the nobs and Vect kills off the warboss. We basically just sit and grind on each other for the next few turns, and only 3 hellions escape the prolonged combat. One unit of ork boys retreats to claim his emporer's will and the super solo company (Vect, Eldrad, and Baron) assault them to attempt to pull them off the point. A nob sneaks up on my characters and puts a powerklaw wound on them. Anyone who takes it is going to die, so I do the only thing a dark eldar player can do and let Eldrad take it, and fail. The orks flee, and that leaves the board clear of them... for now.

Competition and Community

A pretty smart man (Samuel Johnson) once defined competition as 'the action of endeavoring to gain what another endeavors to gain at the same time.' When players enter a Warhammer 40k tournament, they're all trying to win, to gain 1st place, or perhaps 2nd or 3rd. This is how tournaments usually dole out prize support: Best Overall, Best General, Best Appearance, Best in Faction. There are titles and prizes for each 'Best' that players compete to get.

What I don't get is why anyone would want to attend a tournament if they don't think they'll be the 'Best' in one of those categories.  A tournament is a competition, right? The point of a competition is to win, plain and simple. If you don't think you'll win, you're only there to be beaten, to pay an entry fee which goes to fill the winner's pockets. Sounds like a ton of fun. A small handful of players can actually expect to wrangle for the top spots in each 'Best' category. The rest of us are like Sisyphus, pushing the heavy rock of hope up a hill, only to have it come rolling back down on top of us.

All of the above is a pretty silly way to define a 40k tournament.

A good 40k event is one where everyone can have fun, from the guy who wins Best General and has a 5-0 record, to the guy who comes in last place and gets tabled in every one of his games. Yes, it's a great thing that we reward the 'Best' players in different categories: generalship, painting, sportsmanship, etc. We reward the 'Best' so we can give everyone ideals to strive for in the hobby. But if the only thing that makes a tournament enjoyable is the competition, the chance to be that 'Best' in whatever, a lot of people are going to walk away from an event quite unhappy. Every event has far more losers than winners.

You might object that I'm defining 'competition' too narrowly.  After all, can't competition be about having close, hard-fought games of 40k, where the winner and loser are often determined by a single die roll or risky tactical decision on the last turn? Why does it matter who wins or loses, as long as each player is striving to do their own best at the hobby and having a blast doing it? That's healthy competition, right?

Sure, we use the word competition to describe that kind of atmosphere: close-knit, friendly gamers that challenge each other to do better. But I think we're using the wrong word when we call that competition. A competition is a struggle to determine who is stronger, smarter, better. Personally, I don't care so much about finding out who the 'Best' is: I'm interested in the struggle itself, the drive to improve myself in tactics, list-building, and painting, and the ways I can encourage others to do the same. That's not competition, that's community! Being the best doesn't matter, becoming better does.

From my perspective, that's what CAGE is all about: building community. Sure, there are prizes to be won by performing the 'Best' in different categories, but that's not the point of holding an Alabama 40k tournament, it's just a side effect. The point is to have fun, to become better as a community at the game of 40k, and to celebrate the hobby we've all invested so much time, money, and imagination in.

Only one person can win a competition, but the entire community can enjoy the game.

~Wraithdrad~

CAGE Qualifier Round 1

So here's the list I took to the CAGE Qualifier:
Asdrubael Vect
Baron Sarthonyx
Eldrad
Coteaz

3 wracks and a venom
5 warriors, blaster, venom
5 warriors, blaster, venom
5 warriors, blaster, venom
20 hellions with helliarch
3 guardian jetbikes

ravager
ravager
ravager

aegis

Round 1 I faced off against:
Imhotekh and reroll cryptec
Daemon Prince
Be'Lakor

Death marks
Night scythe with 5 warriors
Night scythe with 5 warriors
10 cultists
10 cultists

heldrake
heldrake

Bastion

I set up fairly aggressively after winning the roll off to deploy first. I was fairly certain Coteaz would let me keep the first turn but with Imohtekh the other player managed to roll a 5 and then a 6 and seize the first turn from me.

 Despite taking the first turn, he only had a bastion with Imhotekh, the two princes and some cultists on the board. Lightning did very little on the first turn, or really in any turn all game long. Belakor flew up turn 1 and used puppet master to turn one of the ravagers against it's brethren and destroy it right off the bat. The explosion took a single hellion down with it.

 Here's a pictures of his lucky dice he used to seize. Thing number one I learned this game: seizing on a 4+ makes Coteaz's ability to force re-rolls slightly less useful (and khador dice roll well).

 So turn one for me I jump the hellions into a larger piece of cover and set up to take shots across the board. Eldrad managed to only roll fortune and some other slightly less useful things this game so he puts it on the hellions and I cringe knowing that they're going to get eaten by hell-turkey's when they come on. I do manage to kill Be'Lakor and grab slay the warlord early, as well as shoot one squad of cultists off the board.

 Speaking of rolling well, when he brings the heldrakes on he also manages to get his one lightning strike of the game thanks to Imohtekh. He rolls four penetrating hits. on a venom and I make all four 5++ saves. I also learn that Coteaz not having nightfighting is a huge disadvantage to leaving him on the quad gun. I played a test game against this list and managed to beat it handily but as this game shows, it's almost entirely because of the 4++ power from divination.

 The Heldrakes and night scythes cut across the battle field and do surprisingly little (other than kill a majority of the hellions AND watch baron die to a second lightning bolt despite having a 2++ with a reroll). The hellions clean up the other cultist squad, the bastion falls and my jetbikes come on and try to hide as best they can.

I manage to eventually put down the other Daemon prince and in the last few turns the game went haywire and I forgot to keep taking pictures. Turn 5 I had the relic, crusade, and was contesting emperor's will. He eventually pops all the venoms open and manages to kill off all my troops. He lands some warriors on my emporer's will and all I have left by the bottom of 7 is vect guarding the relic and his board edge and eldrad trying to fight off two squads of warriors. I get warlord and linebreaker he gets first blood, line breaker, purge the alien and emporer's will. That's 2 points for me and 8 for him.

CAGE Qualifier 2014

First of all, welcome to the Crimson Blades blog. This is a blog dedicated to following the happenings of a group of wargamers out of Tuscaloosa Alabama. This first post will be covering the CAGE qualifier round in 2014. We had nine players show up and here are a few pictures of the armies that they brought out to play.

The next three blog posts will be batreps of individual games. Tune in for more updates regularly and feel free to check out the CAGE match website for more details about the tournament itself.