40k: Reboot Dos

Hot on the heels of last week's game (prior post) is another 40k night. We were shooting for a four player night, but for reasons I won't go into length about, one of our players did not show up. His name is Chris. Chris is the player who didn't show up. Anyway, we had a blast, mostly because we felt more comfortable with the rules and played with points values and much bigger forces. Because we had a player not show up, remember his name is Chris, we had to rethink how we were going to play the game. We opted for a 1000 point battle, Andy and his Necrons versus an alliance between 500 points of my Tau and 500 points of Ray's Imperial Guard Cadians. The points value was still not enough for me to sink my teeth into some meaty Crisis Battlesuit teams, Vespids, a tricked out commander, etc. For Ray, it was a hard task to finagle two troop choices and an HQ choice under the points limit, but he shoehorned it all in. We had a go at it, and it did not disappoint one bit. I need to come up with a more concise battle report in the future, but in the meantime I'll just ramble on. Here we go:


We put together a 6"x4" table with a fair amount of terrain. If it looked organic, it was soft cover, if it looked hard, it was. We had some marsh land, a few ruined buildings, and a smattering of leftover industrial equipment.


Like I said, five hundred points doesn't give you a lot of Tau options, especially after you get your two troops choices out of the way. I really wanted to take at least a single team XV8 Crisis suits, here in the 'Fireknife' configuration, this left me with a full squad of Fire Warriors and a bare-boned, absolute minimum squad of Kroot. A low-leveled Commander led the team.


Andy's Necron army, unceremoniously arrayed on top of his codex. There's the requisite choices of Necron Warriors along with some Destroyers, a gaggle of Scarabs, some vicious Wraiths, and some of the flesh-wearing infiltrator guys (whose name I forget). They're all led by the Undead Robot Commander guy.


Ray took pride in setting up his force for the opening shot, and well he should. His Cadians are drop dead gorgeous to look at and have some serious tabletop presence. His mere 500 points had him fielding no less than fifty troopers. A single troop choice numbered three ten-man squads, accompanying heavy weapon teams for each squad, and a five-man command squad. His other troop choice was a ten-man armored fist squad mounted in an Imperial Chimera. A five-man command squad leads the force as his HQ choice.


Our mission goal was to secure various objective markers around the field. I'm looking forward to making up some game-specific markers in the future, but for now we settled with stands of giant mushrooms.


The allied Tau and Cadian deployment line stretched across the entire length of the six foot table. I opted to have my Crisis team deep strike from orbit. I don't think they really drop from orbit, I"m pretty sure they drop out of the back of Manta Transports, but it sounds cool.


Necrons Destroyers eerily glide across the battlefield.


Kroot infiltrators eagerly rush the first objective marker...


...and were quickly pounced upon by awaiting Wraiths, immaterial until the last, deadly moment. The Kroot are no strangers to melee, they inflicted a couple of wounds as well, but their fate was sealed the moment the Wraiths emerged and engaged them.


The Armored Fist squad piles out of their Chimera and open fire on the distant Necron warriors. The Chimera's turret multi-laser was knocked out rather quickly, leaving only the Heavy Bolter team to add punch to the massed firepower.


Gauss Flayer and Pulse Rifle energy ionized the air as these two squads hammered away at each other turn after turn. The Necrons' ability to self-repair each turn, and possibly get back up after suffering a crippling hit, made these types of engagements tiresome at best, heh.


Staff Sergeant Johnson valiantly holds the line, err, mushroom against innumerable odds. Shouting Imperial Chants, fist raised in defiance, he exemplifies the Imperial Decree.


The Flayed Ones (ha, I remembered their name!) infiltrated towards the objective in the middle of the table, and held it all game, almost too effectively; no one even bothered to contest their objective stranglehold. Below their position more Necrons advance under the watchful gaze of their Undead Robot Commander Guy, and no, I haven't remembered his name, haha.


The allied Tau/Cadian forces lost, having failed to secure a single objective marker. The Necron forces, having tread Staff Sergeant Johnson under their steel heels, secured one objective mushroom. Above, had the Cadians been a little swifter, or had we had one more turn, we could've had a tie game on our hands. The Crisis team, being an elite choice, is not a scoring units, but they could've held up the Wraiths long enough for the human grunts to secure the influential fungus.

It was a great game, very fun, and like I said last post, it gets players around the table. The war torn future looks promising. Rock on.