So what have we learned about Guard?

Weeeeeeelllllll.....

Let's look at something fun first - PERMITTED ABHUMANS!

 

Because I'd already painted 40-some GW Cadians, I figured I'd find something else to be my Veterans in my Guard army. Cue Victoria Miniatures 'Broolian Beastguard' or, in my case, Imperial Beastmen - the PERMITTED ABHUMANS! I can't say I really enjoyed the assembly all that much although some of that is certainly my fault, but I really enjoyed painting them. The details are crisp, the castings were lovely and the kit design was easy to drop in the shotguns and meltaguns. And they look great!

So the Guard army is looking very close to complete. I have a third Sentinel to paint and a couple of Leman Russ for a competition later in the year but otherwise, I think I might be done with my reinforced platoon of Guardsmen. Which is good, because as GW are reworking Space Marines for 40K at the mo, I'll be putting some more time and work into my Deathwatch.

Narrative! 
This went better than I thought it would TBH. Guardsmen are surprisingly effective, providing you can keep them alive. The Guard orders are remarkably flexible (although I am going to have to get some more officers to make it really sing) and lasguns aren't altogether terrible when you can use First Rank Fire, Second Rank Fire.

Rather than go into a blow by blow of the two games I'll summarise the adventures of Inquisitor Gnaeus Aldo. The first game was against blogger Pel's Emperors Children. It was an absolute bloodbath (1-0 to Pel in the end) with two real highlights - Guard heavy weapons popping the Emperor's Children Helbrute was fun and the deep striking Obliterators taking my Inquisitor out before tying up a pair of Guard squads for most of the game.

Forward Manipulus Aldo! 

Guardsmen! Advance! 

OBLITERATORS! OBLITERATE! 

The end of Game 1

Another highlight from round one for blogger Pooch:

Poxwalkers!!

Turns out that two Sentinels can't kick that many Poxwalkers to death...

Game two was a dash across the board against new player Ben's Orks. The new Ork codex is cool. It's really, really cool. It's hilariously designed to be fluffy and also effective. I'd almost be tempted if I could face a painting project of that magnitude!

The armoured wedge of Guardsmen made it a long way across the board (it was such a tight game I completely forgot to take photos. But in the end, all the Guardsmen were killed getting the officer cadre off the table. Unfortunately Mortis and Ordiantus, piloting the Valkyrie, buzzed around the table strafing Orks and didn't leave the table in time to give victory to Manipulus Aldo. But being able to have two units of Guardsmen rapid fire lasguns into an Ork boyz unit at short range is amazing. And then they get wrecked by Nobz.

It was a lot of fun. For the next narrative day, I'm hoping to be able to put together a fun list still based on Manipulus Aldo, but with a Deathwatch Kill Team included this time as well. It might even be the Fortis Kill Team...

Next Time
I'm going to take a break from the sci-fi posts for a while and get to work on a project to rebase my Teutonic Order for Kings of War. I will be painting a few new models for that, so expect to see those in the future. I've also picked up the last 5 M60s for my Marines in TY and I'm quite keen to nail those down too.