10e Combat Patrols? FUN!

So I tried my first two games of Warhammer 40K 10th Edition at yesterday's club. 

 

Our first combat patrol was Grey Knights versus Heresy-era Alpha Legion. In my first turn, the Grey Knight Terminators and their Librarian commander teleported across the board after losing one of their number to a savage lascannon shot in the first shooting step!

 

My Strike Squad eventually charged up the left flank and destroyed Scottty's Havocs and the Terminators waded into the Tactical Squad and slowing cut them to pieces for the loss of a second Terminator. And then Scotty's Contemptor (Helbrute!) turned around and came back from heading for my side of the board and committed absolute murder. Those powerfist hits wrecked my Terminators. In the end, the last three Strike Squad powered into Scotty's commander sending him to his doom before they too were ripped to bits by the Contemptor.  

We re-racked and had a second game, where I took Scotty's Adeptus Custodes (hereafter referred to as Custards) against his stunningly lovely Heresy-styled Black Templars. I've never played with or against Custards before and by the gods it was brutal.

 While Scotty's big squad of Acolytes and Neophytes blitzed my 10 Sisters of Silence out of existence, the squad of Custards and the Shield-Captain shredded a Primaris Repulsor transport, the 5 Assault Intercessors housed within and then crossed the field scoring VPs the whole way and finished off Scotty's entire force for the loss of one Custard and some damage on the Vexilliarius. It was brutal.

Thoughts?

 Mostly pretty happy. The stripped back rules for 10e more generally are reduced to their simplest in Combat Patrol. Given my experience with 8e, the leap for CP wasn't that hard - and the very cleanly designed unit cards were really good to make that easy.  I asked the occasional question to sort out the order of operations and learned some useful things about how wound allocation works and that sort of thing. A quick QRS of the keywords was a thing I definitely should have made for myself.

I definitely figured there's some nuance I have currently missed (like understanding the trade-off of attaching your characters to things) and I'm genuinely curious about the balance in some of these boxes I will be definitely running out the Guard at some stage over the Christmas break to give them a tryout.

Also...  

I also built a cool model (as a reward for assembling flatpack furniture) which is part of my Christmas break Ghosties Completion Programme (TM). The Scriptor Mortis:

will be a proxy for a Nightstalker Mindscreech. In the Nighthaunts army, this is the one serious spellcaster and so this particular model really just slots in beautifully. I'll also be assembling and painting some Chainrasps to proxy in as either Scarecrows or Bloodworms depending on my mood. 

Next Time

I'm grinding Renaissance Spanish cavalry as I'm still painter blocked on the Landsknechts and the two remaining Tercios.

Finally wading into 10e 40K

 Yep. I've got a decent collection of the various types of Imperium models in my collection and I enjoyed playing 40K in 8e. I didn't really get into 9e as it really just felt like a rehash of the same rules bloat as 8e so it's been sitting, taking up space, for a couple of years. Blogger Pel played a couple of Combat Patrol games recently and that sounded like it might be right up my street so figured I'd look at my collections and work out what I could reasonably do....

 Good news, I have most of the bits of three combat patrols. Bad news, I don't have all the bits for any of them. The easiest route was Grey Knights - Blogger Scotty hooked me up with a couple of spare Terminators and access to his bits box and boom, army done. So here we go:

First off, Librarian Aurellios: 

This is, amazingly, a GW Finecast and it's surprisingly good. I painted it up donkeys ago - I had this idea of fielding a Supreme Command detachment in 8e of Grey Knights in a Guard army just for the lolz.

 The main beef of the army is a Brotherhood Terminator Squad:

One of the things that appeals about Combat Patrols is that the weapon loadout of the troops simply doesn't matter which means my love of Warding Staves as a sweet looking bit of kit is simply fine. This squad can, if you want, be swapped for a Nemesis Dreadnight which is both super cool and a really derpy model. I've been looking at some conversion ideas to make it look less like a baby carrier online...

Finally, half a Strike Squad makes up the rest of the army:

 

The heavy weapon is wrong but I'm not changing that. It seems like a bunch of work for no real benefit. This is another one of those mometns where the weapon loadout not mattering makes me happy. 

I'm hopeful that this is fun and somewhat balanced. It would justify picking up two models to finish the Imperial Guard one and three models to finish the Deathwatch one. I'd be well pleased if it could be managed and might be a light enough introduction to 10e for me to get into it.

Next Time

A report on how it went hopefully and some thoughts on 10e. Plus I'm trying to focus on getting my 15mm Renaissance Spanish moving again which is proving harder than I thought.  

That's not how you rob a train...

It was club day and we decided that another game of Dead by Lead was required. This time we thought we'd try out robbing a train! Blogger Scotty's Amish Gangsters (yep....) defended the train while Blogger Tank's Apache AND my three-man Western Tribute Band both tried to rob the train!

In the style of the train robbery in Legends of the Old West we gave ourselves horses to make running down the train a little easier. Tank's Apache warriors doubled up on their horses and the two gangs went after the train from both sides!

Both gangs arrived at the train but the Apache made the first move, leaping into the passenger car while the Tribute Band tried to knock out the Amish mercenary, Alice, in the train cab, but she was well protected in the iron cab.

The Tribute Band rode up alongside the train and Tuco fired off all his six gun at Alice, doing a great job of shooting her in the legs! Meanwhile, two Apache warriors had boarded the train. The first wore a shotgun but the second landed on board only to have the Man with No Name take a perfect shot and knock him dead.

Tuco went down immediately to the second barrel of the shotgun and as more Apache boarded the train, the Amish gang leader Ma Baker waded into the fray wielding her cane with fury seeing off a couple of Apache soldiers. The Man with No Name's hat and poncho were riddled with bullet holes from the Amish gangster on the coal car (he was VERY lucky!) but his luck wasn't much chop shooting back.

In the end, Alice was still alive in the engine, Angel Eyes was on the roof of the caboose as the train left the board and the passenger carriage was absolutely awash with blood with dead gangsters and Apache and the couple still standing tripping over the corpses of their comrades. In the end neither the Tribute Band or the Apache managed to loot the train but the Amish didn't defend it so well either. 

It was another hilarious game of Dead by Lead which we all enjoyed. And thanks to Tank, we rocked out the epic train. It was awesome.

Next Time

I've been doing a bit of work to finish up a Combat Patrol of Grey Knights (thanks to Blogger Scotty) so I can finally give 10e 40K a go...

Dead by Lead- Jailbreak!

Following on from a very enjoyable game with McZ, a few of the other Regimenters were keen to try out Dead by Lead too.

So, over the weekend we tried out Scenario 2: Trials and Tribulations. There were three of us, so we changed the scenario up to have one crew coming from one side, the other from the other size, and the defenders in the middle!

Conveniently the 4ground Sherriff's Office has two jail cells, perfect for this game!

A view of the table before the crews were placed and the game began!

On to the game....

"Look Sherriff, I already told your deputy all I know. I was just minding my own business yesterday, when this whole thing went down.

Now now, no need to pull your Iron. I'll tell it you, just.... just keep that in that there holster...

Whisper Creek was quiet, nobody was renting a room at Rogan's, even the saloon was empty. There was a train coming tomorrow, but nobody wanted to be out in town after yesterday.

A couple of the locals had come to blows over who's brand was on a particular set of cattle, which resulted in some words being thrown, and then some bottles, and then a couple of bullets. Now, all of that was normal fare in Whisper Creek, 'cept there turned out to be a troop of Cavalry who were in town, and they decided to make a whole thing out of it.

And so it was, that the two leaders ended up in the cells, waiting for the train to come with the new Sherriff, as well as the car to take the cattle away to Bloodstone to sell.

4ground make SUCH GOOD TERRAIN

Now, the Cavalry didn't reckon on the trouble they had gotten themselves into. Their Sergeant was there, taunting the folks in the cell, unawares that around the town, a whole bunch of trouble was getting all set up ready to start.

Trouble.

When one of the Cav, Jebediah his name was came out of the General Store (after taking more than a few things off the store owner's hands), he was quickly met by a hail of bullets from one of the locals, heading to free their boss. He ducked quickly behind a mule, which saved him, but the mule didn't have the same luck....

RIP Francis the mule

Now, that particular local hadn't reckoned on Butch coming out of the Sheriff's office, with both barrels of the shotgun primed and ready to rock. With an almighty bang, that local was a goner.

Shotgun at close range.

Now, this whole thing had kicked off right royally by this point. From the other side of town, the other group of locals (Ma's Boys) were moving up to the Sherriff's office, intent on getting Ma out.

From the top story, Butch emerged, holding his Winchester Repeater. He took aim at a local hidin' in an unfinished building. He stood up there, paused, and a crack rang out, followed by a hard thump as the feller fell from his hiding spot.

Butch coming out of the Sherriff's office

Butch might be regarded as a pretty good shot, but he was never regarded as a smart man. So while he was there, aiming carefully down the road, making that great shot, what he wasn't doing was looking around him, and seeing the person standing right at the bottom of the stairs, pistol raised in his direction.

The six shooter rang out, six bullets fired faster than a fly beats it's wings.

And that was the end of Butch.

Splat.

While all of this was going on, at the same time the locals had gotten their way into the Sherriff's Office, where one hell of a scuffle was occurin'. The Sergeant was hard pressed, trying to fight off one of the locals, the two tuslin' over a Bowie knife.

Brawl!

Jebediah, hearing that his boss was in trouble came runnin', only to end up on the wrong end of a tomahawk...

More Brawl!

Fightin' in the Office was bloody and brutal. More and more of the locals piled in, first fighting the Cavalry, and then fightin' each other. The Sergeant was overwhelmed, and during all of that, both Ma and the Chief were able to get free.

I don't know whether anyone got out of it, because pretty soon all that was left in that office was a whole bunch of dead and wounded folks, and not a whole lot of anything else.

A ridiculous amount of Brawl

And that's all I know Sherriff, honest. Now can I go...?"

Another brilliant game of Dead by Lead, it remains a ridiculously cinematic and enjoyable game. The rules play quickly and simply, with plenty of opportunities for cinematic elements, and great moments where things did, or didn't work out!

We will for sure be playing more....

Pooch

 

Telegraphing my super secret tech again....

So it's that time of year again, when our  club thinks about it's annual Flames of War end-of-year event in which we remember the loss of a close friend and clubmate a few years ago. Every year the organisers come up with something mad and this year blogger Pelarel decided it was going to be: 

• 60-point Infantry companies
• Only 1 top armour 1 unit and no top armour 2
• Only 1 support platoon

I've never really looked at the Italian Motorciclisti Company before. Now I have and I love it so I'll be running it for Remember December. 

The List 

Core 

Motociclisti HQ - 2 Rifle Teams on motorcycles

Motociclisti Platoon - 5x Rifle/MG Teams on motorcycles

Motociclisti Platoon - 5x Rifle/MG Teams on motorcycles

Breda MG Platoon - 3x HMG Teams

Armoured Cars - 4x AB41 Armoured Cars

AT Guns - 4x47mm Elefantini

AA Guns - 2x 20mm Autocannoni

Support

Semovente Platoon - 5x Semovente 75/18

Command Cards

For Italy!; Frontline Fighter; Motorcycles (3); Bombe Passaglia (2)

Getting Ready

I had two jobs to do for this one - rebase a motorcycle transport base and acquire and paint some AB41s.  Blogger Pooch sorted me out with some spare bases and local 3D maestro Che at Potbelly Miniatures printed me the AB41s in a matter of days and I smashed them out in a weekend:

The motorcycles I did a *long* time ago so just had to rebase the HQ from two motorcycles on one base to one on two bases and do a bit of repair work. Here's a fair sample of this absurdity:

Thoughts? 

It's probably terrible. The tiny infantry platoons mean it's brittle AF but it has a lot of MG dice so should be able to deliver those tiny platoons. The Semoventes provide a template if I need one and some mid-range AT as well. But it's going to be SO MUCH fun to play. 

Next Time

I've made a bit of progress on 15mm Spanish. Not enough for this week but enough....