Saturday, December 17, 2011

Played Zach (spelling confirmed) this last Wednesday using our tournament lists.  He had finished third in the tournament with his foot Wolves.  His listed featured three big squads of grey hunters, one of them might have been blood claws but I don't think so, a runepriest, a multimelta dreadnaught in a pod, and a long fang pack with three rockets and a plasma cannon.  We rolled randomly to determine which of the tournament missions we'd play and got the final one, kill points battle line.  He picked table edge and deployed first.  I refused the left flank and set up in a huddle on the right.  Once again Pardak seized the initiative and the engineers all shot lascannons at his rune priest, killing him instantly with a double out.  On his first turn in dreadnaught did a suicide drop and missed.
My brotherhoods rolled forward, one deploying and vaporized the dread and the pod, secure in the knowledge that the majority of Zach's army was well out of position to threaten them.  The only squad that did have a good fire lane was the long fangs, but their only target was a smoked chimera.  The long fangs did little more than shake it.
The shaken chimera moved up to block fire from the dismounted brotherhood squad while the squats focused their fire on the right most grey hunter squads.  Six were killed, including the wolf guard leader in terminator armor who died tanking a storm bolter wound.  They Grey Hunters broke and began to hoof it towards the board edge.
The shaken chimera was close enough to the broken Grey Hunters to chase them off the board, to complete Zach's misery the Long Fangs once again failed to do anything to the forward chimera but shake it.  Finally in the middle Zach's infantry got close enough to take a few shots at my brotherhoods.  Thanks to my engineers, who had mostly rolled armor enhancements changing my carapace armor to powered, I lost only two space dorfs.
My heroic lead chimera rolled forward and actually tank shocked the Long Fangs off the board, while in midfield my brotherhoods massed firepower on yet another Grey Hunter squad, reducing it to four marines.  Pardak and the Slayers dismounted in preparation for a counter assault.  The heroic tank shocking Chimera finally met its end from a few melta gun shots..  They Grey Hunters assault faltered a little as the ground rippled from Pardak's sanctuary ability and one of their number died.  The Space Wolves only managed to kill on Squat, and the little blighters passed their morale test. 
The final turn had the two unengaged brotherhood squads mass fire on the final Grey Hunter squad, killing it to a man.  The counter assault of the slayers killed the last three space wolves on the board before they could swing.

Zach had some pretty horrible luck in this game which lent to the scale of the Squat victory, but had his rolls been more average while the Squat losses might have been higher I doubt the game could have gone many different ways.  The relative slowness of his force and how spread out they were, combined with the maneuverability of my force and the line of sight blocking terrain pretty much spelled victory for the space dwarfs.

You can always tell a quality opponent by how they take a drubbing, and Zach handled it with aplomb.  I can certainly see why he earned best sport at the tournament.

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