I managed to get in several games this week!
Battle Missions
Tuesday, I met up with Jeff to throw down some Battle Missions. (My first time actually using the book.)
He was running his very cool Gue’vesa IG army: everything’s converted up to be Tau-ish, from his Valkyrie converted from Devilfish, Piranha and Valk parts to his robotic Sisters of Battle built from Necron and Tau bits. Both games were at 2,000.
I was running the same 2,000 point Khornate Daemon list I ran at Battle for the Cure.
Warp Rift
We decided to kick things off with a Chaos Daemon mission: I rolled for it and got Warp Rift. (12″ around “rift” in the center of the board. Defender deploys anywhere 12″ away from the rift. Daemons can Deep Strike as normal, or can “walk on” the table from the rift.)
I lost, by kind of a lot. I had trouble getting past the leafblower: something would get to one of his squads, obliterate it and then get blown away by the squad behind the freshly deadified squad. Still, it was a neat mission, and was a fun game. I’ll definitely have to build a Warp Rift terrain piece to use for this in the future.
War of Attrition
We had time for another game before closing and we’d decided that it was only fair to play an IG mission. Two of the missions looked… bad for us due to the nature of my army. We weren’t going to get a good game out of Bloodletters slogging a quarter of the way across the board before being blasted away by lasguns, so we settled on War of Attrition: deployment zones that put us near each other and the ability to recycle Troops choices.
I fiddled with my list a bit, as I don’t consider my 2K list to be very good: split up the 16 ‘Letter squad into 2×8 ‘Letter squads and swapped out two Daemon Princes for two Soul Grinders.
Suprisingly, this game felt closer, though I still got my teeth kicked in. It ultimately boiled down to one side of the board seeing us trade a Bloodletter squad for two infantry squads each turn (because the Bloodletters would come on close enough to assault that turn and the Guardsmen would come on close enough to rapid fire them into nothingness; rinse and repeat) and big nasty things trashing tanks and being blown away on the other side.
Again, also a lot of fun.
Conclusion
I’m definitely sold on Battle Missions. They’re fun, thematic and don’t require custom army lists.
One thing that I noticed is how differently they played from the core missions despite the changes being relatively subtle. There’s a lesson here: a light touch. There’s an inclination in scenario writing to throw a lot of different things in, and I think this does a great job of showing how just a few small changes makes for a significantly different game.
I expect that my default 40K setting for the next several months (at least) will be, “Let’s try some Battle Missions.”
Malifaux
The next day, I met Thalaric at Game Parlor to have him walk me though how to play Malifaux. I don’t really process or understand rules until I see them in action and, frankly, Malifaux system is so different there’s no way I could have grokked them without having someone sit down with me and answer a question every 30 seconds.
I was running the Witch Hunters crew I picked up at Madicon, Chris started out running the Cult of December.
The first game probably doesn’t even qualify as a game. More a matter of going through the motions. “There’s no reason to cast Flaming Bullets on Samael, but I’m going to do it because I need to understand how it works.” That sort of thing.
Second game was a bit more of the same, but it progressed much more smoothly. Also, it became clear that Sonia Criid vs. Rasputina is not a good matchup, as the former is really pretty much designed to kick the latter in the face, hard.
Third game was more of an actual game. Chris switched over to his Viktorias crew. The game was surprisingly close… a very close win for me.
The game was interesting enough for me to decide to buy a few more minis for it, though my opinion of the game remains… complex. I’d like to get in a few more games before I write up a full post about the game.