The League Gets... Bloody

There always seems to be something a little perverse about playing my army against an actual Blood Angel's force.  We make plenty of jokes about training exercises and dum-dum bullets, but it still looks weird to have all the red on red crime.

This happened on a Thursday, when the league organizer finally gave up and said, "Fine, Imperials can play Imperials because they outnumber the Axis this week."  This led to my match-up with a heavily meched up Blood Angels army.  It consisted of three different Predator tanks, a bunch of Razorback and Rhino transports with Assault Squads inside, some Sanguinary Guard, and a squad of scouts.  I had just finished building the Vargheist's bases, so I decided to run a full squad of Thunderwolves.  I also wanted to run the Land Raider once again, and decided to use the extra random points to make the squad inside seven strong, including Logan.  That should strike fear into most units in the game.

Enough red to make your eyes bloody.  Get it?

The mission we rolled was called "The Listening Post."  The primary objective would be one piece of terrain, based on making a 5+ die roll attempted each time we initially entered a wood or hill.  The secondary objective was a marker that was placed in the middle of the field, while the third was who could pop the most tanks.  With only one tank, I was pretty sure I could pick up the tertiary easily enough.  It was Dawn of War and I took first turn.  My plan was pretty simple.  I wanted to move into as many pieces of terrain as possible, as quickly as possible.  If I could find the main objective, I could castle up and I'd be hard to shift. 

I managed to make a mockery of this fairly simple tactic by failing roll after roll over the course of the first two turns.  I countered this by rolling well to pop his tanks and was stoked to have four points in the bag from turn one.  My opponent found the listening post deep in his back right corner, which would present a problem for me as I had already committed the Thunderwolves on the left flank, and the rest of the army was going to struggle to make it across the field fast enough.  The only thing close by was Logan's squad, safely delivered by their transport just before a string of 6's from the lascannon Predator blew it up.  They'd have to do the dirty work alone and quickly set to it.  Even with poor rolling, they just put out so much damage that they quickly carved out all the resistance in that corner.  To compound this, my opponent deepstruck his Sanguinary Guard in my end, and victory was preserved when the Thunderwolf Lord made it 24" to finish them off.  Unfortunately, they wiped out the remainder of my Terminators, so I could only secure the points for the primary and tertiary objectives. 

Thirty Guardians vs. five Death Company = Not Fair

My second was something of a surprise bonus game.  All my models have been pulled off of their bases while the master copies of the scenic versions are being molded and cast, so I had anticipated being out of commission.  However, the army that won best overall was offered to me while the owner went to lunch so his friend could get in another game, which meant I was playing real, actual Blood Angels for once.  Speed, light armor, and a Storm Raven makes for a very different army, but similar employment.  I was playing against a foot Eldar list with an old school, 3rd edition Rescue mission that would see us looking for two hidden objectives.

I elected to go first again and chose the side with more markers to search.  It turns out my decision was a good one, with my troops jumping out and quickly finding both markers.  The two units carrying the markers used their transports to quickly relocate to the opposite corner of the board from his firebase, while the Death Company and Assault Marines applied pressure, killing off Guardians and forcing a reaction.  My opponent was so busy dealing with them that he never had a chance to go after the objectives.  That said, he pretty much annihilated the rest of my force, leaving a grand total of thirteen marines alive by the end of turn five. 

That adds 28 points to my league tally.  We'll see how quickly I can get the rest of the boys back in action.  Hopefully the bases will be done by tomorrow, but if they're done by the weekend, it'll work.