A Small World After All

Another week.  Another good league game.  This week I was paired up with one of my usual playing partners to stand against a couple of Ultramarine players.  One of my opponents was new to the club, and as we were rolling off for sides and turn, he lost one of his dice which had some sentimental value to him.  He asked me to check my dice, since they were the same shade, but all my dice are Iron Fist League logo dice, and they all turned up with the same logo.  But there were too many of them.  It turns out the club I used to be a part of on the East Coast ran an event he attended, and he still had the die he received.  This small coincidence kicked things off in a very positive direction and led to a great game.

The mission we rolled up was called Return to the Eye.  The primary was Seize Ground with five objectives, while secondary was kill enemy psykers, and tertiary was killpoints.  It also contained a special rule allowing each player to remove something from the table and redeploy it via deepstrike every turn.  Our opponents took first turn and threw Rhinos and Space Marine Tactical squads all over their half.  In response, we decided to have everything walk on in our first turn.  We rolled on almost entirely on the left side of the board and began a big sweeping right hook.  Most of our first turn fire was ineffective, while our Daemon Princes took a few return wounds in the top of the second turn.  Unfortunately for them, it wasn't enough to dissuade us from throwing them forward again.  In our turn, we smashed up a couple of tactical squads and a dreadnought, while the Defiler started lobbing battle cannon rounds down range.  Our force brought so much force to bear that the left half of the board was completely uncontested.  Meanwhile, by turn three, our transports were free to floor it for the far side of the board. 


On the top of turn four, our opponents Thunder Hammer Terminators arrived.  One of our Daemon Princes had worked his way across the board, so we offered him up as bait back towards their own board edge.  This pulled the Assault Terminators away from the central objective, which should have contributed to icing the game for us.  It turned out that a Daemon Prince, a Greater Daemon, a squad of Possessed with Furious Charge, and a full turn of shooting couldn't kill off four regular Terminators.  After the number of 2+ saves I've made in the last year with my terminators, I now got to experience the other side.  It happens, but man it can be frustrating.  With a little late scrambling, we contested both objectives on the far right, including the back corner after a big time deep strike with the Defiler.  The game went one more turn, and the Defiler didn't make it, but it was a moment of great levity.  We did manage the other contest, so we pulled off the primary and tertiary objectives, 2-1 and 8-5 respectively.  It's another positive result for the league, but more than that, I'm stoked about the pace of play and the quality of the games.