Blog hits! A June record!

A nice little side note - June was the third most highly visited month I've ever had! At nearly 2,500 hits it was only a few hundred behind the time my army got featured on bell of lost souls in 2012! My most successful month is still the month in which I posted my jumpmaster magnetisation article. 

I honk in part it's due to better self promotion, but also with double trouble there has been a lot of linking from other people's blogs, so thanks for that :) very much appreciated! I'm hopeful that I can keep up this momentum and break 50,000 hits before the end of the year. 

Battle Report Game 2 - Darksun Life 22

"Drop me near them, I want to hit them with my Grav Cannons!"

Yeah. The heading pretty much says it all. In a continuing theme for these Battle Reports, my Grav Cents spent most of the game in combat with Grots who repeatedly refused to break and run away. I mean, I can't be bitter because we did pretty well all things considered. But those were some mighty, mighty grots.

Double Trouble Round 1 Battle Report

"Don't get cocky kid"

If only I'd listened to Han Solo before this game. It may have gone better... opps, spoilers! Thanks to Rob, Ian and Matt for a great game :) Tune in over the weekend for the 2nd installment!

Deathwatch Killteam review

Last week at club I played Deathwatch: Killteam. Read on to find out how I got on.....

Ian had brought Killteam with him, and I'll be honest the models are beautiful. As much as it pains me to say it, games workshop are doing an excellent job with the quality of thier miniatures, and the ruleset isn't that bad either. The game plays basically like how Soace Marines are in any of the books you read. Ian described them as being are superhuman "movie marines". 

The way that this is borne out in the basic game is that the marines go first, and shoot twice. So each turn looks roughly like this:

• Space marines move
• Genestealers move 
• Space marines shoot
• Genestealers shoot
• Space marines shoot again

This means that as a marine player you can wade through hordes of cultists and stealers as you achieve your objectives. Having only played the one game, I'm not going to go deep into the rules, but they are very simple. They've removed "to wound" rolls entirely, if you hit, that's a wounding hit. 

The game plays very fast, with the phases cycling through very quickly each turn. What's interesting for the tyranid player is that you get cards to lurk with every turn, similar to space hulk. You draw from a deck every turn and place those cards facedown, not revealing them until after the space marines have moved. It's tough to bring down a marine, and I found that they were taking out smaller groups of 6-7 cultists with ease. The cool thing is you can leave one card lurking for another round, especially as you can only place what models the game comes with. 

This creates a balancing element, as you can never have to many purestrain genestealers running around. It's nicely balanced though, as the marines are so tough you might cycle through the same models every round. 

The thing that I realised very early on was that I needed to swarm the marines to stand any chance of killing one. You need at least 5 or 6 to 1 to stand a chance of taking one down. And that's after thier attacks! So you probably need 8/9-1!  It feels very cinematic, games workshop have got that bit spot on. There is desperation on both sides and it really turns into a swirling blood bath!

Springing the trap is all important. The cards that give you cultists also give you abilities such as "attack twice" and combining these factors is the only way to take down a space marine. Even with that ability and all of these guys I was only able to take down 1 marine. They're tough!

Overall, I'd reccomend playing this game if you get the chance. It's fun, fast and cinematic. I don't know that I'd buy it, as £118/$160 is quite a lot, and I don't play tyranids. But if you have always planned to do a cultist army, then the models are amazing, and if you've got a group together you could play through the missions quite nicely. If you can, give it a go!

Double trouble: 8 weeks and counting!

Double trouble is only 8 weeks away! Have you bought your ticket yet?!  f not, why not? Of course,my  potential excuse for that would be that the last time I played 40 was February, but we can't all use that. And I have bought my ticket. 

I've been musing on what to take, and I'm torn between two armies. The first, as you can no doubt geuss by this photo, is Space Marines. Howling Griffons to be exact. I really fancy some bike based shenanigans, as you could take two full bike squads and a bike command squad before breaking any of the comp rules. 

Taking a HQ on a bike gives you interesting options as you can take bikes as troops. Combined with the combat squads rules it gives you interesting opportunities to have lots of small units. You could couple this with some scouts in a land speeder storm, and maybe even throw in a thunderfire cannon. 

It would also give me an excuse to finish painting this guy, who is one of painting goals for this hobby season. I'm not sure of how competitive the whirlwind is really (it's completely not). When you compare it to the thunderfire cannon, or imperial guard wyvern it doesn't match up favourably. 

My other choice would be humanities true protector in its hour of greatest need. The Imperial Guard. I strongly believe that they function really well at lower points values. After all, for 200 points you could get 40 of them! There is however, something that we need to discuss. 

I may have a bit of an imperial guard sized problem. Which may seem trivial to you, but it really isn't to me. I mean, in a 750 point game, which heavy weapons do you take? If we pan out on the previous photo, we can see that I really do have a conundrum.

All these heavy weapons together would work, right!?!  My main problem with Guard is that they are to squishy, and don't really hit hard. Eldar and thier darker kin are both really squishy, but both hit a lot harder. Guard are much more about being the sum of the parts. Which is why I think they could be good for double trouble. 

One of the reasons they wouldn't be good for double trouble is that it's very objective based. And sure, they can swarm around, or mount up, but my guard army isn't very speedy. Unless I break out the old X-wing vendettas. Which I could, they haven't seen play in a while. But something about the fix bayonets, and "win by having more men than they have bullets" approach really speaks to me. Plus I could take mortars!

Love these guys. They're so cheap and not really that useful. 

Overall I can't decide. I really like the guard idea, but it's more characterful than competitive. I've spent my time in the trenches with fluffy lists in the past and they are fun. But I do like the bike idea. That's one I've not tried yet. So I'll see! I don't have to paint a thing to take the guard I don't think, so that would be nice! Thanks for stopping by! Until next time, Let me finish by asking; Have you bought your ticket yet?!

The blog returns! With Space Marine Bikes

So, a long time no blog. In the time that I haven't blogged, the following has happened:

 - I've got married

- I got 2 new jobs (I now work for the Church of England)

- I've moved house 3 times and we have really noisy neighbours in the current place

- there have been two space marine codexes

- 7th edition happened

- I help out at my church youth group

- I now play X-wing 

- I now play bolt action

- I've been to various tournaments: Several blog wars, student nationals, X-wing tournaments, X-wing championships 

- I came third at a couple of tournaments (student nationals and an X-wing tournament)

- I came 4th at blog wars 8

Space marine bikes!

So tonight's blog is about bikes I'm painting for blog wars. Above there is pic, but below there is a video! I'm getting back into this blog partly because I want to try Vlogging. It's a good place to host the blogs & vlogs I'm hoping it will be successful. So here is the first attempt:

https://youtu.be/5jHTwGc1v54

I read quite a lol if blogs and need to give a lot of credit to Michael  (http://standwargaming.blogspot.co.uk/?m=1), Dave (http://40kaddict.blogspot.co.uk/?m=1) and Alex (http://fromthefang.blogspot.co.uk/?m=1) for giving me good blogs to read! I'm hoping to contribute to the blogosphere now as well!