Apocafez re-kindled my joy in Warhammer 40k, reminding me of the fun I had as a staffie in the Guildford store. Since the new ruleset came out, I've not made the effort to learn it - I knew 5th Ed like the back of my hand, and all the changes seemed like too much effort at the time, so I moved on to pastures new (Flames of War, Dystopian Wars, Infinity).
Still, having far too many armies (50k+ of Imperial Guard, Marines, Eldar, Orks, Tyranids) that I've invested time and alot of money in, I thought it was time to dip my toe back in the 40k pool.
So it was last Monday night that 1000pts of 'Da Bloody Fistz' squared off against the finest the pointy eared Eldar could bring, ably commanded by Alex 'Axle Foley' Foyster. His beautifully painted army contrasted with my foundationpaintandbadabblackwash speed painted orks.
You can see more of Alex's Eldar at the HobbyBrush, here.
We rolled corner to corner deployment, with multiple objectives (I finally got to use the objective token set I bought when the rulebook was released).
 |
| Shock-attak!! Who doesn't want to teleport snotlings inside people?? |
Alex got the first turn, but luckily his shooting was rubbish, with his shots either bouncing off cover, or failing to pen the AV10 vehicles.
Then the objective I was sitting on with grotz and my Big Mek with shock attack gun exploded. It was a booby-trapped objective. This caused me to fail the Ld test, and off ran my Grotz and big mek. No shock attack gun for me turn one. Grrr.
 |
| Stomp Stomp Stomp |
The rest of the game played out with massive swings of luck both ways - The shock attack gun finally hitting some juicy squads, causing them to flee off the table, and the Eldar shooting killing ork unit after ork unit.
 |
| Deff from da skies! |
The rules themselves seem a tad smoother than 5th ed, although the sheer number of 'universal rules' got a bit overwhelming, and I'm sure we forgot some of them. It certainly felt a lot more 'cinematic', if more random - I could have lost my warlord turn one if the objective was closer to my board edge.
 |
| Would have rammed him too - if I had paid for the red paint..... |
It was a lot of fun, although the old style Apocalypse games (with 175K+ a side) feel like they are no longer viable, as there is just too many rules.
 |
| Shock-attack-and-flee..... again! |
The game swung either way turn after turn, with the final run move of my Ork boyz failing to move them into capturing range of the primary objective - this meant that neither of us had captured any objectives, so it was on to the secondary objectives - at this point both our warlords were dead, Alex had scored first blood with the war buggy, but I had a scoring unit in his half of the board, meaning it was still a tie!
 |
| The Burna Boyz mess up the green onez dat smell funny |
 |
| Lotz choppin - a propper scrap! |
We both had a blast, but with the constant release of new lists/codex/units in multiple formats, competitive tournaments will be a nightmare. Is this a bad thing?
 |
| Game ends! |
I think sometimes people expect too much of game systems. Games Workshop has taken 40K firmly into the 'fun' game category, where you cannot get too wound up if a few dice rolls swing the battle against you. I'm looking forward to dusting off more armies, and playing different scenarios. How have you found 6th Edition 40k? Comments always welcome!
Fez
