A Small Matter of Honour

After getting home late Thursday, I spent Friday doing the last finishing touches to the Order of Sanguinius. After putting on a coat of matt varnish on the last three models, it was snow time! With a mixture of artificial snow and PVC glue to hand, about twenty models were ‘snowed’. To speed up the drying time (I wanted everything packed and ready to go Saturday morning), all the models got put in front of a fan heat for a bit.

Anyway today was the day for our club’s annual Warhammer 40000 tournament, A Small Matter of Honour. To recap, my army list is here. So how did it go?

Well the first game (annihilation mission) against Marc’s eldar was really close until the final turn when Marc took advantage of a bold move on my part, claiming two kill points from my razorback and squad onboard. Unfortunately I couldn’t finish off any of Marc’s transports in return. Just for the record, Eldrad seems to the busiest pixie in the galaxy because he seems to be in every eldar army I see these days!

The second game was against Simon’s Tyranids (hundreds of them!) playing Seize Ground. Suffice to say I should have deployed on the board to thin out his numbers a little bit. Combined with my general indecisiveness we run out of time on turn four. Unfortunately Simon (who in fairness had loads of scoring units) had two of the four objectives and easily bagged the win.

After lunch was my third game, this time using the full 1750 point army rather than just 1250. Now on table 17 I was playing Neil’s Tau. For game we were playing Capture and Control with a Pitch Battle deployment. As per normal I outflanked what I could and kept the rest in reserve.

Lucky for me, Neil Kroot’s also outflanked and arrived first, far too close to my table edge. This preceded a rush up that side of the table, trying to survive the three railguns determined to blow my vehicles apart. Once my Chaplain and Honour Guard got onto Neil’s objective and defending fire warriors, the game once decided and it was not pretty.

For my final game I faced Chris’s Dark Angels, playing an annihilation mission. Chris deployed quite defensively along one flank but moved his Chaplain and assault unit too far forward to engage my assault bikes. When my forces arrived the following turn that unit was swamped.

Having learned the lesions from earlier in the day I was far more aggressive in this game in the turn three virtually won the game on kill points. To Chris’ credit, he hung in to turn seven when he was finally wiped out.

At the end of the day I managed two big wins, and two loses, so I’m pretty sure I failed to finish in the bottom half of the results table (my aim to prove I’m not super competitive all the time).

However much to my huge delight, my Blood Angels won Best Army! Considering the competition, including Greg Bachelor's Space Wolves (pictured above), I’m really chuffed.

A big thank you should the guys from muppets for organising a fantastic event, and congratulations should go to Greg Bachelor, Ian Courtney (Space Wolves) and Rob Uter (Tau) for claiming the top three places.

UPDATE: The results are now up on the Sad Muppets' website here. I managed to finish 12th in the end and had the second highest VP total.