The Ninja Pirate Tournament on 12-16-07

While my game in 40k has been nicely improving, the tourney yesterday was one of my poorer showings.

Round 1:
Cricket is a Tyranid player who hangs out at Ninja Pirate (I've not mentioned it before, but kids today, at least the ones who hang out at NP, have somewhat nonsensical nicknames - The S.S. Pequod considers this BADASS! Kudos to the leaders of tomorrow!) Aaaanyway, as of this weekend, he has gone to Space Marines. He relies very heavily on tactical squads, a las cannon predator, and a Vindicator. I'm actually glad he's doing this, because I finally get a regular "shooty" army that I can run against to practice.

I drew him on round one.

He took turn one and was able to really neuter my forces before I could develop them. I couldn't get my Baals placed correctly, I couldn't get my squads up close enough, and I couldn't easily wrap my head around the scenario. He did very well and walked away with a crushing victory.

What did I learn? I don't think I can rely on deeps striking squads behind the gunlines to kill them.

Round 2:
A 'Bigger' bug list played by Adam. You can see pictures here. I REALLY hated this scenario. It called for the Escalation rules, which means "Infantry only". I run a 100% Jump army with vehicles. So, starting out, I had nothing on the table. ZIP, Zero. I won initiative so I was able to slow him down a round and my 3 Baals came in on Round 2. As we can see with this pic, I did rather well mowing down genestealers.



However, the scenario's secondary objective ended up turning this from a draw into a crushing victory because he'd had a large number of big bugs in the center of the table.

Adam was a hoot to play with as his bugs moved away like Curly, "Woo-Woo-Woo-Woo!"

Round 3:
The advantage of doing poorly, is that I get to play against Chris (just teasing you Chris!!!!). While he is also a Blood Angels player, he is a fun guy to play against. This was a much more straight forward scenario than previous ones. However, I was able to get my Baals where they could be best used first and take out his veteran squad which made my life a great deal easier. Had I realized that there was also an Honor guard, I'd've turned and took that next. However, despite this error, I still managed to take both main objectives and deny him the third objective. This gave me a Victorious Slaughter.