My First 40K Games!

After about a year in the hobby, I finally got around to playing WH40K! Our local GW store was holding a Kill Team tournament and I signed up for better or worse. Over the last two months I have been building my Kill Team based on my earlier ideas of a somewhat rogue Space Marine chapter. I'm still finalizing the lore but a rough explanation would be this:

Born from a campaign to find a cure for the curse hounding all marines descended from the Blood Angels and Sanguinius, the Flesh Eaters have found a measure of protection from the Black Rage and Red Thirst by devouring those they defeat in battle. While this is not an unheard of practice, the Flesh Eaters have taken these acts of seeming barbarism to new levels chapter wide.

So anyways, my first game... well was really a bit of a practice game about a month before my first tournament match. This practice game I shared with a fellow FLGS regular to get a feel for Kill Teams. I ran a team of 5 Chaos Possessed with marks and mutations etc. A very elite and small team (and unfortunately all melee... more on that later). I figured this might be the way to go, spend all your 200pts on making the best guys you can get even stronger. In my defense, this approach looks great on paper with all the nifty looking special rules that possessed get. This is where my opponents force of two Zoanthropes and 10+ Termagaunts with devourers (Devilgaunts as they are called) showed me the error of my ways... Long story short my force was tabled in 3 rounds easily. I realized two very important things that day. Volume of dice and bodies on the table are a huge factor, and melee in Kill Team games is something that you should not focus your entire force on (no more than 1-2 units/models for that matter). Things that look good on paper rarely perform on the table top...

My “second” game was to be the first of 13 I would play in our FLGS's Kill Team tournament. Luckily lots of the other tournament competitors were new players as well so it was a great learning experience for us all. This time I ran my Flesh Eaters. I used the Space Wolves Codex and brought 10 Grey Hunters lead by a Lone Wolf. My squad received a flamer and plasma gun for free thanks to the 5^th ed SW rules (the tournament started two months before the new SW book came out). My lone wolf was issued a wolf claw and storm shield. Math hammer readers may notice that this list would actually cost 220 points and you would be correct. Our local shop has some running house rules that if you buy merch in-store at the start of the tournament then you get an extra 10% in points to spend on upgrades. A pretty smart business boosting idea I must admit. Another cool house rule is that we track the kills our Kill Team's leader makes each week, and at the end of that week we roll on a boon chart and add the number of kills to the resulting roll. Your leader may be granted an extra wound, bonuses to Strength, WS/BS, Toughness, special rules like Fleet or Infiltrate etc. These bonuses stay with your leader through the entire tournament which is awesome. You can really watch your team's leader grow with each kill. And I don't mind saying that my Lone Wolf became a true beast by the end. My team specialists were the marines with the plasma gun (Preferred Enemy), the flamer (Feel No Pain 5+) and a normal Grey Hunter (Ignores Cover). Preferred Enemy was a great choice because it not only meant that my plasma gunner almost never had to deal with the Gets Hot rule, but also with scoring hits in general. Feel No Pain on the flamer marine helped him charge into range and fry enemies without dying half way there. Lastly, Ignores Cover on the bolter shots of the last specialist cannot be overlooked. Cover plays a big part in Kill Teams and stripping it outright was very useful!

The first tournament game I played was against one of the tournament coordinators. He brought a squad of Iron Hands scouts to the table with cloaks, sniper rifles/bolters and a missile launcher. I learned very quickly that those camo-cloaks are a pain in the butt, and that 6+ Feel No Pain can save guys at the worst/best times (depending on who's side you're on). Its also nice to be able to Infiltrate and Scout move your force for pretty much ideal placement every time. All these fancy tricks however proved to be false hope though, as my Flesh Eaters swept the board by the end of the game! We played Head Hunt so all I had to worry about was killing (perfect fit for the Flesh Eaters), and I used focus fire to quickly bring down his scout specialists. The Lone Wolf himself killed 5 enemies single handed, including hunting down and slaying the Scout Sargent. I will probably write some battle reports from the perspective of the Kill Team later. For now though, I'm glad to be able to blog again and I'm very excited about how these games have gone!