In terms of rules updates, this is the week I’ve been waiting for – the chance to bring Lords of War.  One of the things that I love about Warhammer 40k is the big stuff; in this case, knights.  This week, I kind of felt like I got to have everything – dreadnoughts, all the Space Wolf character dreadnoughts, my own character dreadnought, and a knight:

This week, I had the pleasure of playing with one of my best friends at the shop.  He fielded his Drukhari and Harlequins across from my army of walkers, we set up a simple scenario, and went to it.

The first roll of the game triggered the narrative scenario’s special rule upon the Harlequins and they ended up having to run away from the center of the board.  Still, those guys move fast!  His infantry began to gather around objectives and his skimmers were shooting their anti-tank weapons at me from turn one.  During my shooting phase, I took pot-shots at his skimmers with what I thought would help (the melta, rockets, and plasma), and saved the light fire for the infantry just before I charged into their ranks.  With Jarleiv, Bjorn, and Murderfang all hitting the same flank, this was pretty devastating.

While I was able to do some damage to his infantry, his skimmers kept coming at me and putting the hurt on my walkers, while his infantry gathered around their toughness-boosting haemonculus on the remaining objectives.  I knew this would make them hard to remove, so I focused down on his infantry this turn (with the exception of Bjorn, who was out of position to be able to), hoping to clear the objectives and make it so that I could deal with his skimmers afterward.  This was mostly successful, and by the end of round two he had very little left on the table.

He gave another round of shooting heavy weapons at my walkers, and was able to take down one of my dreadnoughts, but then then resigned as I still had a lot of my force on the table, easily holding the remaining objectives.

Overall, It was a pretty fun game, with an opponent I was less sure on how to deal with (because they could move so fast!).  On the other hand, the objectives forced him to have those models more exposed, which allowed me to deal with them rather effectively with my anti-infantry weaponry.  On the other hand, I still don’t know how to deal with his skimmers – the hit-and-run that they were able to perform, especially with such heavy weapons, was rather effective counter-play.