My first games of 6th Edition

 My first games of 6th edition were against my worthy opponent Lord Boroth (of Apostles of Contagion fame), for a classic Marines vs. Chaos standoff, and after that a Guard vs. Guard lasgun shoot-out.  I had problems with a crappy camera, so I'm going to leave the battle reports to him.   I had a good time fielding over 1500 points in troops, 6 tactical squads, two Rhinos, two Razorbacks, two librarians, and a Land Raider Redeemer.

 I had a pretty rough time with my dice the first game, failing multiple "easy" saves within a row, and failing to fire my hunter-killer missiles mounted on my Rhinos before they were pegged mid-field.  I tried a mid-field rush, but I had left the Redeemer in reserves.  Big mistake, it was like a half-assed blitz, J picked it up, destroyed the Rhinos, delayed the Razorbacks, and held my advance at bay.  His shooting easily dismantled the combat squads (and full squads, for that matter) that dumped out of the destroyed vehicles.

 The new Chaos Codex is slick.  I really like the direction it is going in.  I found that I didn't really have a problem at all with how wound removal is now resolved, and J was super-nice to pointing out the ease of wound-pool allocation.   One of the funny things that happened were with Warlord Traits.  I ran two Librarians in my list (because I wanted to roll a lot of random powers and stuff), and my Warlord Trait happened to be Legendary Fighter (or something like that) which scored me a victory point every time I won a Challenge in assault.

The Iron Warriors had a stipulation in their army that demanded that they make and/or accept a challenge in all assaults.  As soon as my Librarian got into assault, I started scoring points.  Likewise, I lucked out that his Raptors were falling back when the game ended (one more turn and they probably would have regrouped, the made a sucky Leadership roll the turn before).  These things alone allowed me to win the game by one point, which I didn't really deserve, since he had hoards of guys still out there capturing objectives, and I had probably 9 marines left on the table (at best).

I'm not really sure how my Guard won their first game, but here are my impressions on their first run:

1) Lots of grenade launchers paid off against other lightly armored vehicles.  I had much luck handling an outflank from Sentinels that threatened poor guardsmen that couldn't scratch the surface.

2) Krak grenades are useful.  When you don't have them, you're sorry you don't have them. 

3) Hellhounds really rock, especially since they are fast.

4) Heavy weapons squads are very fragile.

5) A Priest whose squad runs away sometimes has a hard time regrouping.  Probably not worth it unless he's in a vehicle of some kind.

6) Command squads on vehicles would be a great idea, otherwise you gotta run them into the guns in order to give orders.


All in all, I loved 6th edition.  I'm ready for more, as soon as possible!  I really liked the set-up, where both players "gear up" their psykers and warlords, roll for objectives, mission, etc.  Plenty has been said about 6th in other forums, so I won't wax philosophical about how cool this is when considering the social beer-and-pretzels component of the game, however I'll just say that it helps it rather than hinders it.  More to talk about after the game.

Thanks for stopping by.  More updates on the game room coming soon, I built some shelves, ready to install temporary lighting...