Glorious VICC-tory! Day One

So hilarious pun titles aside, I'll just start by leaving this here:

Its good to be King!

Yes, our plucky team of upstart invading Kiwis, and a couple of locals along for the ride (love you guys!) went in, smashed up the place and won the VICCs tournament, much to the delight of everyone not from Hampton Games Club!

The prize support was freaking amazing too. We each got $25 of vouchers, and Ben and Greg get to split a custom built tables worth of terrain between them, which is frankly amazing as by my estimates thats about $300-400 worth of stuff.

Anyway, I shall get onto my tales of glorious victory. Somehow I managed to go 4 wins 1 draw and no losses with my High Elf army which matched the best army results there, and far exceeded my expectations for the weekend, especially considering the hangover I rocked up with on day 1.... I apologise for the sporadic photos, its hard to get used to taking them, when you don't usually do it.

So my High army was:

Archmage - Level 4 Heavens, Silver Wand, Loremaster's Cloak
BSB - Reaver Bow, Charmed Shield
Level 2 - Death, Scroll

12 Archers w/ Flaming Banner
10 Archers
10 Archers
10 Archers

24 White Lions w/ Banner of Sorcery
7 Swordmasters w/champ Talisman of Loec
7 Swordmasters

3 Eagles

So all in all very defensive but highly able to conserve pts through bait and flee archers/eagles while blasting things at range with Lightning and Comets and Purple Suns

Game 1: Hampton, Ben Leopold, Ogres 

Mission - Battle for the Pass, Tower Assault.

Straight off the bat, our biggest rivals, and me with a massive hangover, playing against Ogres with the Watch Tower in his Deployment Zone, and I was assaulting it.lengthwise down the table... Yay... Anyway, I resigned myself to taking one for the team as we managed to get Nick and Ben pretty good matchup, so hopefully we could get a couple wins and draw the round.

His list was:

SM with Heavens
BSB
Level 1
Massive GutStar
2 Big units of Leadbelchers
Cannon
Dogs

So three big ass units which could smash me up especially if Convergence got off on the Belchers. Sadly I had to run at  it too. Ben didn't roll Comet though, and only had one of the Lightning spells, which was pretty big for my magic defense, as I could focus on dispelling just Convergence and Lightning as the two dangerous spells.

His deployment was Guts next to the Tower, to remain threatening rather than being locked in the Tower, and the Belchers on either side with the dogs in behind waiting to hold up anything that got close. I put my Lions in the centre with everything fairly evenly spread to either side.

Turn 1:

He also got first turn, because apparently that makes sense too in an already shit matchup, but oh well... when in Rome. Both Belchers moved up with the Guts holding back and but only one had range.Ben then rolled some shocking to hit rolls and killed like 2 Lions with 30 S4 shots (this was a recurring theme.). Cannon did 1 wound to an Eagle.

I moved forward as I gained nothing by sitting back, trying to get a unit of Swordmasters and the Lions to both threaten the closer Belchers on the right (so he could only shoot one of them) but the Lions were a bit far out. Archers shot a couple wounds off the same Belchers, but generally nothing happened.

Turn 2:

Ben again moved up the Belchers to get them in range and took off most of one unit of Swordies and another Eagle. I again moved up but not too far to avoid combo Bull charges.

I charged the remnants of the swordies into the Belchers to die heroically. My level 2 jumped into the Lions and I 6 diced Purple Sun at the Belchers on my Left figuring I needed to get rid of one unit fast or get shot to death. It worked as IFed for the win (as a rule if I have a wizard in my White Lions I will IF 100% of the time and then Cascade to kill them all on the way out) , the Purple Sun went 30" killed 6 Belchers and the Eagle I'd jumped behind them to sneak into the tower, but I killed 9 White Lions in the process, meaning I effectively had no combat unit left to assault the tower, which I assumed would be full of Iron Guts and characters. Balls, there goes any chance I had...or did it?

Turn 3:

I think Ben got greedy here, and to be fair the game was his to win big... but I only needed one unit to make the now empty and unguarded tower and I had more units than he did to stop me. He pushed up the Gutstar to finish me off. He then chain lightning the second unit of Swordmasters to mostly dead and the remaining Lead Belcher unit went nuts at last and killed every WL but the Champ, who got a Cannonball to the head. Hmm...

The Archers on my left flank started a sprint to the tower while I shot the second unit of Belchers some more and prepared to draw off the Gutstar with double fleeing archers.

Turn 4:

Ben kept running the Guts at me, shot my last Eagle with the Blaster and finished my remaining Swordmasters with the remnants of the Belchers

I kept moving back and shooting the Belchers to Death, while my ninja archers continued running up field unmolested. Two turns to go and I could get to it, but the Dogs were still guarding their Kennel so I didn't have much hope.

Turn 5:

Again fled the Guts losing some archers in the process, but nothing much else happened. FYI Our magic was pretty much cancelling each other out.

I got the Archers to about 6" from the building but realised I couldn't make it in, and almost gave up but decided to kill some more pts (a brilliant decision apparently), so finally killed the Belchers.

Turn 6:

Ben then proceeded to have the brain fart to end all brain farts. We both forgot that you could win by being the closest unit to the tower so he moved one dog into the tower (which should have just sat behind it out of LOS) and the other to redirect my archers.

I figured I could deny him the bonus pts for the Tower, so left everything to shoot the dog in the tower, completely by luck not charging the second dog. Then my BSB stepped up with his Reaver Bow, 2 hits 2 Wounds, dead Dog, paniced the second dog (not in combat) and someone watching pointed out that my Archers were now the closest unit and I held the Tower... WTF?!?!?

Here you see my Glorious Archers holding the Tower from the fleeing Sabre Tusk. Also Chris Cousen's fine arse apparently...

So by shear and utter accident, I got the 1000 VPs for the Tower which gave me a 500pt Win. Them's Skills baby!

Elsewhere Ben deleted Dave's Warriors with some DP Cascade help, Greg expectedly got smashed up by Nick's Warriors, but Nick managed to beat Cousen's and we got 3 Wins out of 4, to everyones surprise. BOOM, How's them apples!?!?

Game 2: Phoenix, I totally can't recall his name, which sucks cause it was a really good game too - High Elves

Mission: Kill over half their unit for bonus pts, Pitched Battle

Greg had a very soft High Elf list:

Chariot Prince with Reaver Boow
2 Level 2s with Beasts and Fire
NO BSB....

Big Spears
Big Archers
Big Swordmaster unit
Big White Lion unit
Chariot
Bolt Thrower
2 Eagles

So um yeah... no BSB, wow...

Deployment was basically as below minus a couple turns. Diagonally opposed across the marsh in the middle, with y Level 2 and some Swordies on my far right flank

End of Turn 2: You can see the remaining Banner Bearer gapping it behind the nearest hill at the bottom

I went first moved up a bit but not much was in range, My Swordmasters on the Left boosted it into the forest to take the archers with a supporting eagle. He scrolled my first Comet but I got through Caress of Laniph and took out his Beast Wizard.

He marched toward me as well so we were kind of standing off across the marsh. Then his 16 archers shot my Level 4/BSBs archer unit and did 7 wounds out of 8 hits on 5s... the Bolt Thrower then killed 4 leaving me with just the Standard and very happy he had no more archers as neither character had any armour to speak of!

Turn 2:

My characters bolted to the next unit of archers. The swordies moved up to the edge of the forest as seen above. I then got a Comet off just in front of his lines, excellent! I shot every archer in my army at the bolt thrower and did one wound, sigh...

He umed and ahhed about the comet and finally decided to take it on the chin and move up. The comet came down, killed half the White Lions, ten Spearmen and his Tiranoc Chariot, which paniced the Swordmasters as he had no BSB. More good news! His archers didn't kill a single Swordmaster at close range (clearly tired after last turn...)

Turn 3:

I charged the Swordmasters, and an Eagle at his Archers, but only the Eagle made it. The White Lions decided they could be slightly more aggressive about life now that everything was dead and moved up in front of the Spearmen block, but leaving a largish charge for his WL and Prince. I doom and darknessed the fleeing swordmasters to take them out for another turn, and dropped another comet next to the Lions/Chariot Prince.
Then the funniest thing happened, the Eagle didn't do much, and fled from the archers, who in a fit of insane bravery decided they just had to chase it down the hill straight into the Swordmasters at the bottom... :-D

Silly Archers...

My opponent charged everything at the White Lions but only the Spears made it. Win! He flanked my Swordmasters with Lvl 2 with an Eagle out of desperation, and his Swordmasters kept running due to D&D.
The Eagle then proceed to do 2 wounds to the Swordmasters who couldn't kill it and then ran away due to flank charge bonus, and lost me 300pts to an Eagle... However the WLs chewed a large number of Spears losing a fair few in return but the Spears stayed on Stubborn 10 from the Prince. The SMs ate the Archers and ran them down right in front of the Bolt Thrower  (who had survived another 30 odd shots...) but without LoS to it.

Turn 4:

Swordies faced the BT, assuming their friendly archers would finally take the last wound and save them (no... no, they wouldn't...). The Lions with the help of my now dominant magic phase ate the remaining spears but had to pursue them out of BSB range to get the points.

His Sowrdmasters finally rallied, and the Lord and Lions charged into my Lions. Massive mutual destruction resulted in me killing all but one of his Lions, and a couple wounds from the chariot but with the added impact hits I lost combat, rolled a 9 without reroll and lost all my silly WLs... The Sowrdies got pasted by the BT at short range but the last two stayed put to kill it next turn.

Turn 5:

Swordies killed the BT, and my BSB shot the last WL, and I knocked a few of his Swordmasters off with archers.

Without much left to do, or indeed on the table, for either of us at this point, he ran away with the Lord and remaining Eagle, and killed my last two SMs with his SMs

What remained. It wasn't much of anything.

I shot off  the last of his SMs in my T6 and we called it there, for a win to me, though not as big as it should've been had my Lions stuck around another turn... Anyway really fun game and brutal massacre of a civil war.

Elsewhere Ben and Greg got big wins, but Nick found out what a horde of Witch Elves does to Bloodletters. (Hint: Its not pretty...) But still an overall round win to Shirts Off.

Round 3: Monash, Chris - Orcs and Goblin Warmachines

Mission: Bonus for Tablequarters captured.

Chris had:

Warboss
Level 4 Orc Shaman
BSB
Level 2 Goblin

2 big units of Big'Unz
5 Wolfs
3 single trolls
Rock Lobber
2 Giants

Interesting and very different list but I really didn't see what it did... so I was pretty happy, mainly as no Doom Divers!

Sorry this one won't be highly in depth as it ended up abit dull for both of us after Turn 3. I also forgot to take photos again...

Turn 1:
Chris moved up aggressively  with Giants on either flank of his Big Uns, tried to Foot of Gork me but Loremasters Cloak said no!!! and then chucked Hand on a Giant. Didn't see that coming! suddenly had a Giant standing in the flank of my White Lions. Interesting...

I moved the Lions abit away and managed to get an Eagle in the way of the Giant in my flank, but without much way to avoid the overrun so let it hit the Lions in the front on the overrun and shot the crap out of the second one.

Turn 2:
Giant charged the Eagle, everything else kept moving up. Eagle did two wounds to the Giant, like a boss and survived. Dispelled Foot, but Chris sent a Bad Moon through a unit of Archers.

I moved up some archers to block both blocks of Big Unz which were too close together and shuiffled back some more. the Eagle took 12 wounds this turn from a club, lol

Turn 3:
Giant charged the WLs, Orcs killed some archers. Again 6 dice Foot of Gork without IF, killed afew archers but the Cloak was seriously saving my ass this game. Giant died in combat, then fell on my Lions and killed about half of them. Balls...  theres goes any chance of killing his Orc blocks.

As I suddenly did not have the tools left, I had to go into plan shoot and run, which I did effectively for the rest of the game but its not a great read so I'll just give a couple highlights:

• 6 dice Purple Sun killed 60% of one of the Big Un units but I couldn't get them leaving 4 alive at the end.

• Talisman of Loec dude did no wounds to the Shaman in a sacrificial charge for some pts.

Otherwise I faffed about with archers baiting and fleeing and shooting til the game ended with a draw of about 500VPs each

As for the rest of the team, Nick ran over some Dwarves as a good Daemon player should, but Greg got all his toys taken off by turn 4 by a HE Light Council, and Ben couldnt stop Papa Nurgle getting off his table edge as a mission objective and lost his only game of the weekend. So we went down 1-1-2 to Monash, and had to hope the Hampton boys destroyed them in the doubles in the morning, to put us all back on par at 3-1 goin into the final round.

So that was day 1 at the VICCs, pretty damn successful all round, and all to play for in the morning!


Day two to follow and the unleashiing of the most unfriendly doubles combo known to Warhammer.

Laters!