Warhammer 40k Tournament

Well, I finally got some time to write about the tournament I played at on Sept. 1. It was quite a lot of fun, with 40 40k players using the Hall of Heroes rules. Hopefully this'll be the first of many tournaments held in Edmonton. (the Games Workshop guys hoped that this would put Edmonton on the map for GW events - if you look on the Canadian website right now it's all about cities like Toronto, Vancouver, and Calgary)

At the tournament, each player had four games, and depending on the score either rose or dropped between the higher and lower tables. I played my Godzilla army, as I mentioned in my earlier post, and not surprisingly it did pretty well - a lot of the time Warhammer 40k is all about the army selection. Despite some bad moves and bad luck, I still won three crushing victories (the second best kind) in the first three games and rose to fight on the second highest table. I was hoping the two highest players (one of them actually played an army very similar to mine) would play each other to a draw, and I would get a good victory out of the last game to win. That was not to be :( I made some bad decisions early in the game (I was a little too aggressive and made a bad gamble), and later bad dice rolling sealed my fate. I actually had a crushing defeat and probably did poorly in the final results. (they still don't have the information posted online yet, and I haven't had a chance to go to West Ed where they have it in the store)

The whole experience was a lot of fun though, and I'd definitely do it again. :)

I brought my camera to the tournament to get pictures of all the cool miniatures I could find, but the camera ran out of batteries half-way through (should've checked...) and I didn't take as many as I would have wanted... I uploaded the full-sized pictures to my Facebook account.

The first army I played against - Eldar (space elves) with grav tanks and the Avatar, which is a giant moving statue of the Eldar war god. The scenario we played was "Head Hunting," which involved killing the enemies' HQ in addition to defeating the enemy army. Of course, my HQ was the Hive Tyrant, a giant monstrous creature. His HQ was the Avatar, another monstrous creature. I managed to kill his Avatar early on in the game, and gained a lot of victory points. But I think in general his list just wasn't as strong as mine, no matter how he could have played it. My genestealers ate up his troops, even his dedicated close-combat troops, and the monstrous creatures shot up his tanks. The end was a crushing victory for me.

The second army I played against were the Daemonhunters, a branch of the Inquisition in Warhammer 40k. This included an Inquisitor and his retinue, plus numerous Grey Knights, space marines specialized in hunting down daemons, and assassins. These are very good, but very expensive (game points-wise) soldiers. In general, the Daemonhunters are not considered a very competitive army. Still, the guy I played against really knew what he was doing. In the first turn he used one of the assassins to kill one of my heavily protected gunfexes. In another attack he killed my flying Hive Tyrant with his Grey Knight grand master. But despite all that, his army was just too few in number, and I eventually gunned down most of his Grey Knights. It was another crushing victory for me.

The third army I played against was an Imperial Guard army. The Imperial Guard are regular human soldiers in Warhammer 40k, as opposed to the space marines, who are genetically-engineered super soldiers. The Imperial Guard are weak individually, especially in close combat, but have a lot of fire power as a whole, with tanks and artillery. My opponent parked his army on his side of the table and basically waited for me to come to him. In a normal scenario this would've been disaster for me, to march into his fire like that, but this particular game was Dawn Raid, where the first three turns were at night. This meant special rules in play that made it harder to target. His troops had search lights, which made it possible to kill some of my genestealers, but it wasn't enough to make a difference. I managed to charge home against him and the genestealers (remember that they rip up space marines in Space Hulk :) ) killed most of his infantry. He had a tank, a mobile artillery piece, and some combat walkers, but those were all shot up by the monstrous creatures. The end was another crushing victory for me. At the beginning of this game I no longer had any power left for my camera, and so I didn't have any pictures.

The last game I had was against Necrons. Basically think undead robots. :) This was a tough but slow army that had a lot of firepower. The table itself had very little terrain, and the game had the Escalation rule, which meant that all my monstrous creatures had to come in later as reinforcements. This caused me to do a risky gamble at the beginning - I charged my genestealers as quickly as possible toward the only units my opponent had on board, some basic Necron warriors who were quite vulnerable to genestealers, and hoped enough of them would survive to tear through his army. This ultimately failed and I only killed some of his troops. His heavies (he had to follow the same escalation rule too) came in and they were terrifying. His main heavy "vehicle" was the Monolith, a floating pyramid that dished out a lot of firepower. This and his remaining warriors killed all of my genestealers, so my monstrous creatures ended up facing them alone. I didn't have the firepower to kill enough of their models to do anything for the rest of the game, and bad dice rolls during shooting didn't help either. This ended with a crushing victory for my opponent.

During the intermissions between the games, I also browsed through all the other armies people had. Many of them were quite nice looking. Too bad I had such a poor camera and couldn't do them justice, and I ran out of batteries to boot. Oh well, the rest of the pictures I took, as I said before, are here.

40k Tournament

Recently I've been busy priming and painting a bunch of models for a Warhammer 40k tournament in September. I'm assembling a Tyranid "Godzilla" army, an army made of mostly large monstrous creatures. The models are assembled, including magnetic arm sockets on all of the monstrous creatures, but most are not primed or painted yet. I'll have to hurry then...

The main hive tyrant with two tyrant guards. I bought the tyrant already painted, and the scheme is what I'm using for all the other monstrous creatures, but the tyrant has been modified to use magnets.

The carnifex I bought with the above hive tyrant. I modified it to have both big guns as a gunfex.

A new hive tyrant I built with wings and two twin-linked devourers. (really nasty weapons) I still have to prime and paint him.

Two identically equipped carnifexes (carnifices?) with two pairs of twin-linked devourers. Notice the green stuff I used to secure the magnets. These will be covered by the spray primer and paint.
My close combat carnifex, Gene Simmons.
Most of the big guys together. I'll have to post more photos once I paint more of them.

Space Marines

For the last while, I've been painting my latest Warhammer 40k army, the Space Marines. They are the first human army I've painted for WH40k, although I haven't had the need to paint actual human features yet due to all of their power armour. I decided to collect an Ultramarines First Company army - this means that all of the space marine infantry wear Terminator armour, the super heavy powered armour used in the game Space Hulk. The only other units are vehicles. I made this decision because it keeps the number of models I need low, and reduces cost and painting time. :) Some of the miniatures I bought were already painted, others I stripped and repainted. The badly painted ones are mine. :) In keeping with the style of the game, I've named the squads and main characters in the army.

Librarian Docente (with power axe) and his command squad. I bought these all painted this way. The black ones are only undercoated and still need to be finished.

Chaplain Elysius. I stripped the original paint scheme and repainted him.

Two space marines with assault cannons that I stripped and repainted.

Squad Honorius with two Cyclone missile launchers. They all came painted.

Squad Valius with two assault cannons. I painted the assault cannon space marines (not the same ones as the picture earlier) but the others came painted.
Brother Irenaeus, a venerable dreadnought. His paint scheme is awesome, so definitely not painted by me. :)

3D Space Hulk

Remember the guy who cast his own 3D resin board for Space Hulk? He's finished painting enough for the first mission. Pretty impressive:

http://spacehulk.beckerf.de/SH_3D_Setup7.jpg

http://spacehulk.beckerf.de/SH_3D_Setup8.jpg

http://spacehulk.beckerf.de/SH_3D_Setup9.jpg

http://spacehulk.beckerf.de/SH_3D_Setup10.jpg

Compare to my much more pathetic card board ones :)

Full Map

Marines Entering the Hulk

3D Space Hulk

Here is a guy who casts 3D Space Hulk corridors by himself with resin, using LEGO in the production too. :) That's pretty cool. Looks like you can get quite a bit of detail just from resin. Interesting...

Warhammer 40k Cityscapes

Wow, I found this German site where someone has gone through a lot of effort to build ruined cityscapes for Warhammer 40k. The game boards are very nice looking, like this one, or this one.

Forgeworld

Forgeworld is an UK company that produces Warhammer 40k "spinoff" miniatures that Games Workshop doesn't make itself. Their miniatures are ludicrously detailed and gorgeous to look at, but are also ludicrously expensive. Check out some of these:

A Tau Orca Dropship: Notice all the troops and battlesuits sitting in the back.

A Tyranid Malanthrope

A Tyranid Trygon

A Tyranid Heirophant

A human super-heavy tank

A human inquisitor and his toilet paper dispenser :)

My WH40k Page

If you look to the right, I've put up a link to my Warhammer 40k website. It's still under construction, but it already has some interesting material on the miniatures I have.

Space Hulk Miniatures

Well, I haven't been totally doing nothing with Space Hulk. I'm actually getting some miniatures painted.

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Here are some partially painted Genestealers.

A regular heavy power armour trooper walking.

A heavy power armour trooper with a machine gun, I suppose standing in for the assault cannon in Space Hulk.

A sergeant.

The space marine miniatures are not from Games Workshop, but are from a different manufacturer. I already had them, and like them rather better than the over-the-top GW miniatures.

Cluedo Crusade

Wow... I don't know what to make of this.
Basically it's a combination of Clue (called Cluedo in the UK) and Space Crusade, a boardgame relative of Space Hulk. As a normal game of Clue goes on, Space Marines show up, with each of the characters (Mrs. White, Col. Mustard, etc.) commanding a faction. The Space Marines shoot each other while the Clue game continues. Brain eating is also involved...

Lost Patrol

I've discovered another interesting old boardgame, or rather a mini-game. It's called Lost Patrol, and is by the makers of Space Hulk. Some people on Boardgamegeek actually describe it as "Space Hulk Lite," and indeed it seems that way from the rules. The idea is that you have a small team of five space marines in a living jungle on a distant planet, and your objective is to reach a dropship and leave the planet. The jungle, controlled by the other player, is constantly shifting, and contains alien beasts called "lurkers." These will try to ambush the space marines at every opportunity. In addition, the board, which is made up of hex shaped pieces, is changed by the jungle player as the game goes on and the space marines move. The jungle player places new hex pieces down and removes old ones, and using what he gets from the shuffled board pile, also tries to trap the space marines in the jungle. All in all it looks like an interesting game, and far less complex than Space Hulk.

These are the hex board sections, made in a similar way to the Space Hulk ones.

These are counters representing the lurkers.

These are miniatures that I've had for a long time, used to represent the space marines. They have lighter armour than the ones in Space Hulk.

Dawn of War

A while ago I bought a game from the bargain bin called Dawn of War; this is an RTS set in the Warhammer 40k universe. It's got a few elements that are quite rare in the RTS genre, and they make the game more like a tactical wargame in some ways than an RTS. For example, infantry come in squads instead of as individuals, and morale really matters. Plus, they fix some stuff that I've always had complaints about with games like Warcraft III. For example, in Dawn of War you can attach hero characters to regular infantry squads, which boosts their stats and makes the hero move with the rest of the army, whereas in WCIII I've always hated the hero going off on his own, away from the rest of my units. In general the game is just a lot of fun due to the universe - I mean, where else can you find heavy tanks, powered armour infantry with teleporters and plasma weapons, alongside daemons, witches, and avatars of gods, all in the same game? :)

As a side bonus, when you play the Space Marine faction, you get the Terminator Space Marines:


Yup, these guys are the protagonists from Space Hulk, coming in nicely detailed 3D models, with options for all their heavy weapons. The modding opportunity here is interesting...

Space Hulk Mission 1

I've finally got all the Space Hulk board pieces made. Just as a test, I built the first mission's map:


The red triangle shows the Space Marine entry area, and the green triangles show the Genestealer entry areas.

I also took a picture of what it looks like for the Space Marines to enter the board.


Now I just have to paint the miniatures...

Space Hulk Board

Here's an example of board pieces assembled together. Full maps from the actual missions use more sections and are quite a bit larger.

Space Hulk

Space Hulk is an old boardgame published by Games Workshop. One player controls space marines in heavy powered armour who board derelict star ships called "space hulks", in order to perform a variety of missions. These usually involve retrieving some kind of data or going to a particular room to access the ship's controls. They are opposed by aliens called "Genestealers" that live on these derelicts and try to kill the boarding space marines. These aliens, of course, are controlled by the other player. The game is played on a board made up of interlocking sections (with jigsaw puzzle like connectors) that can be rearranged to give a variety of different maps. The space marines and Genestealers are represented by nicely detailed Games Workshop miniatures from their Warhammer 40k line. I've played some computer adaptations of the game and found it to be a lot of fun, so I've been trying to get a copy. The problem is, the game is long out of print, and commands very high prices on eBay, if you can find it at all.

Interestingly enough, I found out that Games Workshop has released the rules of the 2nd edition of the game free as a .pdf file, along with .pdf file pictures of the original board sections. So I've started a project to create a set of the game.

The board sections:
The board sections are easy, if tedious, to make. You can simply print them out on regular paper using a colour printer, glue the paper to cardboard, and cut out the sections. The full game has some 54 individual sections, so I'm still in the middle of doing that.

The rulebook:

You just have to print it out. No problem.

The miniatures:

This is the cool part of the game - collecting and painting miniatures is a fun hobby by itself.

For the game, I'm using some heavy powered armour miniatures I already have from a different manufacturer (Ground Zero Games), but at around the same scale. These will stand in as the space marines.

This represents a space marine with a basic ranged weapon, called a "storm bolter" in Space Hulk. I'll use the guy on the far right with the antenna on his back as a Sergeant in Space Hulk. The guys with two boxes on their shoulders will be regular space marines - I'll just say they have searchlights mounted. The guy on the left has a heavy weapon, which I will use to represent a "flamer" (basically a flamethrower) in Space Hulk.

A closer look at the heavy weapon guy.

With the Genestealers, I don't have any models, so I ordered a bunch of them on eBay. These miniatures are fairly common, since they are a common troop type in the table top wargame Warhammer 40k, which uses the same models. I got some painted ones and unpainted ones - I might have to repaint the others anyways.

These ones are already painted by the previous owner, but I might change the colour scheme.

These are freshly assembled out of the box, plastic-coloured.

Well, I'll keep working on these and see how they all turn out.