Campaign Overview

This campaign comprises two games: a 100pt game of Kill Team and a 1000pt game of Warhammer 40,000. The first game can be played with any appropriate Kill Team mission (we chose Recover Intelligence). The winner of the Kill Team game may veto 1 card from the Open War draw (e.g. Deployment, Objective or Twist). 

Playing the Campaign

Game 1: John opted to use Death Guard and I brought my Blood Angels out to play. As I was using Primaris models it meant my Kill Team was a little vanilla (I’m getting my excuses in early…), with 6 Intercessors. John’s was more varied with 4 Plague Marines and 4 Pox Walkers, the Plague Marines being armed with a blight launcher, a bubonic axe, a power fist and a standard load out. That’s why my marines looked so vanilla – they had Bolt Rifles and their puny fists! We had a fun game – it was John’s first go at Kill Team and I think he liked it. Here are some photos from the game:

In summary – my shots bounced off of John’s Plague Marines while he easily outscored me on VPs! 

Game 2: On to the main course. Here are the Open War cards we ended up with for our game of 40k:

John vetoed the first Twist card we drew (which allowed one force to deploy first, but pretty much guarantee going first) and we ended up with Grudge Match, which resulted in a pretty epic and bloody game.

I decided to have a Primaris Chaplain lead the force as I recently painted him and it fit the fluff (the Blood Angels trying to resist the Blood Rage caused by the Sanguous Flux). Joining him were 3 units of Intercessors, a unit of Hellblasters, a Lieutenant, a Predator and a Redemptor Dreadnaught.

John opted for a Daemon Prince of Nurgle [8 PL, 156pts]: Hellforged sword, Warlord, 2 units of Plague Marines, 3 Myphitic Blight-haulers (which really scared me!) and a Plagueburst Crawler. I had no idea what his force could do, but I was about to find out in a tight and hard fought game…

Deployment

We used a 4′ x 4′ board as with only 1000pts it would give plenty of room. The objectives hadn’t been placed when I took the photo, but I place 3 close the the right hand side and John distributed his quite evenly along the back line. I won’t detail everything that happened in the battle, but John’s force advanced on two fronts, while the Plagueburst Crawler hung back – the Blight-haulers and a unit of Plague Marines moved up in front of the Predator and the other unit of Plague Marines, with a somewhat cautious (initially!) Daemon Prince moved towards the Redemptor. 

I focussed heavily on trying to take down the Blight-haulers and this eventually paid dividends with the Chaplain landing the killing blow. This took a lot of effort and saw the Hellblasters reduced to one marine and the Predator was taken out too!

Much of my other shooting had proven ineffective, until, for some unknown reason, it just lit up… severely mauling the two units of Plague Marines. Things weren’t looking too bad at this point as I still had some units in play and John was more-or-less reduced to the Daemon Prince and Plagueburst Crawler.

The Daemon Prince came out to play… he took out the Chaplain in a single Curse of the Leper (Yup, rolling five 5+ on seven dice!).

The Daemon Prince was within striking distance of my objectives (he could Burn and Pillage one at the end of each turn). My troops on the left flank were already high-tailing it towards John’s objectives, leaving the Redemptor to try to slow John’s Warlord.

Alas, I couldn’t quite slow him enough and John managed to remove my final objective about a turn before I would have gotten to his last one. It was an exceptionally close game in the end!

There is still a lot to fight for on Benus Majoris…

Until next time,

Owen