THE BROS ARE BACK much to everyone’s surprise. Battle Bros is an ongoing bi-weekly column where Drew (PantsOptional) taught his brother Chris (head58) how to play Warhammer 40,000 and now, well you’ll see the gimmick this time shortly. Catch up on their past adventures here.
Meet the Battle Bros
Chris
The older of the two brothers, unsure of the road ahead.
Drew
The younger brother, overconfident in his “knowledge” of what is to come.
DREW: Oh you thought you were rid of us? To be fair, so did we up until very recently. We were free of this burden which we have voluntarily placed around our necks. We’re like Atlas if he put the heavens on his own back, could stop any time he wanted, and wouldn’t stop whining about how much he didn’t wanna do it.
CHRIS: This must be what Dreadnoughts feel like. We were promised sleep, maybe they’d even finally let us die this time. But no, not for us. Only in death does posting end.
DREW: To set the stage for where we are now, let’s flash back to a time shrouded by the mists of history, ancient and unknowable: last November. We alluded to this at the time and didn’t want to go into too much detail as it wasn’t the focus, but we had an idea which was so dumb it wrapped back around to genius. A certain online minis store which will not be named (let’s call it Sadness Minis for obvious reasons ) offered a Black Friday deal which seemed wildly absurd: for the low low price of $200 you would receive nearly 2000 points of a randomly chosen army for Warhammer 40k.
One thing about me: I am a goddamn sucker for the random option. The liquor store near me used to offer a “Mystery Bag” which was an assorted six-pack of off-seasonals, terrible hard lemonade varietals, and random decent-to-good beers packaged in a paper bag with question marks drawn all over it like the Riddler had fallen on hard times. My heart shrank three sizes the day they stopped selling those, though to be fair my liver probably did too.
Inevitably the Sadness Minis deal didn’t work out. We had such plans to spend the first half of 2024 building our random armies, playing them at the Goonhammer Open Narrative event, and auctioning them off for charity at the event. Those plans were dashed on the rocks as soon as the packages arrived at Chris’s house and we started making a big unboxing video only to discover there was nowhere near 2000 points worth of models there.
In fact, if you added both our armies together we barely made 1000 points. Supposedly there had been some sort of marketing error which led to the points-to-dollars ratio being incorrect; we’re not interested in litigating the situation. At the end of the day our dream of doing a big dumb column about learning and piloting random armies gave way to the Necbromunda season which was nothing if not funny.
CHRIS: If by “marketing error” you mean “dude realized he would lose his shirt if he actually delivered what he promised and backpedaled hard, and supposedly sent out an email almost immediately claiming that the initial offer had just been a draft which was sent out accidentally but strangely I never got that clarification” then yes. But whatever, I’m not bitter.
If memory serves we went on to play my one and only (so far) game of 40K 10th edition that day. I won only because you were so incredibly salty at not only seemingly getting shafted on the random army deal but also (to add insult to injury) you ended up with AdMech, the one army you actively feared receiving. For the record, I was only a little more pleased with my Ravenwing box but I would have taken yours in a heartbeat – robbit-heavy Martian armies are my weakness.
But all of this is ancient history, why have we been dragged back here when we just goddamn finished a “season” of this column and I was looking forward to a good year and a half of not doing anything?
DREW: As it turns out we seem to have been fated to “solve a mystery” as my friends used to call it, but hopefully this time I wouldn’t have to drink some sugary acidic mango monstrosity. (Putting a pin in “Mango Monstrosity” for a Certain Someone’s drag name, by the way.) My local game store (Off the Wall Games in West Springfield, MA) announced a special “tournament” event for early October. The catch? It’s a Combat Patrol blind box tourney. You randomly determine which ComPat box you will play and you take it home ahead of time to assemble and paint.
Oh, baby.
Naturally I messaged Chris immediately to inform him and he replied with those words everyone wants to hear: “Yeah fuck it, I’m in. I’m two bourbons deep and excited to make bad decisions.” I did not expect him to also pitch it as another Battle Bros season, but I think you can probably guess what happened and if you can’t, maybe go lie down for a while.
CHRIS: How would we not turn this into a new season? Displaying our full asses to our reader(s) is our full brand. That and wondering if anyone at Goonhammer HQ actually edits or reads these.
But the pressure was on – once someone claimed a box it was off the list. They could try to order a replacement for you but you know we would be utterly screwed by GW’s warehouse and end up delivering the box a week before the tournament. If we wanted Good Pickins we had to get there ASAP.
DREW: With the blessing of “Bossman Rob” as my phone knows him we headed down to the store to roll up our Combat Patrols. We both decided on the Tier Two option of picking twelve and we independently came to the same decision that our list of twelve should consist solely of options which were on the store shelves so we adjusted our twelve after seeing what was in stock. Some of the boxes had sold out and others were on pre-order but we were determined to walk out with boxen in hand. Strictly speaking my list was entirely factions which I hadn’t played before, and if you claim that Dark Angels and Black Templars are Marines and that I play those so my statement is false then all I can offer you is a weary shrug and a slow saunter away into the sunset.
CHRIS: I had, of course, made a spreadsheet of factions I’d prefer, in ranked order, because I am the Bertiest Bert who ever Berted. Five of my top twelve (World Eaters, AdMech, Thousand Sons, Drukhari, Dark Angels) were already claimed so it didn’t look great going in. I had a deep dread that I was going to end up painting Orks again.
Which leads me to ponder: if the available list was down to about 15, should we have gone with the d20 for the extra free reroll since the dude at the store said “if what you roll is out of stock you can roll again”? If we were Smart Men, that’s maybe what we would have done. But, you know.
DREW: The dice spoke! For a moment I thought “not too bad, I’ve at least assembled and painted Space Wolves before.” Friends, let’s take a look at the box for this:
Ah, beans. I’m on record about Reivers, as is his cat. I do not enjoy the look or concept of Phobos armor and I have little use for Reivers in the game. They pack about as much punch as a newborn puppy and somehow two editions later they still have Leadership shenanigans as an ability. Personal aesthetics objections aside, at least Infiltrators serve a greater purpose and do so reliably and I’m sure Eliminators and Incursors do something. This leaves the Invictor and the Intercessors which means the Invictor is going to be doing a lot of heavy lifting especially since it’s going to be carrying around a massive target on its back. I’ll have to do some research but I might be able to make this work. It’s definitely not the worst thing which I could have rolled.
In a totally-not-connected question, what exactly did you roll?
CHRIS: I was pretty happy with my roll, actually. My die came up a 2, so I was in good shape ranked choice-wise. That was Leagues of Votann. I’ve liked the Space Dorf aesthetic since they returned and they look interesting to paint up. I’d even bought a box of Necromunda Ironhead Squats at one point before realizing I had Too Many Necromunda Gangs and giving it to Josh (who had way, way Too Many Necromunda Gangs already, what’s one more?). A basic 10-model battleline unit, a generic leader, five “Beserkers” (the spelling of which makes me very very angry), and three hover trikes. Seems like a decent little box.
I knew nothing about how LoV plays, though, so I did a little googling when I got home. It yielded a shocking number of posts saying things like “how do I not get utterly, completely, soul-crushingly stomped while playing Votann?” and “is the Votann Combat Patrol box merely the worst one currently available or truly the worst conceivable box in a world cursed by an unloving god?” Oh, good. Well, at least when I come in last in this tournament I can blame the box. At least I didn’t end up with Reivers, amirite?
I also need to say the rules for the Combat Patrol force are weird. I understand it’s a simplified version of the game but the gear choices seem sub-optimal, especially if I ever wanted to expand this into a full army. And frustratingly my Beserker (!!!) with the grenade launcher doesn’t have her little robbit friend to carry her axe! Disappointed! But then the Hearthkyn Warriors feels more like a Kill Team setup – one with a medpack, one with a scanner, one with a HyLas rifle, one with a railgun, and one with a comms array. The comms array doesn’t do anything in the Combat Patrol rules – it’s not even referenced in the Wargear Abilities. Same for the Kahl’s “teleport crest.” What the heck? Was this truly the last Combat Patrol they threw together rules for on a Friday afternoon ten minutes before clocking out? Really starting to seem that way. But having just come off a season of Necromunda poor and/or inconsistent editing isn’t going to slow me down!
DREW: Having played Crusade games for the last few years I’m no stranger to mechanics which work funkily and are never expected to update. Thankfully the Space Wolves box seems to be free of the problem of mystery wargear and/or rules and instead the main problem is one of utility/coherency. Everything in the box is a pretty standard unit, but none of it really goes together in a meaningful way. It feels like opening up one of those home meal prep kits (promo code BATTLEBROS) only to find that it contains a piece of lobster, a turnip, and some dog hair. I can make this work, but it’s gonna take a little doing and maybe don’t eat the fuzzy bits.
Moreover, the best abilities and wargear from 40k for each unit are removed. It’s going to be really hard to remember the Lieutenant doesn’t give out Lethals and even harder to remember the Intercessors don’t have Objective Secured to “sticky” their objectives. The loss of Objective Secured just underlines how much it feels like the Lieutenant (Thoryk, if you nasty) really should be paired with Ass Incestos (you win, Cousin Greg) instead of the rifleman squad but that might just be me feeling the melee-heavy vibe of the Space Awoos. I’m not well versed enough in Space Dorfs to know the ins and outs of what’s omitted in their conversion but I can’t imagine it’s any better.
CHRIS: Neither am I! My impression at first blush is that their native Ballistic Skill is really dependent on having Vengeance tokens to increase the hit roll by 1, but with only four units (five if I split the Hearthkyn Warriors) the opportunities to place those tokens will be as rare as a catfish in a rodeo. They have ion blasters instead of bolters which hit harder but only have one shot instead of two which will hurt alongside their mediocre BS. But again I have to stress I’ve played one (1) game of 10th and have less idea what I’m talking about than usual here. The general vibe on both our boxes is, it seems, “whelming.” Let’s see if our stellar talents can pilot these go-carts made of wet cardboard and dog vomit pizza to victory!
Next Time: Putting It All Together
Will Drew throw the instructions for the ComPat out the window in a fit of rage? Will Chris waffle on a color scheme? Let’s all pretend we don’t know the answer!
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