Welcome back, dear reader, to the fourth installment of our BLUNDERDOME series. In case you missed what all this is about, you can find the rundown in our first article. We’re now two weeks in to this terrible debacle; on Monday we reviewed the results of our Round 1 match-ups and previewed our Round 2 games. Then our intrepid group of saps went off and played said games. Players were matched up according to their record and seed, only in a kind of reverse – the losers from last week were paired up again in our 3-round single “elimination” bracket, while the winners got re-seeded.
In today’s article we’re going to talk about this second round of terrible games and the results.
THE MISSION: SCORCHED EARTH
Round 2 is our dawn of war deployment map, giving some factions a bit more leeway to spread out and surround opponents, but also increasing the distance between deployment zones. There are now 6 objectives to fight over, with hold 1/hold 2 primary scoring and no “lock in” for holding objectives after you leave them.
Let’s jump into the pairings and see how the games went.
Dark Angels (3) Greg Chiasson vs. Drukhari (1) Michael Pestilens
Greg: We spent like five minutes talking about how bad the mission secondary is, so of course I immediately picked it and spent a CP for Secret Agenda to hide the fact, because I thought it would be very funny when I scored it. That didn’t end up happening, and reading this is probably the first Mike heard about what my secret objective even was. I also took Oaths and Raise Banners. Oaths is a no-brainer with this list, and Banners, well, I had to pick something.
There was absolutely no chance of this being even a close loss. Once again, I had no space to deploy the Fortress of Redemption, so I was playing 1600 points of Dark Angels into 2000 points of Drukhari. Still, turn one went OK: I didn’t lose any models, and took out a few of his trash screening units. Turn two he finished Ravager-ing the Darkshrouds, and then his entire army advanced and charged, and locked every single unit on my side in combat. After turn three we called it, because I had nothing left and would score no more points.
The lowlights of this game were:
- His Ravager shooting my Champion, and me rolling for the Ancient to see if he could shoot on death, then realizing that the Champion had no guns. Great.
- Failing two charges out of deep strike by rolling 8s. I didn’t really expect both of these to go off, and even getting one was a stretch, but rolling exactly an 8 both times when I needed a 9 is just rude as hell.
Druhkari are bullshit and they never should have been allowed in Blunderdome. I’m over here with chainsword captains and this guy has multiple Succubi? There are Blasters in units? ObSec units! What the hell is this, fuck you.
Final score was 100-18. I got 5 for Primary, 11 on Oaths, and 2 for Banners. Between this and what happened with my T’au list, I am firmly out of the lead and likely to descend to my usual level of never being allowed to have nice things. I hate Blunderdome now.
Chaos Daemons (2) Scott Horras vs. Chaos Space Marines (4) Liam “Corrode” RoyleCondit
Liam kept complaining about playing the cultists and it looks like he finally managed to weasel his way out of playing them by convincing Condit to take his place. Condit’s not as good a player as Liam but here’s the secret: It doesn’t matter, this Cultist list was always going to get slaughtered by the Chaos Daemons.
Condit: So before the game even started, I joked that I was going to take up the entire deployment zone with this stupid fucking army since the only units that could go in vehicles were the 4 characters. When I said that, though, I didn’t realize just how true it was:
The upside of this is that it meant that it would be literally impossible for Scott’s strategic reserves to come in behind me, so at the very least I would only have to be worried about being murdered from the front.
During this game, I made several ill-advised moves with the Rhinos, of which 5 or so got mulched unceremoniously by Skarbrand and the remainder of which died to Bloodcrushers, while basically all of my cultists got murdered by Flesh Hounds. Holding objectives wound up being harder than you’d think with as many models as I had, especially since I went second, which gave Scott the opportunity to charge at least a couple of my units round 2.
I also lost one of my Dark Apostles – he didn’t get killed, he literally vanished from the Rhino he was in at the bottom of turn 2 – which I can’t blame him for because honestly if I’d had the option to just leave halfway through without Rob tracking me down and dragging me back to the table to finish the game, I would have.
In the end, I lost 83-7, so between the two of us, we scored a perfect 90. I’ll donate my half of the paint score to charity.
I did kill Skarbrand with a Cultist in melee, though, so that’s something.
Necrons (5) Innes Wilson vs. Tyranids (7) Robert “TheChirurgeon” Jones
Rob: This was probably the nadir game of Blunderdome. Innes’ list, with it’s seven units, of which only 4 could move, was up against a Tyranids list with few scoring units, and the ones that could score were perfect targets for Gauss pylons. This was the only mission where I put any spore mines in deep strike, on the foolish hope that they might all gang up and destroy a single pylon. That was something I quickly became disabused of however, as it became clear I’d need all of my army just to win the battle over the two middle objectives. And that’s really what this was about – we could both realistically hold our home two all game, so the question was who could win those two midtable objectives. And as it turns out, when you can just shoot spore mines off the table it’s a lot harder to take out Necron vehicles with a bunch of S5 AP0 characters. I managed to kill a couple of Innes’ vehicles but ultimately he held on to the midtable objectives and outlasted me for the win.
Astra Militarum (6) Chase “Gunum” Garber vs. T’au Empire (8) James “Greater_Wing” Grover
Wings – The Plan: OK, OK – game face time. This is one of the very, very limited number of games this list might actually be able to win. The combination of the Dawn of War Deployment, six objectives and Leman Russ Vanquishers being extremely terrible does, just about, give a path to victory. It’s not an especially complicated one, involving rushing the mid board, feeding drones and battlesuits into melee with the tanks to slow them down, and doing the maximum possible to disrupt Chase’s scoring on his home objectives, but if I do all that the army can genuinely pull it off. Secondaries are To the Last on the big drone blobs, Engage and Banners. The plan is to put a banner up on the two home objectives turn one, put as many small Drone units on the line to fish for a full advance for a turn 1 three quarters engage, and then to only commit the big drone squads in the late game when they can hopefully wrap a tank that won’t be able to kill them fast enough. I can’t just leave them behind the walls forever, as there’s a small risk of a Deathstrike just going sicko mode and taking one off the table – the big missile is Blast, so does kill an average of nine drones from a 12-model squad, straight up. Keep them safe long enough that there isn’t enough attrition left in the game to take them out, then keep them in combat for the rest.
Result: Wings (Tau) wins 87-67.
Ladies and gentlemen DO YOU BELIEVE IN MIRACLES??? We have our first OFFICIAL UPSET OF BLUNDERDOME. In a stunning victory for T’au players everywhere, James “One_Wing” Grover held on to defeat Chase’s Astra Militarum list.
Wings – The Aftermath: So there was an additional factor that turned out to be necessary to my victory – Chase rolling some dice that were bad in a truly legendary way. We’re talking misses on every shot for his four Vanquisher main guns on one flank turn one, 1s re-rolled into 1s on the d6 damage, and getting to fire exactly one Deathstrike missile despite getting to roll to try on all three turns four and five. At the point his Lord Commissar turned a relic pistol on some Drones and rolled triple 1 to hit I genuinely thought Chase might be about to call it.
That aforementioned Deathstrike missile killed exactly four drones, which was enough to take out one of my To the Last squads, but it didn’t matter – his secondaries mirrored mine but I went first with a lot more models, which meant I kept him completely off Banners and Primary for his first few turns with judicious charges, deployed straggling single models to stop him putting new Banners up and generally making enough of a nuisance of myself that I was able to pull it out.
You can definitely see from the scores that if Chase hadn’t rolled so atrociously, and started scoring a turn earlier, things might have flipped – I was distinctly running out of stuff and even, for example, Deathstriking enough Drones out of a unit that they no longer had the space coverage to wrap a tank against a wall (the state in which the two surviving squads ended the game) could have chipped away significantly more of my points. Big shout out to one of my Fireblades for successfully killing a Commissar in combat – I choose to believe it was the same one who killed the Beastmaster game one, a true hero of the Tau Empire who has become one with his Hanzo steel. Another Commissar ate it at the blocky hands of some Crisis Bodyguards which, big news, means the total points cost of units this list has killed is now over 100pts. Take that haters. Also Greg, who we have to remember is the real loser of this matchup. Thanks to Chase for a great game, and I look forward to being crushed even harder than in round 1 when I stroll into the 1-1 bracket with this abomination.
Next Time: Round 3
Talk about an exciting, dumb round of games. Stay tuned for our round 3 preview on Monday where we’ll talk about the final round of games and how things are shaking out in the standings. In the meantime, if you have any questions or feedback, drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com.
