Bonesplitterz at the Blackout VI GT: An Age of Sigmar Tournament Report

The Blackout series of events are 5-round, 2000-point matched play AoS affairs, usually run as ‘by the book’ as possible. Veteran TO Chris Tomlin has had an understandably rough recent run of it with cancellations and drops around Covid, so it was nice to finally have one run totally smoothly. 

The venue is Firestorm Games in Cardiff, which is a great location: easy to get to, big, airy and lunch is included in your ticket. If there’s a complaint to be had it’s that the terrain is really starting to show its age and there are some particularly ropey tables scattered around. 

Unusually for a Blackout, the army lists and battleplans were all published in advance, as was the round one draw. I was full of good intentions to use this to be really prepared in advance, practice all of my deployments and plan out matchups vs the popular armies. Instead I got really sick and was happy enough to recover in time to actually go.

The List

Allegiance: Bonesplitterz
– Warclan: Drakkfoot
– Grand Strategy: Take What’s Theirs
– Triumphs: Indomitable

Leaders

Savage Big Boss (65)**
– General
– Command Trait: Great Hunter

Savage Big Boss (65)**
Savage Big Boss (65)**

Wurrgog Prophet (150)*
– Artefact: Glowin’ Tattooz
– Lore of the Savage Beast: Gorkamorka’s War Cry

Wurrgog Prophet (150)*
– Artefact: Dokk Juice
– Lore of the Savage Beast: Gorkamorka’s War Cry

Maniak Weirdnob (100)*
– Artefact: Mork’s Boney Bitz
– Mount Trait: Fast ‘Un
– Lore of the Savage Beast: Glowy Green Tusks

Battleline

10 x Savage Orruks (165)****
– Stikkas

10 x Savage Orruk Morboys (155)****
10 x Savage Orruk Morboys (155)****

Units

10 x Savage Boarboy Maniaks (290)***
– Reinforced x 1

4 x Savage Big Stabbas (160)***
– Reinforced x 1

4 x Savage Big Stabbas (160)***
– Reinforced x 1

2 x Savage Big Stabbas (80)
2 x Savage Big Stabbas (80)**
2 x Savage Big Stabbas (80)*

Endless Spells & Invocations
Purple Sun of Shyish (70)

Core Battalions

*Warlord
**Warlord
***Bounty Hunters
****Expert Conquerors

Total: 1990 / 2000
Reinforced Units: 3 / 4
Allies: 0 / 400
Wounds: 184
Drops: 15

Bonesplitterz were always going to be the army I took – I’ve been playing them virtually for some time but hadn’t managed to take them to a real life event. Drakkfoot was a meta call, ward saves are an increasingly common mechanic and Maggotkin of Nurgle are strong and popular. 

The list itself was somewhat dictated by available models. I don’t know any other Bonesplitterz players, and I’m averse to begging, borrowing or stealing models anyway so there was always a hard cap on how many Big Stabbas I could bring, taking the full spam army off the table. Savage Big Bosses are a decent sub in, they’re a pip of rend off of being a unit of Big Stabbas at a discount and give you some activation play with their ability to let another Bonesplitterz unit fight after they do. The Maniaks are a brick of 30 wounds that cover a lot of board space, are fast and can hit extremely hard in the right circumstances. 

Beyond that it’s fairly standard: Big Stabbas can stand 2.5” behind walls of foot Orruks to give you a counterpunch into enemy charges, Wurrgog Prophets keep people honest with ‘infinite’ mortal wounds and the Maniak Weirdnob with fast ‘un gives me the ability to move 8” at the start of the game, then another 12” in my hero phase and then cast Purple Sun, projecting that power at a massive distance that isn’t usually possible. 

The three big gimmicks to always keep in mind are Bonesplitterz having access to a once-per-game 4+ ward in the combat phase, an 8” pre-game move that lets you start the game on mid-field objectives, and Drakkfoot simply switching enemy wards off vs their attacks. 

Game 1: vs Aaron Hazell, Stormcast Eternals

Close to the Chest

Aaron's list - click to expand

Theory

You have to admire the commitment to the bit, running a subfaction that does genuinely nothing for your army just because they’re painted that way. 

Stormcast aren’t in the best place at the moment, but this army shouldn’t be underestimated. It’s got a very aggressive scaly wall and an ungodly amount of shooting that’s perfect for picking up my smaller units. My goal here is to weather the storm, control the objectives and eventually push out into his shooting threats whilst I still have an army. 

Practice

An interesting game. I deploy incredibly badly and forget about using my pre-game move to screen, so leave my general without Look Out Sir. Fortunately Aaron deep strikes his Judicators to take out the Maniak Weirdnob, figuring the long range Purple Sun threat is the more important. He plays it very aggressively with his Stardrake but I call the Waaagh and get it stuck on some Morboys. 

I repeatedly make awful decisions on retreating in this game, saving the retreat move for last and then giving perfect redeploys. Fortunately, my Wurrgog and stabbas kill the Stardrake. The game goes very back and forth from here, as we trade pieces in each other’s turns and essentially keep the same score. The crucial turn comes when I fail a battle tactic from Tempestors rolling four 6s to save vs some stabbas and the sun, and that’s enough for it to be game – I never quite made it to the Judicators and the constant chip damage was just too much. 

We made a mistake on the Battleplan with where the attacker/defender objectives were, that did end up working out in Aaron’s favour. We’d both played for it being in those wrong positions and it was way too late when we caught it, but I think if we’d played it right I could have gotten the win even with that battle tactic failure. Make sure you double check the battleplan!

Result: Major Loss (21-22)

Engage the submarine.

Game 2: vs. Chris Mills, Idoneth Deepkin

The Realmstone Cache

Chris' list - click to expand

Theory

It’s an interesting army. There are model choices here that Chris would admit were more to chase painting awards than gaming (which fair enough, he did get second best painted) but there’s a surprising volume of shooting coming out of all of those fish. If he gives me the first turn he can set up for a potentially brutal double into high tide. 

Working in my favour is the battleplan. The Realmstone Cache funnels your armies together early, and if he is reversing the tides then I know he wants to commit to a fight at exactly the moment there’s only one objective to fight over. Being very strong in melee for one battle round is the Deepkin specialty, but tanking a melee alpha strike is mine and there are simply not many aelves on the table once we get into a fight. Drakkfoot means the ward save defences you can get on Namarti are simply gone. 

Practice

This largely went to plan for me. Chris took the first turn, reversed the tides and played it very aggressively. I’d also aggressively pre-game moved the pigs onto the mid-board and he took the bait. I spent my first turn mostly trying to unpack my army from the cramped deployment zone and set up to kill Volturnos, who’d made a massive charge into my back lines. Volty heroically passed 11 of 13 4+ saves to survive a big stabbing but my army is in a decent position for high tide. 

I get the double into turn 2, wipe out some sharks and get the majority of my expert conqueror bodies onto the objective, wiping out his Reavers. Volty finally bites the dust. He commits hard with high tide in his own turn but I’d managed to save the waaagh and he bounces hard. The Leviadon fails to kill a big boss. This means he doesn’t control the central objective, putting him behind. I win priority again, the objectives explode out to where I can easily reach them, the Wurrgogs kill the Leviadon and I mop up most of the rest of his army, so we call it there. 

Result: Major Win, 21-6

Game 3: vs. Daniel White, Kruleboys

The Prize of Gallet

Daniel's list - click to expand

Theory

Monster mash Kruleboys is just super cool as a concept, and the supa sneaky + fast un combo can have a Sludgeraker running around in your backfield as soon as the game begins. Daniel was chasing a 4-1 result to become the highest ranked Kruleboys player, so it was exciting to have a punt at denying that. 

This is the kind of game I want to see, if I’m being honest. A fairly simple battleplan and a fragile melee alpha strike opponent means if I can weather that initial hit, I’m confident I can mop those stinky Kruleboys up pretty quickly.

Practice

As expected, the arcane tome Sludgeraker appears in my back field but I get the clutch unbind on nasty hex (thanks to being handed a +3 unbind on the Maniak Weirdnob from mork’s boney bits). Nevertheless he goes for the big alpha strike and charges the three Sludgerakers into my wall of boys. We both call the waaagh and do a bit of damage to each other, but nothing really dies. Daniel thought he was unlucky not rolling many 6s to hit here, which he didn’t, but to be honest it’s not a huge difference vs my army that isn’t really getting to take armour saves anyway. The extra mortals from 6s on the Sludgerakers wouldn’t have been enough to push through past the screen. 

My return turn is pretty quiet with the Wurrgogs almost killing themselves to no effect, I pick up one Sludge. I get the priority into two and Daniel extremely prematurely shakes my hand. Ultimately, once his alpha strike had failed his heart went out of the game. I said we should carry on, as it definitely was not over, especially given how badly my last turn went – and there was still a totally unengaged Incarnate on the board. I pick up his remaining Sludgerakers and take board control. In response his incarnate goes in, kills 3 big stabbas and loses a level. This is the point where we call it for real; Daniel’s just rolling dice and not having any fun so I’m not going to force him to play out the rest of the game if he doesn’t want to.

Result: Major Win (Conceded me a max win)

We caught up on Sunday and he was much perkier; it’s all good. 

Game 4: vs. Kenney Gibson-Chhetri, Maggotkin of Nurgle

In the Presence of Idols

Kenney's list - click to expand

Theory

In Warhammer, even if your army is theoretically very strong there are certain matchups that are just terrible for you. Unfortunately for Kenney, my army is designed to fight Nurgle and this is a tough matchup for him. 

The matchup got posted Saturday night, so we had the evening to study each other’s armies and strategise. I went to bed, Kenney hit the town.

Practice

This game took a long time to play out, we only actually made it through two full rounds, but that was enough to decide the game. Kenney started off a bit worse for wear, so hopefully won’t mind me saying that I reminded him of his own rules a fair bit. I guess I could have played cutthroat and not done that, but cannot imagine wanting to play that way. 

I actually made a pretty hefty mistake on this one, calling the waaagh prematurely and losing what I was trying to protect anyway and giving him a double turn of getting into the meat of my army and killing a lot of stuff. A second huge mistake was forgetting what the shield of growths does – I’m too used to playing against the 4+ ward! – and doing a galaxy brained play of putting big stabba mortal wounds on death into his Lord of Afflictions, handily giving him save rerolls before my other big unit of big stabbas attacked, letting him survive on 2 wounds when he’d otherwise have died. 

Fortunately the power of this skewed matchup helped to not punish these mistakes too badly. Purple sun finally decided to do something after not eating anything all game and killed Bloab and a Beast round one. In my second turn after scraping through his double the Wurrgogs pick up Orghotts and the Lord of Afflictions, I grab every objective and kill all but one of his flies. I then double him back into round three, and we talk through the game with about half an hour left on the clock. 

Kenney was a great opponent – he had played the matchup before and gave it as good a go as he could. It ended up not looking very close, but it really was touch and go in those early turns as I piled on the mistakes.

Result: Major Win, 25-15

Game 5: vs. Matthew Gouldesbrough, Lumineth Realm Lords

Head-on Collision

Matthew's list - click to expand

Theory

In Warhammer even if your army is theoretically very strong, there are certain matchups that are just terrible for you. Unfortunately for me, my army just… doesn’t have a way to interact with this LRL list. 

Sevireth and the spirit of the wind can move with perfect information to do everything they want to do, and avoid any way my army has of meaningfully touching them. The blob of kangaroos can run out of their castle, shoot something off, and then run right back into their castle without me being able to respond. It’s a question of how much of my army can survive walking up the board and standing on objectives before it all falls apart. 

Practice

I mentally gave up here. Not instantly, but quite early. That’s poor form, but it was quite a disheartening game to play. 

The plan was to run up as fast as possible (somewhat hampered by my run rolls being so bad that Matthew asked me to change dice because he couldn’t watch me roll another 1) and corral the Lumineth into their own corner for as long as possible. I did make a mistake here and charged with the pigs into his castle, desperate to do anything that felt like a play. It took lambent light off the table, which is nice, but I lost all of the pigs in return and that’s basically a full turn of wounds for him to have to shoot off an objective lost in my own turn. 

I think if I’d played as tight as possible to the zero engagement, just score plan and had won a single priority roll the whole game then I might have had a chance here, though it was always going to be very difficult and very boring. As it was, Matthew played it as tight as he needed to, won every priority and picked up enough to have effectively neutralised my army by the end of the third battleround. I was still scoring OK at this point, and was ahead when we called the game, but when he won the priority for four there really was no more hope for me to score any more than one or two more VP and he would easily max for his next two turns.

I did get to call a comedy waaagh for a 2+ ward on a Wurrgog at one point, so having him laugh in the face of a thousand kangaroos was at least quite funny.

Matthew was lovely and his army was gorgeous but absolutely miserable to play against when you have no (or limited) ways of reaching out and touching it. Fair play, he knew it as well and said as much. Fingers crossed for the new tome. 

Result: Major Loss (13-9 when I conceded)

Final Thoughts

A shame to finish an otherwise great event on a bit of a bum note, but overall I was happy. I’d thought in advance that I had a 4-1 in me with this army, so a 3-2 is a little disappointing, but those losses were games where I made big mistakes so I’ve only got myself to blame there and I’ve come away with things I know I need to improve on (please stop giving your opponent free redeploys).

Is there anything I’d change in my list? Fitting an Incarnate in would undoubtedly improve how competitive the army is into its more difficult matchups, but I can’t stand the Incarnate model so I’m probably not going to go there. 

The big change I think I’d make would be spell selection. Glowy green tusks and Gorkamorka’s war cry are the ‘best’ spells in the Bonesplitterz lore, but I found I was almost never casting them. I had tusks on the Maniak, who was more often than not using his single cast on Purple Sun early, and by the time he’d be more able to buff the boars they were quite often very dead or depleted. Likewise I didn’t cast war cry once, both casts of it were on the Wurrgog prophets but the 12” range on the spell is the exact same range as on their Wurrgog mask ability which I elected to use every time rather than casting. Maybe this was a mistake in some situations, but it feels like anti-synergy on that model.

I think what I’ll probably do going forwards is swap the spells up, take war cry on the Maniak and then tusks and power of the were-boar on the Wurrgogs. Were-boar isn’t a fantastic spell, it’s +1 to hit and charge, but in situations where the Wurrgog isn’t within 12” of an enemy it gives me something to do that isn’t bolt and shield.

I think there’s also an argument that I should replace the Maniaks with regular boar boys. It’s a slight points saving for that triumph bid, and whilst they’re less offensively powerful I found that very often the boars were getting charged themselves, and I was using their wound pool to tank. Taking the unit with an extra pip of armour save probably serves me better in that role.

My next event is in December where I’ll either do the right thing and run a tweaked version of the same army for practice or, much more likely, get very distracted by rats and run the stupidest Skaven army in the world.

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