Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing blog of competitive and hobby progress for 2024. Last time around I recounted my games at Warzone Houston 2024 and my somewhat disappointing 3-2 finish. With Warzone in my rearview, it was time to prep for my next (and final) big competitive event for the year: The Games Workshop US Open in Tampa. Tampa’s extra special this year because it’s the event we’ve got more of the East Coast crew attending – Ragnarok Angel is flying down to play Age of Sigmar, and Corrode is flying in from the UK to play 40k. That means some great hangout times and while I’m kind of sick of my Thousand Sons I’m still looking forward to…
…oh.
That escalated extremely quickly, and what was a tropical storm on Friday was suddenly a category 5 hurricane on Monday and being described as an “un-survivable” event. This prompted Games Workshop to cancel the tournament, and several phone calls later I had received the appropriate refunds for all of my travel and was looking at making other plans.
This is a bummer, but it happens. I still want to get in another big event this year so I can log a sixth ITC score and so I fire up Best Coast Pairings and see what’s in the area. As it turns out, Dragon’s Lair is running a GT next weekend (the weekend after Tampa), and that’s about a forty minute drive for me – worth doing, even if some of the names there are pretty nasty.
Right now I don’t really have the time to adjust tactics so my plan is to take the Thousand Sons again and aim for Best Overall and possibly Best Painted. I think both are doable but it’s going to depend a lot on who shows up and how good their armies look. That said, I suddenly found myself with a lot of additional time on my hands for hobby prep, and while I wasn’t able to get in any serious practice games this past weekend, I did get one game in that’s worth talking about.
Game 1: vs. Bryce’s King Warriors Space Marines
My wife was out of town last weekend for her annual Girls Trip to Vegas, which left me and Bryce to just kind of hang out and do shit. Heading into the weekend I asked him what he wanted to do, intimating that we could do all kinds of fun things, and he told me he really wanted to play a real game of Warhammer 40,000. We haven’t really played yet – he’s bounced off it in the past – but he has gotten a couple of demo games in against Max at the local Kingwood store. He tells me that Max is “too easy” because “Max’s secret weakness is kids,” and that “he wants a real game.” I’m happy to oblige, and I set out to build a proper learning game scenario.
The Armies
Up to this point, Bryce has painted five Assault Intercessors, five Terminators, a Terminator Captain, an Invictor Warsuit, and he’s about to finish his unit of Sanguinary Guard, but they still need some finishing touches. I figure he can run everything but the Guard in a 500ish point game and we can do something simple, with three objective markers on a 44×30 board down at the local GW. I should note that any time we do hobby or game stuff I take him over to the store – it’s way easier to focus when we’re in a dedicated environment, whereas if we stay home he’ll lose interest quickly and gravitate to the nearest screen.
I’m fully intending to let him win the game, so I put together a Death Guard army with five plague marines, five blightlords, a Foetid Bloat-Drone, and ten Poxwalkers. It looks close enough to even with his army in terms of unit counts, but it’s definitely less powerful overall, and I can sandbag with it as needed.
The Rules
One thing I do know is that aren’t going to play with the full game rules – there’s just too much bullshit in there, and Bryce just isn’t reading at that level yet. So before our game, I grab a notebook and create a special rulebook just for him:
The goal here was to write things at a level he could read, using mostly words he’d recognize, and to keep things colorful and easy to go back and forth with. I expect him to reference this during a game and so it needs to be colorful and simple. I’ve trimmed down the datasheets a bit – I want him to get the hang of the numbers, but anything more than one ability is too much.
We head over to the local GW on Saturday morning and Bryce puts some finishing touches on his Sanguinary Guard and while we wait for the texture paint on their bases to dry, we play a game. It’s simple Hammer and Anvil deployment with three objectives – I’m not really keeping score as I expect him to table me, but I want him to get used to seeing them on the table for now. He doesn’t really have the headspace to handle going after objectives, and in his defense, I’ve known grown men who couldn’t wrap their heads around playing objectives and not just killing things.
The book serves its purpose well during all of this, and Bryce refers back to it whenever one of his units has to act – I have him look things up as we go. So when the turn starts, I ask him what the first phase is, and he goes back to the phase list and looks it up and tells me. When he shoots, I ask him how many shots and what he needs to roll, and he looks that up too. It’s great for the repetition of him learning and also him feeling like he’s doing more active things.
The one thing I don’t really talk about in our game is doing Strength/Toughness comparisons. I put it in the book but generally it’s a bit too complicated for him as he’s still learning multiplication tables at the moment and it requires looking up enemy values so I just handle that for him on the fly.
I’m way outmatched in this game and Bryce won the roll-off to go first so he’s able to table me pretty quickly and it’s over on turn 4. I don’t play particularly coy but the goal here isn’t to win so much as it’s to get him the hang of the turn order and how units act during the game. Plus he’ll like the game more if he wins the first time. I can whoop him in the second go-around.
Hobby Progress
I’m still plugging away at my Night Lords, while also working with my son Bryce on his King Warriors Space Marines. He’s added a new unit to the army – Sanguinary Guard – who fit in very well with his insistence on painting the army gold, even though he doesn’t want to play Blood Angels because “that’s what Andrew [Corban] plays.”
After the game Max informs us that Armies on Parade is this upcoming weekend, and that they have a Youngbloods category. He’s very much into that, and I tell the missus she’s going to have to bring him by for the judging – but now that Tampa has canceled I can just do it myself. On that note, I now have ample reason to bring my own army this weekend and so I’m kicking myself into gear to get things painted for my own entry.
Before that, I help Bryce build a display board. I have an extra sheet of insulation foam sitting around, and it’s the right size for Bryce’s small army.
The first step is to paint the thing with PVA glue and seal it so it can be painted with spray paint later. If you do this well you can go to town on the thing without the paint eating away at it.
Bryce picks out the terrain items he wants to put on the board. He’s really partial to the Age of Sigmar terrain, which is fine by me, since I don’t have much use for it otherwise. His bases are all done as desert terrain, so that’s the theme we’re going with. We also decide to put a road on the table, using a piece of thin corkboard I had left over from another project.
He initially wanted it to be “a river of blood” but I talked him down from that, in part because having a river be a raised element would be weird.
Next up we glued the road down to the board and let it dry. This is where the fact that it hasn’t rained in a month helps, as the glue dries pretty quickly on everything. Next up is a coat of glue and the sand/basing grit. This is another step Bryce can help with, and he helps coat the whole thing, after which we place a bunch of skulls on it.
That sits for about an hour and then I coat the whole thing with Woodland Scenics Scene Cement, which is basically a mix of watered-down PVA glue in a spray bottle. It needs a couple of hours to dry but once it’s done the sand is absolutely stuck on there and the whole thing is ready for priming.
This is a two-step process: Mechanicus Standard Grey for the road, then Zandri Dust for everything else. Bryce can’t really help with the spray parts at this point – he just doesn’t have the finger strength to work the nozzles yet. But he can drybrush like a champion, and we drybrush the whole thing with Wraithbone.
We more or less finish the core board with some brown tufts of grass which will help match the board to his models’ bases. I’m pretty happy with it at this point but there’s more to be done. Specifically the terrain, plus there are some details Bryce wants to add.
After that, Bryce insists on doing the road stripes. That’s a pretty tall order given his painting skills, but I tape off some spots for him to paint with Averland Sunset. All laid out, it’s looking pretty good.
At this point the terrain is still left over. I’m not actually sure if we’re going to paint it in time for this weekend, but if we don’t, the board is plenty good as-is. I may even end up using it for my Thousand Sons in a week. At the very least I think I can prod him to paint one or two of the pieces of scatter terrain.
My Night Lords
With a sudden influx of time on my hands, I started working on my Night Lords. I’ve had a few Heresy models lying around for a while that I’ve wanted to use, and with a little bit of kitbashing they read very much as 40k Chaos models. The Heresy Night Lords models are great in part because – in similar fashion to the Word Bearers – they’re already rocking most of the aesthetics they’d have in 40k and look like Chaos models.
I started with this Chaos Lord:
He’s a little undersized but with that hero rock from the Chaos Lord in Terminator Armor he blends in just fine. On that note, I had a bunch of Contekar Terminators I picked up off Rocco. They needed a bit of work – I pulled off and swapped out their arms – they’ve got the aesthetic I want. As of this writing I’ve finished the first of five.
Next up was a Rhino. I have three of these I’m working on and they’re always fun opportunities to do custom freehand work. This first one has the sideways-facing winged skull I’ve decided will represent the Crimson wing, the Night Lords warband I’m taking to this year’s Grand Narrative.
One other thing I wanted to do was bring a Heldrake to the Narrative. I’ve got two painted Night Lords Heldrakes, but they were both painted years ago and still need quite a bit of work to get them up to the level of quality I want. That said, touching one up is also faster than painting a whole new unit for Saturday’s Armies on Parade, so I opt to touch him up this week. This is mostly a process of doing the interior panel lining on the Heldrake’s trim, then improving the shading on the gold trim.
When the whole thing is done I’m really happy with the result – the extra panel lining makes a huge difference and the gold looks much better.
And that pretty much squares me away for this update – I have four more Contekar I’m trying to finish for Saturday but if I don’t get them it’s not the end of the world. The army is coming along very well now and truth be told I needed the extra time this week for painting, and it was good to make some real progress with this army, even if there is still quite a bit to go.
Next Time: The Results, and Practice
That’s it for this week’s update. Check back next Thursday for an update on the Armies on Parade results plus a battle report from another practice game as I gear up for the Dragon’s Lair GT in two weeks. See you then.
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