2022 in Review

It was a quiet year for me hobby wise, I dabbled with running some RPGs and that took up a fair bit of my time. But there was still Warhammer…

Games

I played 20 games this year and won 82%, which might sound impressive but I wasn’t playing especially competitive games. This is a higher number of games than in either 2020 or 2021, we’re hopefully the other side of lock downs now.

I did play with the Terminus Est Assault Force an awful lot, I think that infantry only armies can work quite nicely. It’s also a reaction to my continued problems taking on Super Heavy enemy units. I just don’t really try and go toe to toe with them, I just play the mission.

I also played mostly Tempest of War missions using the cards, and I really enjoyed it. I didn’t play any missions from the Warzone Nephilim book at all… I’ve really enjoyed playing the cards, they seem a lot fairer than the 8th’s Maelstrom of War cards were.

Painting

Only 26 models for me this year, it was very much filling out some of the hole in my army. I think I’m particularly pleased with the Possessed and the Deathshroud. This does reflect that in many ways my army is pretty much “complete” and that I don’t want to start a new one. So I think I’ll continue to add in some odder models and things to help my forces be more WYSIWYG.

Aside from the Death Guard stuff I also painted some other bits, including a barrel and a Space Marine to mark the 35th Anniversary of 40k.

Death Guard (537pts)

• Plague Marines [12 PL, 147pts]
  • Plague Marine w/ cleaver [21pts]: Blight grenades, Great plague cleaver, Krak grenades, Plague knife
  • Plague Marine w/ flail [21pts]: Blight grenades, Flail of corruption, Krak grenades, Plague knife
  • Plague Marine w/ plague spewer [21pts]: Blight grenades, Krak grenades, Plague knife, Plague spewer
  • Plague Marine w/ special weapon [21pts]: Blight grenades, Krak grenades, Meltagun, Plague knife
  • Plague Marine w/ special weapon [21pts]: Blight grenades, Krak grenades, Meltagun, Plague knife
  • Plague Marine w/ special weapon [21pts]: Blight grenades, Krak grenades, Meltagun, Plague knife
  • Plague Marine w/ special weapon [21pts]: Blight grenades, Krak grenades, Meltagun, Plague knife
• Death Guard Possessed [6 PL, 120pts]
  • 5x Possessed [120pts]: 5x Horrifying Mutations
• Death Guard Possessed [6 PL, 120pts]
  • 5x Possessed [120pts]: 5x Horrifying Mutations
• Deathshroud Terminators [9 PL, 150pts]
  • Deathshroud Champion [50pts]: Manreaper, Plaguespurt gauntlet
  • 2x Deathshroud Terminator [100pts]: 2x Manreaper, 2x Plaguespurt gauntlet

My Goals for 2022

• Get that airbrush out! – I undercoated one of the squads of Possessed with it and used it on the barrel, so I did give it a go.
• Keep up with the conversions – Done, the two units of Possessed and the Plague Marines both needed a bit of work on them.
• Get to grips with the Terminus Est Assault Force – Oh yes, I did this one, and it was a lot of fun.
• Decide on the future of this blog – I’ve been going back through my old images and resizing them to save on disk space (I was on 88% a year ago, it’s dropped to 86% now), I think I’ve got some room to grow now and don’t need to consider paying for this 🙂

My Goals for 2023

• Stop dodging the Mission Packs, give the new rules and objectives a go.
• Keep on using the airbrush, I’ve got a big vehicle underway now that will have to use it.
• Give Daemons a go! The new Codex allows you to take 25% of your army as Daemons without losing your Death Guard contagion. There’s got to be a way to get my Nurglings back on the table 🙂
• Attend an event. I’ve been dodging events for years, and I really do need to try one out.
• There’s been some talk between Cadian Shock and I of giving a campaign a bash using the Patrol rules, that would be something different.

Death Guard vs Necrons (1,000 points) – Battle Report

List Theory

Land Raider! I’m continuing to try and play units that I’ve either never used or not fielded for a long time. I’ve got my eye on a Spartan Assault Tank and it occurred to me that I haven’t used my Land Raider, that took a very long time to build, in over two years. So that had to go onto the table, and the rest of the list would be built around it.

The Land Raider can carry up to five Terminators, so I filled it will four Deathshroud and a Lord of Virulence. That’s a big chunk of my points gone immediately. The rest of the list was taken up with three squads of Plague Marines lead by a Malignant Plaguecaster. I went for The Wretched as my Plague Company to try and buff the output of the single Psyker that I had taken.

The Game

Setup

Necron Deployment

Death Guard Deployment

Death Guard vs Sisters of Battle (1,000 points) – Battle Report

List Theory

I was very impressed with the performance of my opponent’s Myphitic Blight Haulers in my big game against the Death Guard. I haven’t used mine for a very long time, so I thought I should put them back on the table. Like my opponent I also wanted to pair them up with a fast moving, by Death Guard standards, Daemon Prince. That’s about half of my 1,000 points taken up already. Two units of Plague Marines felt like they would be useful, the list is then filled up with Typhus and Poxwalkers, they’re a lovely combination.

The Game

Setup

This was a a Tempest of War game and we drew the following cards.

• Primary Mission: Burn and Raze – Capture objectives or perform an action to burn them down.
• Mission Rule: Warp Lightening – Being near an objective could cause mortal wounds to units, we forgot to do this.

My opponent mostly deployed on my right flank as did I. My Blight Haulers were ready to race along the left hand side of some central ruins while my Daemon Prince and one of my units of Plague Marines would go over or through the walls. Typhus, the Poxwalkers and the other unit of Plague Marines hung back to be ready to deal with a unit of Seraphim (or was it Zeraphim) that were waiting in deep strike to cause me trouble.

The Sisters would take the first turn.

Death Guard vs Tyranids (1,000 points) – Battle Report

List Theory

1,000 points of Death Guard (minus some Poxwalkers who were already deployed…)

In my last game I didn’t really use my Biologus Putrifier well, so that drove me to try a similar list but on a smaller scale. I was most torn about the Poxwalkers. Small squads are useful as they are cheaper for some stratagems, but a full pack of twenty gives your opponent a lot of bodies to chew through. So I went for a mix, I took a 20, a 15 and a 10 man squad of them, I could then use them as appropriate.

The Game

Setup

Death Guard Deployment

Tyranid Deployment

This was a a Tempest of War game and we drew the following cards (a Mission Rule card gave us two Mission Rules).

• Primary Mission: Take and Hold – Capture objectives.
• Mission Rule: Supply Lines – You only get a CP in your command phase if you control the objective in your deployment zone, I think we both forgot this one.
• Mission Rule: Scrambler Fields – No deep striking or deployment shenanigans onto objective markers, you have to walk on to them.

We both deployed our horde units pretty far forwards, this was going to be an aggressive game…

The Death Guard would take the first turn.

Battle Round 1

Poxwalkers attack!

Poxwalkers attacked!

Typhus falls…

Death Guard vs Death Guard (2,000 points) – Battle Report

List Theory

I had a free day over a weekend so I decided to play a big 2,000 point game. I thought that I hadn’t played a 2,000 point Terminus Est Assault Force before, I forgot this game, so that is what I decided to do. The obvious choice was to take as many Poxwalkers as possible, and that also meant taking Typhus. I then wanted to continue to use models that I haven’t used in a long time, or that I’ve never used. So to this end the Biologus Putrifier and the Plague Surgeon went in.

There was enough points to take all of my Deathshrouds and Blightlords. The rest of the points were filled up with three squads of Plague Marines and nine Possessed.

The Game

This would be a Tempest of War game, we drew the following cards.

• Primary Mission – Priority Targets – Score points for holding objectives after the first round but also points at the end of the game for what you still hold.
• Mission Rule – Sweep and Clear – Sticky objectives, you can keep holding an objective if you move off of it presuming that no one else takes it.

The game is a Death Guard vs Death Guard slug fest, it’s a rematch against the opponent who hammered me earlier in the year. Could I do any better?

Setup

My Deployment

Opponent’s Deployment

Death Guard vs Salamanders (650 points) – Battle Report

List Theory

This game was happening on the 5th Anniversary of my return to tabletop 40k. Well, to be very precise, it was exactly five years to the day that I opened up the Dark Imperium box set after buying it the night before. So to celebrate this I wanted to play the Death Guard that came with the box, albeit with some changes to bring them up to date a bit. This also fitted in with my plans to play units that I normally wouldn’t as I don’t recall the last time I used the Noxious Blight Bringer (actually I’ve just checked, it was my last game of 8th Edition when I used the same list as I knew 9th was about to arrive).

The juggling that was done to the list was:

• The Poxwalkers had to be taken as one big block of 20 as I was only taking one unit of Bubonic Astartes Core Infantry, I would have preferred to have had them as two groups of 10.
• The Plague Marines had their weapons update to take into consideration that weapons upgrades are now free for them.
• The Bloat Drone was armed with the mower as that just seems like the better choice and it would help me to tie down the enemy in close combat buying time for the rest of the list to get stuff done.

I was a bit under the 650 point limit for the army, but I don’t think that’s a big problem. My opponent was tinkering with a 650 point army they were taking to an event, so this game could have gone very badly if they turned up with a totally tuned and optimised 650 point killing machine.

The Game

This was a Tempest of War Game and we drew the following cards.

• Primary: Take and Hold – Score points for holding objectives
• Mission Rule: Scrambler Fields – This stops deep striking and other such shenanigans into the range of an objective.

Setup

Death Guard Deployment

Dawn of War

Salamander Deployment

35 Years of Warhammer 40k

35 years ago this weekend a friend and I travelled into London and attended our first Games Workshop Games Day. Apparently the event ran for three days, so I’ve no idea which day I actually attended. This was I believe the event that Warhammer 40k was released at. A few weeks previously my friend had shown me the preview feature in White Dwarf 93 and I had just loved the picture of the kit bashed Land Raider with the lined up Marines in front of it. I went home excitedly clutching a box of 30 Plastic Beaky Marines and a metal Dreadnought.

At home I rapidly build the miniatures, I was used to building plastic model planes and these were less fiddly than they were. The Dreadnought was tougher, I think I borrowed my Dad’s two part epoxy glue and got the job done.

Then it was painting. I cracked open that box of paints that was used for painting the model aircraft and my eyes fell on a bright orange. I think my brother had bought it to paint the ladder of an F-16 model he had built. So I created my own Chapter, orange with black tiger stripes and got to work. I’m not sure that I ever finished any of the models completely and over time they were all lost. But I’m sure the paint was traditionally thick and pasted on and the free hand stripes poorly applied. But I’d started my way into the hobby.

The next 35 years so my connection to Warhammer 40k wax and wane. I never played much of the original tabletop game until I got back into 8th Edition five years ago. However an awful lot of Adeptus Titanicus and Space Hulk were played and the Dark Heresy RPG got me back into gaming in the universe when it came out nearly 20 years ago.

So as my little part in celebrating this anniversary weekend I painted up a Primaris Marine in the colour scheme that teenage me decided upon. I did use “modern” (by my definition) techniques and so washes and dry brushing were applied. And this is the result, and I’m quite pleased with it :). I even had a pot of Goblin Green that may go back a decade or more that I managed to get working for the base. I’m quite pleased with the eye lenses and the orange armour, but my freehand still sucks and I couldn’t get a Primaris squad transfer to wrap nicely on the shoulder.

This is the right colour for bases!

Plague Marine Weapon Options

Four new Meltaguns.

More melee options.

Plague spewer!

One of the changes for Plague Marines in the recent points updates has been that their weapon options have become free. So you can give a Plague Marine a plasma gun or a melta for for the same cost as a bolt gun, and that’s too good a thing to turn down. My last few games have seen me take some weapon upgrades but I’ve had to proxy them on the table, I didn’t have any meltas at all. So I’ve been working on some models to give me some more options.

Death Guard vs Astra Militarum (1,000 points) – Battle Report

List Theory

There are similar drivers to this list as there were with my last where I used Mortarion. In short I want to move away from playing the Terminus Est Assault Force and to also use miniatures that I’ve painted but never used. This time I wanted to put the Miasmic Maglignifier on the table.

My hope for this was that I would use it to take an objective during deployment and hope that my opponent would shoot at it buying me time to move up the other elements of my army. Coupling this with something fast, to take the best advantage of the time that the Malignifier would buy me, seemed a good idea. Originally I took three Foetid Bloat Drones, but on the way to the game store I recalled that in 1,000 point games there’s a limit of using a data sheet twice. So I hurriedly dropped the third drone, brought in a Plagueburst Crawler to act as a big beat stick, and paid the increased cost by taking less Poxwalkers. The drones were backed by a winged Daemon Prince.

The third element to the army was some ground pounding Plague Marines lead by a Malignant Plaguecaster and backed with some Poxwalkers. Hopefully they wouldn’t draw much fire and would move around getting stuff done.

The Game

Setup

Death Guard vs Tau (1,000 points) – Battle Report

List Theory

There are a few things feeding into this list. The main one is that I’ve been playing with Terminus Est Assault Force lists for a long time and felt that it was time for a change. However adding into this is the fact that I’ve only played Mortarion in one game against the Astra Militarum where he died before he did anything. I’m contemplating my 40k future, and it seems odd to have spent weeks working on a model only to never use him. So I decided that it was time I played him, even if it felt like a bad idea. So a game against the Tau felt like the most stupid game to take him in given how shooty they seem to be, this made it the right game to take him in so I could get over my worries and just enjoy seeming him in use.

Mortarion took up a big slab of my 1,000 points and I felt that I had to try and protect him a bit. I took two bloat drones to try and act as a distraction and an alternate threat. The mowers can be brutal in close combat, and maybe fear of them would take some of the fire away from Mortation. If not then they could grab objectives and buy me some time for me to move up my slower Plague Marines.

The Game

Setup

The cards gave us diagonal deployment zones, I tried to hide as much of my stuff behind ruins and solid walls as I could. Even Morty would benefit a little bit from this, but he’s a big chap. The relatively small deployment zones meant that I split up my drones with on on my left flank and one on my right.

The Tau would take the first turn.