Vanquish 2015 - a 1750 point tournament

So, despite a horrific cold which has made me take a day off from work today (the horror!) I made it out to my tournament this weekend. I took my Night lords CSM list which is not terribly competitive but I'm sure a good general could do quite well with them. A good general I am not...

Here's the army:

The list consists of:

Chaos Lord with Jump pack, sigil of corruption and lightening claws + mark of nurgle
12 Raptors with lightening claw melta bomb champion + 2 meltaguns + mark of nurgle
4 x 5 CSM with a plasma gun each. 2 units are in rhinos with twin linked bolter and dirge casters
5 Havocs with 3 lascannons and 1 flakk missile launcher + mark of nurgle
3 obliterators with mark of nurgles
Heldrake stock
Helbrute with power scourge and plasma cannon
A trip lascannon predator

The tournament is run by Bristol Vanguard and you can find the rules pack for the event if you go to their forum which is linked from their main website. In short you could get a maximum of 25 points from 5 games purely by winning, which is 5pts for more than double the opponents score, 3pts for more but less than double, 2pts for a draw and 1pt if you lost but had more than half your opponents score. 0pts if you were crushed. Maelstrom was primary with standard secondary. In addition to this a maximum of 13 points were on offer for being fully painted, WYSWIG, not spamming etc (all detailed in the pack). And finally in each game you could play a vanquish secret objective, a picture of a couple of these are below:

These did not effect the score for the game but were added on to your tournament points with 12 points up for grabs in total.

This brought the overall score to 50 for the tournament. Points of the enemy destroyed were used to separate players on the same score.

The tournament was attended by about 74-80 people, A few people only played on the first day so numbers were consistent over the weekend. I attended last year which had 96 participants and came 86th with 16 points... Not a great showing! I won one narrowly and drew one with 3 crushing defeats...

This year I did a lot better!! I had to leave before the results were in, but unless I have been docked any points for my soft scores I think I scored 22 points! Which included 2 narrow wins and one narrow defeat with two crushing defeats, a marked improvement I'd say and I'm thoroughly pleased with it.

Below are a few pictures of the quality of tables you can expect at this event, they have put a huge amount of time and effort into them and they are a joy to play on.

Well done if you've got this far.... I'll do a quick run down of my games and then some more pretty pictures.

Game 1 vs Grey Knights and Imperial Knights Maelstrom mission 1 Dawn of War

2 dreadknights, an imperial knight, 10 terminators and a storm raven plus purifiers and a librarian... Ouch these guys demolished me, tabled me at the beginning of turn 5 and I was always on the back foot. I didn't play too badly I was just heavily mismatched with this guy, wonderful bloke called Simon though an chatted to him throughout the rest of the weekend. A 15-4 crushing defeat for me!

Game 2 vs Iron hands Maelstrom mission 6 Vanguard strike

Drop pod with sternguard plus librarian, Land raider crusader with 10 marines plus termie librarian, venerable dreadnought plus ironclad dreadnought, 2 5 man marines in a rhino and a razorback, 2 devastator squads with plasma cannon/lascannons. His static gun line was out of reach of my army for the most of the game and I baited him pretty well. In the end the cards swung in my favour and I got kingslayer because his librarian warlord rolled perils and blew his head off! a 14-9 noble victory for me and I got a secret vanquish objective too! A nice guy who's name escapes me... Sorry!

Game 3 vs Nids Maelstrom mission 2 Hammer and Anvil

I'm afraid I don't know much of nids so I can't recall these from memory, lovely army though, the chap (Tristan) had been playing them since their inception and had some lovely old models. I f**cked up bad on this one. Deployment killed me and once he had objectives and could keep drawing those cards I just couldn't get back in the game. I had a fun game but this was the only match I was kicking myself about after, I should have been competitive and I just sucked hard. A 14-3 crushing defeat, but not tabled!!

Game 4 vs Chaos Daemons and Chaos space marines Maelstrom Mission 3 Hammer and Anvil 

Belakor, 2 large squads of flamers one with a herald, soul grinder, plague big walking thing, tzeentch chariot, daemon prince, 10 cultists, vengeance weapon battery (did not shoot the entire game!), mauler fiend, and 10 plague bearers. This was played on the ork table picture up above. I got the side with the elevation and that won me the match I think. I was effectively able to dictate where he went with my threat arcs and my rhino speeding objective secured units got me the points I need. I gave up slay the warlord with a needless mistake which cost me 2 points as if he had not had that I would have won 6-2, as it was I won 6-3 . I destroyed 2 units in his army totalling some 300pts and he destroyed nearly 1000 of mine. I was proud I played to the mission and got the win, my best game overall I think. My opponent was also a very nice guys called Ben I should say.

Game 5 vs Necrons Decurion Maelstrom mission 4 Dawn of wat

2 squads of 15 warriors, a Lord in 1, 3 tomb blades, 5 wraiths, 1 spyder, 5 bases of little gribblies spider things (name escapes me), 5 immortals in a doom croissant, a transcendent c'tan and 1 lord of war obelisk thing. I actually think this was my second best game, I played the mission really well and didn't try to compete too much with the army. I lost out because of a bit of poor deployment at the start, I was worried about the c'tan and I wiped it second turn with havocs and obliterators but that left the wraiths to control that flank of the table. I lost 15-11 in the end with 3 raptors alive scoring me linebreaker. A nice guy called Moz and had hell of a blast.

Anyway I am impressed if you have made it this far so here are a few picture of my battles and some of the other armies on display that were incredible as always!

The Vanguard website will have loads of pictures up in the coming weeks and I'd recommend checking it out, if only for the Nagash/Transcendent C'tan conversion that I appear to have forgooten to take a picture of. It is stunning!

Thanks for reading and sorry for the massive post!

Rob