Table was full of cover and had lots of levels, made for a very fun and tense game.
I managed to squeak in a game of Kill-Team at the Clubhouse yesterday, versus a Tau kill-team. We rolled for the mission after selecting our Kill-Team, and we ended up with Take Prisoners, which didn’t seem so bad until we read more about it. Turns out, being within 1 inch of an enemy to capture them means you’ll have to be in combat! I had 2 guys kitted out for melee, but they were still just Guardsmen, but my opponent was Tau, famously known for their lack of combat prowess.
I put my sniper here, but was charged turn one! He managed to hold out for 3 or 4 turns, without dying or falling off, and taking the Drone out before he was taken out of action!
What followed was a tense but hilarious series of events, involving the Tau charging into combat to avoid my readied guns, which was a good call for them since I managed to keep initiative for 5 out of the 6 game rounds! My sniper got immediately charged by his Stealth Suit leader, and a Drone, while my forces advanced in two separate groups, hoping to take at least a few prisoner! My opponent garrisoned a tower with an Ion Rifle, his Comms specialist and a gun Drone, forcing me to come to him.
Trying to sneak up on the garrisoned tower, they eventually did get there.
Knowing my Scions could be a pain in the butt, my opponent felled them early, but not before my Hot-Shot volley gun claimed 2 breachers in one round of shooting. They fell shortly after, depriving me of my plasma pistol and power sword Tempestor, a loss I keenly felt later as the battle became a knife fight.
My sniper refused to yield in true Catachan fashion, and didn’t fall off the ledge either, keeping two of my opponents very dangerous models quite busy.
His remaining breacher charged into my readied Grenade Launcher, and my sergeant went to aid him.
Sorry for the blurry picture! My hands tend to shake pretty badly after a day of work!
The launcher didn’t survive, but did manage to take out the breacher. A Stealth Suit engaged my two Guardsmen in hand to hand, managing to kill my Sergeant! This was the beginning of the end, as my casualties mounted.
My force ended up broken, and with both my high leadership models out of action, they didn’t stand a chance.
Having charged to get up there, the enemy counter-charged my fellow below. This fight didn’t end before the game did, and was my best chance at securing victory. When it fell through, the loss followed shortly after.
The game ended 1-0 in my opponents favor, a close game that went to all 6 turns. It was still a great time, and I’m learning the strengths and weaknesses of my list. As much as I loathe to admit it, I might need to build another Special Weapons gunner to add some firepower!
I’ll get you next time you Xeno Scum! But, that is all for now. Ave Imperator!
First Battle Round, yes thats a Deathwatch Veteran with a Storm Shield vs a bog standard Guardsmen. This didn’t end well!
So, after a week of frantic batch painting, I finally got a chance to run the Catachan 890th in a game of Kill-Team! They passed their first test with flying colors, sure, they didn’t win but they didn’t fail me completely either.
It was, as always in this wonderful club I’m in, a much grander event then just a 1v1. No sir, I jumped into a 4 player match, with the mission being Recover Intelligence. With 5 objectives, the ones furthest from your deployment being worth 2, close ones worth 1, and the centre worth 3! The opponents had Orks (A really nice throwback list with the old 2nd edition starter models, and a bunch of Lootas.), a group of Deathwatch, and a mostly primaris Minotaurs Chapter astartes force. The orks started far from me, at the other end of the table, and I had Deathwatch on my left and Minotaurs on my right. It was going to get bloody, fast.
The angry Space Wolf with the Heavy Thunder-Hammer was a damn menace, but was distracted squishing my dudes, leaving the objective alone.1st turn casualties, including my comms specialist and my sniper!
Surprisingly, despite some heavy 1st turn losses, the other players started to focus mainly on each other, and of the two Deathwatch Marines that came after me, one fell to a flamers overwatch, and the other, while not actually dying, started to chase a guardsmen to the edge of the board and kept him away from my objective. For morale reasons I wanted to keep my lads together, but the presence of both a frag cannon and a missile launcher in my opponents teams meant I had to scatter pretty quickly.
A thorn in the side of every other player, this Minotaur heavy specialist was scary indeed!Cover is my friend, but melee doesn’t care. These guys had to leg it from a crazed Space Wolf.
With the centre objective controlled by the Minotaurs, the Catachans fanned out, and I started to eek out wounds where I could. One deathwatch marine, as stated before, fell to overwatch, and luckily for me, it was the storm shield! I stripped a couple wounds off some Minotaurs with my Scions, but their Trans-human Physiology and 2 wounds made them a tough nut to crack.
Cut off, and alone, these 2 scions put in some work, wounding a marine and killing 3 grots before being taken out of action.
I may not have killed much, but with the Space Wolf far from my one objective I stayed in third place till the end of the game. I had a chance at the centre, after a well placed grenade cleared out some grots, but my opponents rallied and killed my scions before I could make good on it. On the other side of the table, the Deathwatch was being swarmed by Ork Boyz, while the Minotaurs were splitting their shots between me and the Orks, and both of us were credible threats.
Insane Bravery kept me in the fight longer then I should have, but in the end it was too little too late. The Ork player made a come from behind push, and despite being broken took the objective in his last turn, taking 1st right from under the nose of the Minotaurs.
“Is he still behind me?”“Where in the Emperor’s name IS everyone!?”
The final score ended with me in 3rd, the Deathwatch in 4th, then the Minotaurs in 2nd and Orks in 1st! A great game, flowed really well, and I have to say, the elegance of the rule-set really showed; never feeling too complicated or bogged down, but still feeling really tactical.
I’m the A! Sure not a lot of points, but I was being chased by a scary dude with hammer so I’ll take what I can get!
Despite this, I don’t feel like my list was terrible; Lasguns are a lot more effective when their not facing tanks or high toughness enemies as much, and flamers and grenade launchers are actually useful! I’m not a competitive guy, and my list was put together more for fluff then actual effectiveness, but I never felt drastically outmatched. I had almost as many bodies as the Ork player, and my guys could shoot better. Next time, I’m going to stick a little closer together and focus fire a bit more.
A great game, with a great bunch of guys. Kill-Team I think will be a staple of this blog going forward! But, while I’m making a lore post today as well, that’s it for gaming! So as always, Ave Imperator!
You folks got a sneak-peek (So far, folks = 0, so this is just me future proofing out of sheer optimism!) at my Catachan Kill-Team.
Trooper Jackson Caulfield Jr, Comms Specialist.
When I was deciding what to play for Kill-Team, there really was only one option for me; Good old Poor Bloody Infantry. But while my Vostroyans are beautiful models, they didn’t strike me as the kind of regiment that engaged in special operations regularly. Its not that they don’t, there is enough lore and fiction about them that says otherwise, but specifically MY Vostroyans are a siege regiment, set up to pound a position to mulch in a time-frame of months, if not years, and through sheer attrition. Ask them to take an entrenched position, and they’ll do it with bayonets fixed and a prayer on their lips. But for clandestine warfare, I felt like something else.
Enter the Catachans. Tough, individualistic and self-reliant. In open warfare, they’re just as good as normal line infantry. But in jungles, be it actual ones with trees and scorpions the size of houses, or urban ones with tight networks of sewers and alleyways, They’re better then most. Perfect for Kill-Team. I never wanted to do a whole army of them, but a squad or two? Kill-Team offered the ideal excuse, and I think that was Games Workshops intention, so me-0-them-1.
However, the Jungle Fighters kit is OLD, very old, around 1998 if I’m not mistaken. and good lord the paint scheme on the web-store isn’t doing them any favors, with its very 2nd-3rd edition style of extreme highlights.
Luckily, the command kit is far newer, and looks amazing!
So I bought one of each, and set to work. The older kit was a dog, and immediately put me off the idea of ever doing a full army. The newer kit was much better, and went together like a charm. And between both, I had 12 kitted out Jungle Fighters! Fair tip to anyone with the same idea; use the best plastic glue you can get, and that isn’t the GW stuff. I swear by Tamiya Thin, and it has a brush applicator. Use that to smooth out the join between muscle, lasgun stocks, and torsos.
The old kit, given a bit of TLC, actually doesn’t look bad at all. Trooper Caulfield here is 100% old catachan kit, and looks the business! After a marathon assembly session with Rambo and Predator on in the background, I had them all ready for paint.
And this would have been it, at least for a while. But, having followed the Campaign rules to put them together, I hadn’t thought of doing a matched play version of the list, leaving me almost 30 points short. While having less points gives you more command points to use in the actual game, I figured having more bodies would help more in the long run, especially since you get command points anyway every turn! But, while I had a few catachan bodies left, the poses they offered looked really meh. So, I figured the Catachan boys were on a rescue mission, and had picked up a couple of Scion lads!
Now this kit is really divisive. Half the people I talk to love the kit, me included. It has that distinctly gothic insanity of the Imperium nailed to a T, and bringing back the beret heads from the ancient plastic stormtroopers kit from 2nd was a stellar move by GW’s sculptor.
One of the original 2nd Edition stormtroopers. I got this in exchange for a Tanith Guardsmen of mine at my local club!
However, the other half of people I talk to LOATHE the kit, for much the same reasons why I like it; that Gothic insanity. To be fair, the two kits that were phased out in favour of scions were beloved by many, especially the cadian styled Kasrkin. These were more traditionally sci-fi and military in comparison.
Cadian Kasrkin3rd edition era Stormtroopers
I can’t say that the latter group is entirely wrong, the Kasrkin were gorgeous models. But they suffered badly from being so distinctly Cadian in appearance. They didn’t have their own identity, and while they fit in really well with the Cadian Shock Troops, they never really worked for anything else unless you were willing to convert them, and since they were metal that wasn’t the easiest thing to do. The 3rd Edition sculpts are more generic, and were the ones I preferred back when I was first getting into the hobby. But they suffered from wonky scaling issues and again, being metal meant if you wanted weapon options that weren’t a distinct model, out came the Dremel and clippers.
So, rambling on aside, the Scion kit is very characterful, and full of great bits for every Guard player, and being the sucker I am I’ve now amassed far more scions then I’d ever actually use. Using two of them for Kill-Team actually meant them seeing the table, and 2 almost exactly put me at 100ish points (I’m actually 98 points, but I don’t feel the need to spend that extra two).
3rd Squad, 2nd Platoon, 890th Catachan Jungle Fighters, the “Rats”. And, from whats left of their disastrous commando raid, two Scions from…a regiment I haven’t come up with yet!
I’ve yet to actually play a game with them, but I’m looking forward to it! Lots of bodies, and plenty of special weapons without going into the plasma-spam cheese of the month. I’ll be sure to take pictures!
Its not all Kill-Team though. About 2-3 weeks before starting this blog I began cracking away at my Vostroyans, and starting with the command squad, I have the Vox, Banner, and Company Commander done. You saw the company commander yesterday, but heres the other two!
The banner needs freehand writing work, but the models are beautiful and really take well to paint and washes, so they’re not as intimidating as they first appear. I just have the grenade launcher, which to be honest is of dubious value and may be replaced by a sniper, and the medic with his lovely massive syringe. I look forward to sharing them!
