It was Wednesday night club night last night, and I got a game in playing a mission from the new Battle Missions book last night. I had been a bit skeptical about the book before, but I was definitely wrong, and this game was really fun.
I was playing my usual Chaos Space Marines, and was playing against Orks. We rolled of the for mission at random and ended up with the Wave Assault mission, which is a Tyranid mission. The Orks took the role of the Tyranids as the attackers in waves, I acted in defense.
The mission is objective based, with 4 objectives on the board which are in fixed position dictated by the book, and the attackers (Nids normally, Orks in our case), come in three waves in each of the first three turns. The units in each wave are decided on by the player, but it's random as to which wave you get. The attacker does get to choose which board edges (their side, or either of the two short edges) they come on from and each wave comes on completely, ie. they aren't in reserve as such.
Tactically, it was a challenge to decide how to deploy, and I made an error at the start. I spread myself out a little too thinly to cover the objectives with my three scoring units. This meant when the second wave of 3 loads of Ork Trukk boyz and a Warboss came on in turn 2, they could get a charge in and destroy one of the units, and then go on to roll over another one, whilst the rest of my army was too far away to help.
For this mission, I should have castled up a little closer together and looked to defend three of the objectives and leave the other. That would have meant my harder hitting stuff would have been better able to support my scoring units. As it was I'd lost two of my scoring units by turn 3 which meant it was looking dicey.
Towards the end, I castled up a bit around the centre of the board where two objectives are close together and tried to protect my surviving scoring unit of Plague Marines but against the tide of remaining Orks. I was only holding on for a draw rather than a win. Had the game ended on turn 5, it would have been a draw as all the objectives were contested. Unfortunately it went to an extra turn, and my Vindicator which was contesting one of the objectives was destroyed, giving a win to the Orks.
I'm definitely looking forward to playing some more missions from the Battle Missions book.
3 comments:
I haven't gotten to play much with it yet, but I agree it's a good book. I like being able to shake things up with a "standard" product - makes pick up games much easier than with custom scenarios and such.
Sounds like an epic battle especially for those who like a there battle to have a narrative element. Defending all four as apposed to defending only 2-3 makes for a better story in the end.
The story approach is something that I think GW was aiming for as they sold the mission pack as a way to play out your favorite Black Library stories.
@sonsoftaurus - Yes it did shake things up a bit for a pick up game, as it only took 5 minutes for us to roll up the mission and quickly read the rules.
@HP - Definitely cinematic, especially as two of the 4 objectives were in a trench system across the middle of the board with my Plague Marines hunkered down in there.
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