Apocalypse Game today Chaos vs Children of the Old Ones

I had a 40k Apocalypse game earlier today. The players involved were Lawrence using Orks, myself using Eldar versus Kenf with his Emperor's Children and AHX with his Chaos Imperial Guard. The theme of the battle was Chaos versus Children of the Old Ones. I know this stretches the fluff a little but it still makes a good game in my opinion. There are many first's in this game. Firstly, this is the first time Lawrence is not teaming up with Kenneth. In addition, this is also the first Apocalypse game by the group that contains a Super Heavy on both sides. The Chaos side had a Brass Scorpion while the Old Ones Side (what a term :) ) had a Kill Krusha Tank, affectionally known as the KKT. Finally this is the first time I am using a special character, namely the Phoenix Lord Baharroth. Each player fielded a special character today. Lawrence fielded Zogwort (using a Savage Orc Shaman model), AHX fielded Creed and Kell while Kenneth used Abaddon. My opponents, especially AHX, make good use of their special characters today. AHX was using Creed to issue orders to his squads, his repeated usage of "get back into the fight" and "bring it down" gave Lawrence and myself lots of problems. Kenneth's Abaddon did what he do best, killing lots of ork boyz. On the other hand, my team did not really make good use of our special characters. Lawrence's Zogwort only casted one psychic ability in the game but he managed to kill some marines in close combat (despite the fact the the boyz would have done so anyway). My Baharroth did worse. He only killed one guardsmen, with the grenade assault and one sentinel in the game. To rub salt into the wound, the great Phonenix Lord took an wound from that Mon Keigh walker in close combat. My only consolation in the game is that Baharroth did not die, although he did left the table on turn 5 for another skyleap attack and never came back.

There are a few great moments though. Most significant of all was Kenneth's deployment of the Brass Scorpion in the middle of the table and he managed to hide the monster so well that none of our anti-tank can see it lol. The daemon construct then followed on by launching a devastating close combat assault on Lawrence's ork mob only to end up being tied into combat which in turn meant that my Fire Dragons were unable to shoot it in my turn. The monster then finished off the orks in the combat phase, shot more orks in his shooting phase followed by an assault into my wraithlord, which served as my cannon fodder in this game. Fortunately I managed to take out one structure point from the Brass Scorpion before Kenf butchered my wraithlord. In the Old Ones turn, Lawrence and myself threw lots of anti tank shooting on the Brass Scorpion but all we got were weapon destroyed results. In the assault phase, my sword wielding wraithlord charged into the daemon construct. Alas only one structure point was taken down while the second wound was another weapon destroyed result. I don't know how but it seemed that Kenneth fluffed his attacks and I won combat.

[Note: there is a small problem here which I only thought of on my way home. I have forgotten whether the Brass Scorpion had caused an wound on my wraithlord or not. The problem was at turn 5 AHX threw lots of shooting at the Wraithlord and failed to take out the last wound. If Kenneth had caused an wound earlier AHX would have targeted the KKT instead. Nevertheless I doubt the result of the game would differ much since the KKT had three structural points remaining. In addition, most of AHX's shooting ended up in misses rather than failed to wound rolls].

Back to the battle. In the subsequent chaos turn, Kenneth's Brass scorpion did more shooting but did not assault due to a bad roll for the assault distance. In my turn, I shot the monster with my wraithlord but failed to do anything. I then continued my attack by charging my wraithlord and my Farseer into the daemon engine. I decided to assault with the farseer because I need to improve my odds as much as possible, more importantly, I feel that this is a good chance for my farseer to earn a glory moment (fluffwise he would have done this to put his rival, the Autarch to shame). So it goes, Farseer had three attacks, one hit, one "wound" which is a penetrate result followed by a '5' on the vehicle damage table. The Farseer had taken the last structural point from the Brass Scorpion :). I did some test rolling and found out that the wraithlord would have done the same but since it was the Farseer that did it, I have something to talk about for the rest of my gaming days. :) Wahahahha

Anyway that was the main event in the battle for me and I enjoyed the battle very much. The death of the Brass Scorpion did not win us the game but it allowed us to get a draw. My opponents' mass pie plate attacks were devastating and I have a new found respect for the Imperial Guard. With so many pie plates, one can only make so much cover saves per turn. I was truly embarrassed that Lawrence's forces have to take so much of the shooting. Most of my guys went down quickly (mainly due to pie plates and a single orbital bombardment by Kenneth) and my only achievement (apart from killing random marines/guard and the Autarch single-handedly taking out a unit of gun-slinging Penal Legionaires...wow -_-") was taking out the Brass Scorpion. Nevertheless the game is still fun and memorable.

I was surprised that the game is so successful despite the fact that we had minimum planning. We had absolutely no discussion on logistics and we did not even have an umpire this time. I was in fact afraid that things will go wrong which led to me scanning through the Apocalyse book quickly two hours before the game. In the end it is fortunate that everything turn out well. I truly enjoy myself today and I encourage other players to give Apocalypse a go. Forget about competitiveness or balance and concentrate on having fun. You will reap more from such crazy games then those standard "balanced" games.

Vern signing off.