Thanks for tuning in to TurboTape's radio. In this edition, Jono hosts another episode of his exclusive Warhammer 40k podcast, Turbo Tabletop. Get ready to embark on the journey through the immersive universe of warhammer, where Mike Yarni's clash in epic battles unfold. Whether it's season veteran or a fresh recruit, TurboTape will talk about your go-to source of tactical insights, army-building strategies and the latest news from the front lines.
Now let's play the theme tune. Hello and welcome to another instalment of Turbo Tabletop. I'm Jono and I'm joined by Steve today. Hello.
And today we're going to be discussing your recent tournament, Kskirge and Bicelf. Oh yeah, so low. So low. So low.
It was a last minute then. Yes, it was, yeah. But before we get to it, we will have a message from a sponsor. Today's episode of Turbo Tabletop is brought to you by Mystic Games, your ultimate destination for all things tabletop gaming.
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Sponsored. Absolutely. Absolutely. Did you want to start us off?
You're excited for your little intro. Come on. Yeah. So I've got a little lore based treat here.
So the plan today was to talk about some of the prep and things I did to do while at this tournament. And I'm listening to the Master of Mankind from the Horace Heresies series. And there's a bit in it which just hit me because it coordinated with you and I, what we're going to talk about. So I want to start with a couple of paragraphs from Master of Mankind.
Raa had studied the Eldar in depth, has had all the 10,000. A wise warrior's creed was to know your enemy. But the custodian guard lived their lives to an extreme beyond desiring typical insights into their foes. They pushed themselves cognitively, not just physically, learning the language, the cultures and histories of their enemies to obtain and almost enlightened understanding of everyone they faced in order to counter and oppose them.
To stand against their foes and anticipate every action, answering with commensurate, consummate reaction. It wasn't enough to be able to stop an enemy from doing something. Purity of purpose and duty lay in knowing what they would do. How they did it and what the perfect response would be.
By necessity that meant knowing when and why actions would be taken at all. Yet this mindset held little rigidity. Almost nothing was codified. Law was gathered not only to predict patterns but to create a fluid sense of potential and threats.
That's lovely that. So that's how the, in the law, the custodian guard research and understand their foes. And I thought it had a fairly parallel with my slightly obsessive level of researching factions and players and lists and stuff. Yeah, you definitely, we talked about it in the teams one.
You created the Matrix for a sort. And I do think your prep has a lot to answer for the rest of our performances in recent times. I would never have even bothered to. I would just look, oh, I'm playing Orcs first.
That's it. But now I've gone to take notes. Not the, as much as you. I mean, you've got a lot of print out in front of me.
But I like it. It clearly works. Well, isn't it? I suppose the key theme that I've noticed generally in playing in tournaments, but you know, especially in this one at Kingdom in Northampton, was reducing the mental load.
So not having to think on your feet for things that you don't necessarily need to. So getting all of the kind of the work done ahead of time. So you're not, you don't arrive at the table and go, where the fuck am I going to deploy my models? What the hell is this mission?
Do I go fast? Do I go slow? What's this faction I'm playing against? Is it one where I need to slow down?
Do I need to be aggressive? Do I need to go around the edge? Do I need to go to the centre? There's all of these different kind of decisions you need to make in the game.
And I personally found that thinking about that stuff ahead of time and having an approach. Not too precise. So I'm not going to plan every turn. That's ridiculous.
But having a general idea of how I'm going to approach, so if I can play your blood angels, John A, I know I need to slow down. Yeah. John, when you're a fast melee arm, you're going to come up with me and you're pushing me in the face. Well, that's your strength and it's not mine.
So I need to flip that round, slow you down, then I've got more control of the game. So it's applying that across different aspects of the game. The tournaments are such a strain. They really take out of you.
Even these, I've not done a two day event yet. And I can't imagine the headache I'll have after that second day. But just from those three, three games at three hours. And normally round two and three are pretty back to back.
It's only really between round one and two that you'll typically get a lunch. And if you can mitigate some of that by just knowing where you're going to deploy. Because that is common knowledge you're allowed to know the terrain layout and the deployment too. And you know, my land raider can fit here.
It can drive through there. That's why when you hear people talk about UKTC terrain, specifically with land rainers, there's normally only one spot they can go. So you're either put it there or you put it in the strategic result. But I think the first thing we'll go over is you took Aoda.
You've played a lot of thousands recently. And the Necron Codex wasn't out for this yet. Correct. So why Aoda?
Point number one is I've been playing them since I was 11. So I've got models back for second edition. And I actually took at least six models which were lead slash Peter, whatever they were from later on. Late ages, early nineties.
Older than I am. Yeah. No, no, no, no. So yeah, they're just my favorite factor in that.
That's easy. And the second one was this is a tournament where I didn't really know anyone. So there wasn't like any in-store politeness where Aoda is so strong or have been so strong. I've basically not wanted to piss the shop off and just like go around with the best.
And especially as I've got access to actually some really strong units within a strong index. Yeah. So this is my chance to really take the best of what I've got and just try and stomp the shit out of three rounds. And yeah, so that was the plan.
Just go. A strong goes and met with as I could do. I like it. So this tournament just before we get sort of two into it, which it was the Firestone Games.
It was a Kingdom game in Northampton. It was run by a lovely blackboard Alex. Yeah, it was 18 players, but I think two dropped the day or two before us at the end. Okay.
Yeah, three three rounds one day. Yep. Yeah. Up in Northampton, that's not too...
Do you know, I didn't realise it was quite as far. I was looking at it. I was like, no, I was like, that's a pain in the back. So that's really far away.
And then I drove it, flying. Yeah. It took me like less than an hour. Oh, wow.
Okay. It was, yeah. Easy to get to. I'll go back.
Oh, okay. We'll keep that in mind for a future tournament. And they had good loads of good terrain. I mean, they're one box short, which we had to finagle a bit.
But Alex was quite organised. He had basically boxes of UKTC terrain ready to go. So that was not always the case every tournament. No.
No. Okay. So you decided on the ladder. Oh, yeah.
So how... Go into preparing. So what did you start with? You've got a lot of eulics choice.
Yeah. So call me through your list. Yeah, actually. Call me through your list.
So we had Avatar of Kane, Fuegan, the Phoenix Lord of the Fire Dragon's, and it's Night Spear, his basic Phoenix Lord of the Rangers, a solitaire, the in-card, an autocway leaper with wings. So she moves 14. A farseer with an enhancement called Fates of a Sengelas, so she can flip a dice with six in Poets of Ten and Mighton, or top-way leepads with Phoenix Gem. So she comes back to life on F2+, lovely.
Two units of Rangers, Sheep, Chaff, Can, Infiltrate into the midfield, and can react to move D6 inches if you get to the nine. Two units of shallow spectres, unbelievable unit. Yeah. They are 95 points, two brilliant shooting profiles.
They move quick. They fight with, they shoot with move six afterwards. Are they there the bikes? No.
They are the Forge World aspect warriors. They're kind of ghostly. Oh, okay, yeah. They've got stealth, they've got a three-up save, they've got a fiber-pin-vern.
Wow. Yeah, okay. Brilliant. And then 95.5.
Yeah, that's ridiculous. I'm looking at the net concode actually to just come out, and I'm thinking what I would do for shallow spectres. I've got five warp spiders, who the guys that can move 24. They're using me 12, lots of dev wounds and a kind of flamethrower gun.
And two of everyone's favourite tanks, the Knight's been there. Yeah. Which, by the way, I don't think it's actually that good. If you can't slow stuff down, they will chip damage people.
Yeah. But they're not doing a huge amount of damage. It's just consistent over game. So I think they're not as great as people say.
Is it one of those things like when they do work, they win you the game almost? Yeah, that is absolutely fair. So in one of the practice games I played Steven is Blood Angels. And he had the Advanced in Charge detachment for the Marines.
I got first shot is two death company units who want to advance and charge me. And I went, well, nothing mines to move and they can't advance to you. And he's like, oh. So, and, you know, that is where they are really, really strong.
Yeah. That would be about time for my terminal, like, right now, it's in death shroud for the death guard. Yeah. Mine is to move.
Yeah, no advance. Yeah, they're moving up in two inches. Oh my God. Yeah.
So you can really fix certain units in place. Yeah. And there's lots of kind of strengths to Knight's been. The main one for me is being able to combine the Knight's been as, well, that's sort of sleigh and neck.
And also, there's the, they can hold down your backfield, a big, big unit. And with the kind of nine inches around them for, you know, anti-deep strike on the rest of it, they can hold down most of the deployment zone on their own. Okay. They're providing that chip damage.
They're providing the slow. You know, all in, it's 180.C, 360 total in my list. They, they just, they just do several jobs quite well. What else are they?
Two or three. Okay. Yeah, I want to say. Okay.
So if you do get a squad there, the transfer zone, you'll take it. Yeah. Okay. So they, you know, different bits of the synergised knight's been.
So that chip damage out of line of sight, being able to combine it with the in-card and her teleport mechanic and the solitaire and the wayleeper and Fuegan. These all units, I can throw out and either just, they can die and I'm okay. Okay. It's dead.
It's done, done a fairing. Or they will die and come back to life and the in-card will still teleport. The in-card teleporter round. Once that is in your backline, it has damage reduction as well, right?
Half damage, four up in one, two, seven, yeah. She's 30, 10. She's really tough. She's another one where she can be kind of crap sometimes.
Her offensive profile in melee, she's got a cool flamer, which is strength seven, minus one, D3 damage, D6 plus three shots. So it's quite a good flamer. But melee profile can really flop. She's great in stuff with that in-card there because she's got minus four on her on a sword.
So in one of the games, she just went round killing black, 10 plus tanks and blocked down, you know, painless backfield. So that's an effective synergy, which I planned into the list. Ironically, so talking about indirect, the one weakness my aesthetic did have was indirect to me. Oh, okay.
I did design that way. So I had anti-indirect in the list and actually took it out because I thought the risk of me facing indirect was kind of low enough to all right where. I feel like indirect has kind of dropped off as time for addition has come along, uh, gone on. To begin with, it felt quite strong, but now I mean even, um, like, play by scoreless.
You're not seeing the flat three anymore. It's one or two. And then what's the space we want? The world went one of.
Yeah, if the ancestors have got the exorcist, which is not a guard. There's a few. I think if you check into it and you haven't really thought about it in your list, you can kind of flatten some with a lot of indirect. Um, and I was kind of worried about that.
I only had one unit that was really, really susceptible to it. And that was the Farsia, but I put the face messenger that enhanced on. So she kept your four of it then. Um, and I could flip the dice to a six with her enhancement and I could use a fake dice.
So there's a half decent chance through all of that that she won't just get sniped at one. Yeah, and be gone for the rest of the game. But I suppose, yeah, if you're, if you're prepared for that and you know, okay, I've got a hole here and you just play around with it. And then if you come up against something that doesn't have indirect perfect, your initial game plan is golden.
And the, so the other list design thing I had in there, which I recommend people think about is what's your factor on your list, crap out and how do you counter it. And then start by your blood angels rushing me. L-dar aren't great at being precious. And I think, so I had a game against all in his oxen.
He absolutely slapped my L-dar. I think I scored like 40 points and he got in a phone grid. Just because I played crap, he played really well. And he just overwhelmed, he just swarmed me.
And that got me thinking about how, you know, I'd make sure I counter that in this design. And basically the two units of ranges that do that. Start in the midfield, go commit suicide, you know, throw their heads underneath tanks and defeat of Black Templars. Slow stuff down, give me enough time to trip it and kill it in school.
And the, I think the other, so I've mentioned the kind of control that the list has with the Knights' biners and some of that, like, the specters and the in-car and stuff. But the other bit I'd say I pushed into the list was I designed it to score thick secondaries, but be pretty good at tactical. So I really wanted to be taking Homas, so deploy teleport homas, say three points in the middle or four points in the deployment zone. And a kill.
Even better, two kill secondaries. That's my ideal plan. I think it's set on primary kill share, score later points. So what kill secondaries were you taking, like, a assassination or bring it down?
It depends. Yeah. Both ideally. In fact, I think I did get to take both in the last game.
But yeah, between those three fixed secondaries, I can score really well and I've got control over them for the vast majority of the time. And when you can take, if you can take both, assassinate and bring it down, it's like, sweet. I just have to kill. Like, that's the most straightforward game is kill.
And then if the primary is to just hold two or something easy. Okay. My tanks will just do that. And then you can just murder.
I love it when you can just play like that. It's like your very first game. So we'll just kill each other. Yeah.
It's like a lady game. Yeah. Your opponent is trying to run around. It's great.
They draw investigate signals and deploy teleport homa turn one, say, yeah, come on then. Yeah. Waste your turn. And you're using units that could be killing.
You know, maybe you haven't positioned, let's you say, half of your army optimally. A couple of powerful units have got to do some action stuff. And all of a sudden the output of your army drops quite considerably because you've got some units trying to kill stuff. You've got some good units trying to do annoying tactical kind of actions.
And you've lost a lot of momentum really quick. Yeah. And sort of about speed violence. So how many, when you were making your list were on best-class parents, was there many people that had put, could you see what army's people were going to bring?
Or did you do some research that way? Some of it. I think about half of the guys had stepped some factions in there. And as it turns out, I think most of them did commit to that.
Yeah. But I'm always like, I've put funny stuff in there before. Just come here. It's on board.
Have you seen the list that you can pick from a BCP? This is random. It's weird stuff in there. I don't understand.
Yeah, just, I don't know. But about half of them did half of them didn't. I do. I took the mantra of our Lord and Savior John Lennon.
I've got a sitcher like a war hammer crush on that dude. I heard him on a podcast and he had a phrase, research the best, outplay the rest. Yeah. I mean, it rhymes.
It makes sense. What's possible then? What's the proof on that? And I actually applied it to this.
I had a look, because it wasn't a massive tournament. I had a quick fettle around BCP to look at everyone's rankings who wasn't on there. And there was three or four, maybe five guys who were up there in the rankings. They played quite a few tournaments and done a reason to be well.
And there were three, maybe four in particular, that I was interested in. There's a guy from Team Six Plus who've got a bit of a YouTube presence and got a lot of tournaments. Guy called Joey. Actually, chat to see quite a lot of tournaments.
A very nice guy. He's been blood angels. Okay. There's a guy called Matthew Edgington who big, big guy player ended up playing him.
Cool. So good that I had a look at some of these lists and kind of what he plays. There's another guy, a guy called Kieran. He seemed to go to call at tournaments as well.
Guy called Matt Gilbert who had been to one or two tournaments but had a list that caught my eyes being in absolutely pain in my arse play against. Back to the rush pressure type stuff. So yeah, I kind of picked those out as the best in inverted commas. Best slash stuff I considered a threat to my list.
Did some research on it. Nice. I like it. Yeah, because it's all on there.
Oh, BCP. It's a really good reason for something. I can't believe we've done two or three tournaments. Not on it, but I'm all in.
Being able to eye up people's lists and where they rank because that's what you did for the main tricks for the teams as well. Yeah, that's cool. You can't research everyone and that's where the outplay the rest kind of plays into it because you just got to at some point trust that you have decent, you know what you're doing and you can just outplay maybe a poor list or a less experienced opponent or just play better than someone, maybe better with the same ability as you. And just trust too.
You can't research everyone. So I've got to kind of lean on a bit of ability sometimes. Yeah. And you never know.
Like someone might be their first opponent and they just swing really well. Yeah. They somehow come up with a really just weird off-metal list that just, you just can't play against. So here's a great example.
So Vic VJ, one of the best players in the world, I listened to his 40K Farsight podcast a couple weeks ago and he talked about going to, I think it's the Con tree Super nature. Oh yeah. And he in the first round played against an Admec player and somehow he's understood through a friend that this player was kind of new to 40K and he's playing a fairly weak factor in. And Vic was there playing his kind of ultra refined meta system.
Vic drew with him. Geez. Okay. And so this is like a list, two lists at the opposite end of scale and probably two players at the opposite end of scale.
And then that he drew and Vic he said in his podcast he was just reminded, don't take anything for granted. Don't play bad basically. Yeah. And I suppose there's always that aspect of dice as well.
Like you never know. You might, you might, you might, you might, you might just not. Yeah. So yeah.
So, yeah. So your research teams, the players and your, your written list, then the next bit is preparing for the games. So what were the missions? Yeah.
So the missions were purge the foe. So that, the primary scoring there is kill one for four, kill more for another four, hold one for four, hold more for another four. The second one was priority targets, which is I think hold one or two for 10 points max to turn and then hold up to three at the end for 50. Yeah.
And then the last one was taking hold, which is basically. That hold three of these, yeah. Just really kind of bland one to be honest. But I did, you know, kind of back to what we said at the beginning.
I knew I wanted to take the mental loads myself. So I just sat down and thought about how I would play those three missions against different opponents. Purge the foe. If you go first, you can get kind of shafted because your opponent knows exactly what they've got to kill.
Yeah. But you know, you've got to rely on a bit scared if that happens. Priority targets, the plan there is apps for elder, absolutely conservative game plan. Sit on two objectives because I can't score more than sitting on two, so it's absolutely no point.
Kill stuff and get on three at the end of the game and max your primary. And through the course of that, make sure you peel the opponent off their objectives. And with that game plan, you can absolutely flatten the primary score. We'll come back to that point.
And then taking hold is a complete nightmare for elder to be honest because... Control three, right? Up to three. Yeah, up to three.
So I've got one tough unit, the avatar, and everything else is like OC1 and toughness three, and it'll just die to a degree. So that was the last one. I was quite nervous about what I might end up facing in that game. The plan on that one for elder is basically suck up some crack primary scores in the first, probably three turns, and kill everything and try and get on some pro...
Pull the primary score back in the later game. Cool. So the terrain for these missions, it was UKTC, was it? Yeah.
Ground floor closed then? It probably was, yeah. I remember now. It was.
It was definitely was, right? Yeah. So then how did you prepare for deployment? Well, you know.
I've seen a picture. You know. So it wasn't that busy at work. That was at work?
Or working day? Now this is in my London break. I thought I'd set up some of the deployments, some of the terrain, and just have a little thing. And this is, again, reducing the mental rate.
I've seen you could do rockets at the table with any of these games ago. Right. Where are we putting everything? I mean, it's a nightmare.
You've got... Stresses me out there, people can do that. Yeah, you'd be like, well, what unit is going to do? What's it trying to achieve in the first couple of turns?
Is something going to be put completely out of position, therefore useless for half the game? You know, how are you building synergy between the units that might like work together? So, for example, I should really be putting my Farsi in next to my avatar of Kane, because the avatar is going to wander out into the middle with his T-12 half damage for a pin-plan. And I'm going to try and put the Farsi's mind's want to win the ability on him, but I've got to be within 12.
So if I cock at my deployment, I think about it, and they're too far apart. Ruined. Most of the purpose of Farsi is being this is completely ruined. But yeah, so I did do a little mock deployment at home just to get my head round quite what I wanted to put where...
When we post this on the episode on Instagram, we'll have a put out the picture as well. So people can see just what went into it. Can see quite how sad I am. But what I was trying to do, and when I'm doing that stuff is I'm thinking, my Rangers can infiltrate the middle.
Do they want to be doing that against all the right different factions? And my way LiPo who's got a move for a team but low not. So in the deployment in the picture, she stood in the middle of nowhere. But she's in a specific place where, and that's something extremely fast, she's safe, especially to the 12th.
And she's 13.9 inches away from objective to go and run on to. If I need to go and run up and do a cleanse or just take objective depending on the opponent. So there's synergy in there, there's reduce momentum low for me. And I know exactly what every unit's going to do to turn one.
Stress free. That's it. We've got a plan. It's fine.
Sometimes you want to counter deploy what your opponent is doing. Say they put a big massive anti-tank gun or something that is going to ruin your plan on one side. How, do you have options going into that? So it's like, this is my ideal one regardless of what my opponent does.
And if my opponent then has, say you're playing Blood Angels and they've gone advanced in charge. They're probably not going to be able to shoot you. Can I imagine Deaf Complete will be using Inferno Pistols. So even if they get within 12, they're not going to be able to shoot you.
But they'll be able to charge, which is an ideal. So what would you do you have somewhere else they can go? Yeah. I would say the order that you deploy is quite important.
So you're trying to pay tail and everyone does this in a tournament. You're trying to put your crap units down first and work out where they're going to put the good units and try to just be aware of that. But in my deployment, I had several fixed things. They'd nights, minutes at the back.
I don't care about what the opponent's doing. Avatar at the front, don't care what the opponent's doing. Rangers to a degree, just going in the midfielder's slagest effect. And from against the shooting army, less so.
I kind of know where they are, way leeper, same stuff. Really, it's just about are there some specific places I want to place. Things like Fuega and the Phoenix Lord, who's got a really strong melodica. It's going to pop some tanks.
The shell inspectors to do some of their drum power shooting and move back. Are there some ruins where they can really nicely move out 12, get an angled shoot and move back. So if someone's put, let's just say, 5, 10, space and reans or guard infantry, I'm going to see that opportunity. I'm going to put the spectres there specifically.
I'll pop out a shoot and pop back in. I know I can achieve that in deployment. So you are trying to counter deploy to a degree. There's not a huge amount of counter deploy that I personally do.
Yeah, well, I think there's only normally going to be sort of one unit in a predator army that will make you rethink at least one unit's deployment. For the most part, your deployment is going to be how you've prepped for it. Yeah. But it is something to be aware of when deploying.
I'd say the two key things I'd pull out from the tournament. One is I am absolutely conservative in my deployment. So if my point can see a single unit, unless it's loading up, I've probably done it wrong. Oh, OK.
And now I'm playing net crons. I need to change that bit because I've got my time. So they can just end up. But absolutely conservative, hide everything.
And the other one was against my black temp, plaz, playing the second game. He had two massive bricks of infantry, which I knew I wanted to say down with my rangers. So in deployment, I was leaving my rangers to last to see where they went. He didn't have any infantry into the midfield.
And I did. So I was kind of chilled on that. As soon as I knew where they were, he had two units of rangers close to him. So if I go first, I'm going to shove him right up into his face and go nowhere.
If he goes first, I can either use fantastic, or the reactive move to try and get them to safety, or worst case, a unit that is. I mean, they're not a lot of points, right? They're like, yeah, so whatever. That's fine.
Yeah. Being able to move block. Infiltrate is so good for that. Yeah.
Yeah. As we're chatting about on WhatsApp this week, move blocking is just the absolute delicious nectar of 49. There's this Deathguard podcast, of course, discussing the Brazilian. And the main guy, William Reed, he's one of the best, if not the best Deathguard player in the UK.
He, there was one tournament where he played against World Ears, which is actually quite a rough matchup for Deathguard. Yeah. Because Deathguard is so slow and World Ears are just fast. So he, he like, baited him to deploy really heavy on one side by loading up stuff.
And then his nurglings, which have infiltrate, stuck those nine into the way. So when those rhinos and eight-bounds wanted to come, they had to get tied up in, with just nurglings, 50 points, 55 points. Yeah. There's pictures.
It was a good thing to watch. And then just all the Deathguard then punched him. Nice. Yeah.
So being able to move block. That's the secret sauce thing. In conversely, if you're a melee or an into army, learning how to get round move blocks is unbelievably important. Like, rapid ingress, deep strike reserves, just those types of techniques.
Yeah. Remembering with deep strike and rapid ingress, you don't have to go behind. That is a perfect opportunity to just save your units. I've done it with my blood angels a couple of times.
Sangre and Erigard, they just went into deep strike just so they weren't on the board to be shot at. Yeah. They deep strike probably further away than they could have got. But that's it.
They've got a charge. You have to reroll it. Plus one to charge with the damn tail. Yeah.
It's fine. Deep strike them so far away that they're safe for your turn, your opponent's turn. Then when it comes to your turn, well then they get 12. And then they can get a pretty something.
Exactly. Like a long play, rapid ingress. Yeah. Nice.
So is there any other prep that you did to go into it? Yes. It was hilarious. So it's on my work night out.
And we had some good work nights out, right? Normally you get stuck into the western side of middle class here, got stuck into the side there. It was not going to be good. This year, bit of a damp square, like three bitters max.
Oh dear. Good to see you. Good night out, but not the best one. So I didn't have a few fights on the Christmas night out.
So I was like, back in my hotel room, what about 11 or something? I'm not ready for my idea. Christmas day. Yeah.
Back by 11. It's just like a limper's. Yeah. It wasn't the best one this year.
But I was like, I'm not ready for bed. I don't need to do a bit of research. Because I was the next weekend. So basically I make my little note pad and pen for the hotel room.
I went through each of the missions and did my little plan like I talked about a minute ago. And I also did my secondary plan for every single list at the event. For every single list? Yeah.
Actually, so it must have been because I did the list inside a week. So maybe it was a few days before the event. I had the list so I could see what it was up against. So I went through and I was like, how well can I score it down?
How well can I score it? So I went through every list and I forgot to bring it. I was going to bring a prop. I got this hotel notebook with it in.
So when you go in, if I face any of those lists, what am I going to take? Can I take my perfect, assassinated bring it down combo? Can I take home as one of the kill? Or have I got to suck it up and take tactical?
OK. And it meant, again, less mental load at the table. I could just rock up and go, what have I got on the list? I know I'm taking.
I don't have to have a deep discussion about what your list is. Do the mental maths on risk and reward and what's the maths? What's the likely score? All of this kind of processing that you have to do.
It was just, well, it's on the list. I like it. And maybe that's something, having your, what you give up for, assassinate and bring it down is a good one to have just ready to go. Because if you rock up with lots of tanks or whatever, and so you're a space-wing player, but you've brought nothing but vehicles, then you're apparently saying, oh, wait, I can take bringing it down.
What do you give up? If you're going to scratch your head, that's not happening to anyone, and you could have started deploying. It's a really nice courtesy to your partners. I'm going to start getting that ready for mine.
Yeah, yeah. The list I'm brewing for my deaf garden is... You are a lot of bring it down. Yeah, yeah.
It's a good list, though. But no, nothing on assessment. Yeah. And I would say that those three options I talked about, so my perfect scenario of both the kills, the homeroom and the tactical, I ended up doing all three of them.
So the first one I did homers and assassinated, it was second one I did do, I asked it tactical. And the third one it was assassinated right now. Cool. And I researched it.
It does work. I like it. Was that your last little bit of prep work for it? I would just conclude that bit and say, knowing what second I was going to take and knowing the primary mission and how I'm going to play it meant that I had a game plan for each round.
Really clear in my head. As I said, the best example is on that prototype. I know I only need to sit on two of the five objectives. So I'm going to sit in a corner and kill everything.
And at the end of the game, I'm going to try and stand on three more and match the primary. And it becomes that simple. Beautiful. All right.
So just before we go into the how the game actually went, was there any oddities or randomness in the mission pack itself? What was the mission pack you sent me the other day? Oh, yeah. Was that just a random one that you found?
No, it was a tournament. I reached out to see if they had any spaces, but they didn't. And they had events. The terrain packing, I mean, I'm going to the app to find out what it is right now.
That's weird. I'd say there's a variety of weird things that you see in some tournaments. The one we went to, John, where everyone's had their own mission per round and we just rolled it up. Yeah.
That doesn't work for the tournament player. No, it doesn't. I mean, probably even the ones that listed it, being a game's workshop terrain is maybe a bit of an outlier, I think. Or maybe not for the 18 player.
Once you start to get into the bigger ones, they all turn to UKTC after that. Yeah, in the UK, all of the big stuff, it's all UKTC. It's all those pre-measured formats. We had that at the teams format where it was a mix.
But as a big fan of terrain setups being good, I think you can play in any WTC, any GW, and any UKTC boards and have a good game. Anything outside of that, player place, absolute rubbish. And anything that's not those three types of setup, just risks, strange things happening on the board, and the game being overly influenced by body place terrain. 100%.
All right, so the game's there. The meat of it all. Game one, who do you have? I'd a lovely bloke called Kyle.
So this is Miramatch, L.R. and L.D.R. Kyle was a fellow second edition L.D.R. No, it's basically high-fived across the table a number of times about how cool L.R.R.
from there for the night is. Both shows your bus pass. Yeah. Oh, sure.
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Anyway. He had a good mix of units.
I wouldn't say a meta list. You shared that list of the chat, didn't you? Yeah. It did strike us a bit of a...
It's just what I have. Yeah. It happens to be that. I don't know how good, but it was clearly just...
Yeah. And it was someone that has played out for a long time. Yeah. So I'm all for that.
He knew his index, like the back of his hand. Yeah. So I was really impressed with him on that one. He knew all of his rules.
And I really appreciate that. And I really appreciate that. And I frankly get pretty bored pretty quickly when someone's looking up the day to sheet for the day. He was looking up the day to sheet for a fucking bolt at every five minutes.
So he was really sharp. I went first and I'll purge the foe. That is completely pain in the arse. I took home as an assassin, he went tactical.
Okay. But the story of the game was basically I got the jump on his back field with my Yincarn and my solitaire. So Solitaire just did a big blitz, went and sniped out his farcea, Yincarn appeared, killed some stuff. And then his back field is mine.
That was kind of the game at that point. Ended up at 96, 47, when... That is quite a decisive victory. Yeah.
It was... I'd say the other thing that influenced the scoring part from me taking his back field. So decisively was... I screened out his reserves really well.
So he was forced to charge into my 70-point village character rather than kind of get into my night spinners and some of my shallow spectres and stuff at the back. So between those two plays, I got to take a lot of his stuff and I got to build a lot of his stuff. And I got to build a lot of his attack. And that's like a 800-point swing.
Yeah, well, on Perge the Fove, that is exactly what needs to be done. Yeah. I always think we've... If you're going first, you're in Perge the Fove as well.
And you're going to be... you're in fights. It's... Well, no.
If you're going second and your opponent is more of a melee threat, I've made the mistake before. For... for back, don't let them get the jump because they're going to be fighting first unless you've charged. Just fall back.
Deny and easy kills. If you've traded blows and you'll still have some lingers, then just drop back. Yeah. How did he score on his...
what was his down side? So I was a bit of a boa constrictor on it and just couldn't let him score primary or secondary to be honest. He only scored 13 on his second race. I do remember us shaking our heads.
I think he had some really crap draws at the worst times. Like I'm looking at it here and he had behind enemy lines investigate signals in the middle of the game. And he just wasn't in a position to get anywhere near it. He did keep bringing it down for a couple turns at one stage, which was a lot of turns.
Really, I've got the Knights' minutes at the back and I've got two avatars who were half damage. So that was something you'd probably do differently if you did it again. Yeah, well, I mean, we're big advocates. If you haven't scored it, you're probably not scoring it.
Yeah. So just give it a little... Yeah. So the reason I scored Knight's six, not a hundred, is because one of my other philosophies in games is don't obsess over the hundred.
Yeah. I mean, I couldn't give a shit about whether I score a hundred or not in a game I'm really dominating. I mean, it might come back to me at some stage, but I'd much rather score really well than perfectly and really win the game well. Yeah.
So I kind of threw away several points just by deploying my homes in the middle rather than in the back field because I wanted to kind of crush his score and make sure I won. Yeah. I mean, if you're denying your opponent points, you're going to just increase your score. So, not everyone scores a hundred.
If you've consistently scored 90, 95, 92, that sort of area and your opponent is scored 90, then sometimes they drop down to like a 70 score win. Then if you've been consistent, then you're going to win. Yeah. I think not going for that hundred is probably a good thing.
Yeah. I'm quite, again, like deployment on scoring on relative and conservative. I don't want to throw stuff away for the sake of a couple of extra points. Oh, the decisive win.
Yeah. Then you've got game two, which was... Game two was against Matt again, another lovely guy. In fact, his wife turned up halfway through the game at the end.