The Road to WARGamesCon...

We've hit the 1 month out mark on the 40k doubles tournament my wife and I will be attending at WARGamesCon. Looking quite forward to it, even if I will be helping a friend move into a new apartment the day before. Ah. the joys of truck ownership. Heh. As the day nears, we've managed to get a few good 1,000 point games in with our armies against some local folks, but haven't yet put the two together for a 2,000 point game since last year.

As it stands, my Nurgle force has fared rather well against all comers with a much greater percentage of wins than losses currently. In fact, I've tabled, 2 of my last 3 opponents and left the other with a damaged vehicle and a transport giving me a 7-3 Killpoint victory.

This last was actually my first game above 500 points against tau in 5th edition. I played tau once in a small points cost tournament with my orks and, believe it or not, lost combat to a squad of fire warriors with a unit of boys.
Nothing like that happening with the Plague Boys. The Purge rolls up, dumps out a ton of fire and rolls on. I'm actually really enjoying using plasma guns with my army instead of meltas or the like. That's not to say that my deep striking obliterator doesn't try to drop close enough to blow things up with a well placed twin-linked meltagun shot.
My Daemon Prince is a great bullet-magnet and while he does get 'stuck in there' and mixes it up a good bit in combat, I find that his best use is usually as a distraction so my Plague Marines can pull up close enough to dump out of their rhinos and deliver the rapid fire damage. They're good boys, and they love their Pa dearly, they just don't miss him as much when he's gone is all. =)

My Wife's been having mixed luck with her 1,000 points of Khorne on the other end of the stick. They're great assault troops, but once in combat, if they don't have the Daemon around to back them up, they end up grinding to a halt and the battle just seems to go on and on becoming a war of attrition. I think she needs to bleed on her minis more. She cut herself in the assembly process on a few things which led to us giving her a pre-emptive bandaid thimble any time she picked up a hobby knife, but I don't think her berserkers got the sanguinary treatment. Or at least not enough of it to really crave it. I'm not talking buckets of blood, but a little dab'll do ya.

The last thing I want to mention today, but certainly not least, are gaming accessories. Gamer bling as it were. More specifically, tokens and counters. At the last tournament I went to, I had dice everywhere denoting which vehicles were immobilized, or which weapons were destroyed; who couldn't shoot or move and whether or not I'd popped smoke. The problem I ran into was, remembering not to pick up those dice when I was thinking about something else. If I'm not paying attention actively to my hands and what I'm doing with them, they like to roam around on their own, picking up dice and rattling them around. My solution to this issue... Tokens!

I've been aware of Litko tokens for a while, but hadn't picked any up until recently. The two things I decided I needed to track most of all were when I used my smoke launchers (since when I did remember to pop smoke I usually forgot to roll saves) and what was wrecked or which weapons were destroyed. For the first, I picked up this bag of smoke counters. They have several different styles and looks, but this is very basic and was just what I wanted. For destroyed weapons and/or wrecked vehicles, I went with these flaming wreckage markers. I bought the small ones to place on the vehicle over or next to the weapons that are destroyed and on the table next to tracks for immobilized results. I plan on picking up a bag of larger ones (probably medium sized) to denote wrecked vehicles.

These tokens have made my results tracking much easier. They add a unique visual element to the table and maybe I'm a bit of a big kid still, but I think they're making my games more fun as I don't feel as bad about losing movement or weapons systems since I get to use my neat new toys. My wife likes the idea, but isn't as keen on these particular token sets so she's looking at picking up some from Gale Force 9, probably this evening after work as she just got paid today. Here's hoping we get them by tournament time.
Until next week, Gurgle for Nurgle!!