Old age and guile

 . . . will win over youth and enthusiasm.  At least, that's how it worked out the other weekend when the Cub and I set out to play some 40k.  I fielded Warboss Binky and his usual crowd of malcontents and stooges, while Cub went with a toy-heavy Marine list.  He took his Redeemer, three characters, a Raptor, and assorted other goodies (I think there was a kitchen sink in there) at 1000 points, which in retrospect, may have cost him the list resilience he needed.

Binky takes charge.

This was one of those games where I got an early jump on things, and Cub never really got a chance to catch up.

Right flank

Left flank

Cub, for some reason, decided to deploy his Raptor on table at the start of the game, despite the odds that I'd have first turn (he had a chance to steal it, but the odds were in my favour).  Now, being the cunning fellow he is, he's tricked the thing out as an ork-murdering machine, with twin heavy bolters, twin-linked autocannon, and a special rule that means he hits ground targets on a 2+.  This is generally sufficient to tear the guts out of a mob in a turn, so I tend to treat it as a high-priority target.

Gaping hole where the Raptor used to be.

Needless to say, concentrated fire from half my army left a smoking crater where a Raptor used to be, and between scoring a VP for a "kill a unit" objective, one for seizing a located objective, and one for first blood, I ended turn one with a comfy 3-point lead.

But the Redeemer rolls up in lieu

Next up on the "to kill" list is generally his redeemer.  This thing requires either a ton of Rokkits, or a motivated Binky with Klaw to deal with, as it has ridiculous armour, and can fire twin flamer templates that are even worse than the raptor.  Cub's usual approach is to drive the thing into the middle of my army, and set orks on fire until I manage to kill it.  Meanwhile, the rest of his army gets a free ride.

This is going to hurt

True to form, he closed in, and started spraying auto-hitting, wound-re-rolling, armor-piercing promethium all over the place, with predictably killy results.  To add insult to injury, he also had it poop out a marine squad to screen the damn thing from assaults.  Kid's learning.

A lot.

Of course, dropping a tac squad into the middle of an ork army, even with Redeemer back up, posed its own problems.



Especially with Binky in view of his favorite S10 Power Klaw target . . .

Binky urges da boyz forward

Cub brought up a Librarian and Chaplain in support, and they did pretty solid service - he likes pyromancy, and his librarian got to unload with yet another flame template into my increasingly crispy boys.

Starting to bleed some boyz.

I think I got lucky with a rokkit at this point.  I'd been shooting the land raider pretty consistently for several turns, and finally made the 4th hull point stick.  I sent the rest of the shoota boys over to engage the tacticals and characters, while my tankbustas went right.

There's Devastators in them there woods.

Binky and the Librarian squared off in a challenge.

The Wrath of Binky.

Predictably, Binky Klawed the libby to death, da boyz did for the tacticals in combat (the Chaplain dying to the Nob), and the tankbustas and the rump of the deffkoptas put a hurt on the devastators that had spent the night lurking in the woods.

It was a pretty convincing win for the orks, but in fairness, Cub never really got his feet under him.  He got his revenge back this weekend, by completely spanking me in a game of X-wing.  I'm hoping to pick up the new, "official" rules for Kill team, so we might tinker with that in a few weeks.  In the meantime, I'm continuing to plug away at the Khorne stuff for Armies on Parade in October.

FMB