March 2010 Apoc Battle

League Subterranea seems to get an Apocalypse game going about once a year. This time it was a smaller game with only 18,000 total points compared to some of the 30-40K battles in the past. The guys at Labyrinth Comics and Games were nice enough to host the game on a day they are usually closed. Members of the Labyrinth team made up about half the players.

Unlike many of our normal Apoc games this one was a little more themed with Good Guys (Tau, Eldar, Space Marines) verses Nids. While there are really no good guys in 40K these races are ones who might join together (or at least stop fighting each other long enough) to fight off the Nids.

We played on a composite table which was about 10-11 feet wide and between 6 and 8 feet deep. That 8 foot deep part was a problem since there was this 18 inch zone in the center of the table that was very hard to reach. We also played the game with the capture and hold style objectives where you earn points for hold objective at the end of your player turns so last second objective grabs are of minimum usefulness.

My unpainted partially assembled Nids can be seen trying to march up the long way across the table while my opponents landraiders try to roll up my flank.

Here is where my units are trying to go but they never made it. Not because they were destroyed but because we ran out of time after 3 turns. It did not really matter since one of our team deepstriked a ton of units behind the enemy lines while I outflanked a unit of stealer who tied up those broadside for 2 full turns.



While interesting things were happening on my side of the table the real battle was won on the other side. During the bidding for first turn process, we had intended to go second and just absorb their fire but I actually bid 1 minute lower than the opponents so we went first. We decided not to make it to easy for them to get first turn and they thought we would want all the time we could get to set up on hordes of minis so my 9 minutes beat their 10 minutes. We set up heavy and they place their objective in our zone behind on the side with the player who had hold at all costs for his units. I took the advantage to load his side of the table with our 3 objective objectives. Their zone objective I put exactly 1 foot from the edge right past no mans land. Then I placed our other 2 objectives as close as possible. This left 4 of the 6 objectives in easy reach of a massive wave of scoring(hold at all costs) nid army. The rest of the board was just sort of a holding action to prevent them from moving to take all the objectives that we quickly gained back. Turns went 3-2 then 3-2 and by turn three we had 4-0 so we called the game as it was getting late.