My First Apocalypse Game
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Warhammer 40,000 – Over the weekend I was able to play in my first official apocalypse size game. Big games are nothing new to me as my group have always played massive multiplayer games of 40K with each player playing their own army by itself. These affairs would take forever to wrap up and inevitably players lose interest in the game when it's not their turn. Which meant we typically only played until we were tired and called it so it was rare to finish a game.
With the current set of apocalypse rules we decided to give a big game a shot. One of my buddies was itching to use his Baneblade in a real apocalypse game so we set it up for a Sunday. Not knowing exactly who would be able to make it (face it with kids plans are always tentative) we came up with a lose point value and teams. This would serve as a kick-off for our Badab Campaign. Each player would bring a 40k legal 2000 point list with several 500 point add on lists that did not have to follow the Force Organization Chart. We also set a hard start of 1:00 pm and a hard stop of 8:00 pm. However many turns we could play in that time period would be the game.
Upon arriving at my friends house I was surprised to see not only a Baneblade but also a Warhound Titan. My teammate did bring his Plastic Thunderhawk Conversion so we did have a superheavy to fight against the hoard but things looked grim.
First turn, we managed to seize the initiative so we could go first. I dropped my Dreadnought at the feet of the titan and disembarked my grav cannon centurions as close as I could to the massive beast. Once it was all said and done we stripped it of 5 of its 9 hullpoints. We also killed a ton of troops but were unable to cause any to break and run. Unfortunately when the titan went it unleashed it's D-weapons and took out most of the things that could hurt it.
Turn two, with things looking grim we brought in the second line of tank killing weapons to take out the titan unfortunately there was little we could do to it and when it unleashed its massive death rays on our field it took out the rest of the things that could hurt it.
Turn three we changed focus to taking out the troops and bringing moving our troops toward the objectives in an attempt to claim some type of victory out of the bloodbath. The Titan found a less target rich environment so not as many things died this turn and the Baneblade was still stuck behind a wall of slow moving friendly troops.
Turn four the Thunderhawk arrived and eliminated the titan. (Moral Victory) We had reached our hard stop and it looked like we'd win on objectives. However to be fair we let our opponent finish their turn and lost miserably.
The game was fun but it did take a very long time to play, with the apocalypse rules however it did move faster than the old big games of 40k we used to play.
