This weekend I was at Tabletop Nation for a tournament. The blog was pretty quiet last week because I was in a painting frenzy trying to get the Word Bearers up to scratch. Although they need a lot more work to finish off and a few things to tidy I was pretty happy with them.

Knowing that I needed to get the army finished I booked Thursday and Friday off work and settled down for a paint marathon. To my surprise I had everything "good enough" for tournament play by Thursday night. Therefore Friday I head down to the FLGS to get my first ever game in with this army before taking it to a tournament the next day! Above is me taking on some Black Templars with my horde.

I hadn't really processed the fact that this army was a horde.... This would prove to be quite a pain over the course of the tournament. Setting up and moving 100 odd models is a slow process. At least with IG hordes they barely move, whereas my lunatics were hurling themselves forwards all weekend.

My Nurgle bikers cresting a hill to bring the Word to the unenlightened. These guys definitely do not pull their weight... however, I may have not used them very well over the weekend. This army needs a lot more practice before I work out who should be doing what and when.

Before heading into the venue we met most of the other players in a local cafe for a nice breakfast. As we had been awake since 6am this was a much appreciated moment lol.

First game was against a Daemon player who was running a mix of Tzeentch Princes with some Soul Grinders and a horde of Blood Letters. I thought hard but at the end of the game I just had my Forgefiend and my Heldrake trying to steal some late kill points but it was not to be. I ended up losing by some margin. It is worth noting that this army went on to take 2nd place overall.

The Forgefined is about to take a pasting.. so I thought.. in the end the Daemon Prince with one wound left failed to Perils of the Warp and died pre charge.. lucky escape.

Game 2 my horde is fully arrayed for war. Every model (except the Heldrake) started on the board. Fighting the Relic my plan was to jam the cultists into the center and take the relic by sheer weight of numbers.

Last game of the Saturday was against Tau. I spent the Whole game trying to rush his lines only to have Farsight turn up late game and torch my cultists etc from behind. Many failed charges from my Chaos Lord later and I managed to take a hard fought victory by the tiniest of margins. Most notable moment of the game and likely of the weekend was a single Cultist left holding an objective on his own passing 4-5 Cover Saves (including a Riptide opening up on him and him alone). He then followed this up by passing his morale after losing the rest of his unit and then contesting an objective which would have given my opponent the win.

Please note this is not me but a fellow gamer. I was not aware of this but I must have left my phone on the table when we were out to dinner and well... this was on my phone... stay classy :D

As the previous pic may have alluded to.. I was pretty hungover on the Sunday morning. Therefore I managed to only take one picture lol. This was the 4th game and I took an absolute mauling with Heldrakes torching everything in my army and Thousand Sons killing anything that the Drakes did not. However, we had a pretty awesome brawl in the center of the table and I really enjoyed the game. Thanks again to my opponent for letting me us a Daemon Prince of his when my Lord rolled Dark Apotheosis on the Boon table.

My final game was against a Dark Angel army and we played the Scouring. This was a draw which I really had a good shot at winning given the amount of troops I had. However, I made a catalog of errors which my opponent rightly punished me for :) In the end I believed I had lost until my opponent pointed out a lone cultist scoring line breaker bringing the final VPs to 10-10.

All in all I had a really good weekend and saw some very cool armies and met a bunch of new people to throw dice with. Thanks again to the event organizers for a smooth weekend and thanks to my opponents for some really great games. 

Lastly I would like top point out that my buddy managed to take 3rd with his Black Templars (seen in the first pic of this post) using the old Codex for the last time.  A pretty heroic effort and I am sure he will be sad to see all that Rage go. RIP Codex: Black Templars long live Codex: Space Marines!!

- Martok