NOVA Construction

Diving headfirst back into gaming, yesterday Colin, Jason, and I finally got down to some serious business on our plans for the NOVA tournament, where we’ll be playing in the Team Trios and Narrative tracks.

The Monastery

Despite being way, way behind schedule, our final plans are shaping up reasonably grandiose. Assuming it gets done, our display will indeed be based around our theme of the Kingbreakers defending their chapter monastery amid the fall of Forestway. The vignette here will be the local Knight Errant marching forth with the last Kingbreakers to join the Imperial Fists, Blood Angels, and Dark Angels come to help defend the planet.

Colin measures and cuts some foam as Jason supervises.

Colin measures and cuts some foam as Jason supervises.

The causeway out of the monastery.

The causeway out of the monastery.

Battle!

After spending many many hours building some elaborate boxes out of foam and talking through the missions a bit, Colin and I played a 2000 point game. We used the second mission of the Trios tournament, which is pretty straightforward: Hammer & Anvil (long table axis), five objectives, go! Colin’s army is basically all deep striking: Bunch of Dark Angels Terminators, bunch of Blood Angels dreadnoughts in Drop Pods, bunch of Blood Angels hooligans in Drop Pods, handful of scouts that have to run onto the board as part of some cruel hazing ritual. Kingbreakers have a forward contingent of Tacticals and Sternguard in Drop Pods, a rear contingent of bunkered up Devastators, Tacticals, and Predators, and a stompy contingent in the form of a giant Knight.

Some early morning traffic congestion.

Some early morning traffic congestion.

After deploying the standard joke about his army being entirely deployed (while still in its cases), Colin went first and dropped Dreadnoughts all around my Knight and Terminators deep in my backfield. My Inquisitor though was expecting them, and the Devastators put a hurting on one group of Terminators on the intercept. The Dreadnoughts did minimal damage, and then the backfield shot back: Sternguard dropped in to bail out the poor trapped Knight and together they kicked in some cans while the Devastators worked over the Terminators some more. More Blood Angels came down on two objectives to scrum it up, but Kingbreakers Tacticals unexpectedly put the beatdown on the dreaded Death Company while the Knight and friends had a shooting party against some less angry red gentlemen.

I am lord of all I surveil!

I am lord of all I surveil!

Eventually we called the game for time, three turns in. At that point Colin appeared to be playing for a draw from a tight position, with me most likely able to claim 3 objectives and possibly Slay the Warlord. The main takeaway for me though was that I remain pretty happy with this basic army construction. Right now I’ve dropped the Guardsmen used in the June tournament as I simply won’t have time to get them painted. That reduces my ability to bubble wrap the Knight and have cheap guys camp out in the bunker, but it’s not the worst thing ever. So, I’m looking at painting a Knight (!) and a Drop Pod to have this army fully painted.  Oh yeah, and a giant frickin’ fortress to be detailed and painted, because… yeah.

Stompin' time!

Stompin’ time!