Some more Kill Team

So, I had a little run of games a couple of weeks ago. These games were played down at the club against a fellow guard player. As he was playing guard I decided to try out my deathwatch, with a blackshield with power sword and storm shield, frag cannon, stalker boltgun, shotgun and leader with combi-plasma. A fairly small force but one I though was well rounded.  

Start of turn 1. We played the mission where you need to capture your opponent's models, so I decided to play it a bit safe. My leader and frag cannon were at the back, with the stalker taking the high ground. There is a shotgun hiding under the bridge on the left and the blackshield is front and centre, ready to charge in and kill some things in combat. 

The enemy deployment, with the guard huddled up behind the central building with just the sniper sitting out in the open. We both were pretty cautious first turn, with my opponent moving up in to the building and me mostly readying my forces, all apart from the blackshield and shotgun marine, which I push forward towatds the enemy, ready to charge next turn. This is where things started to go wrong. First shot of the game came from the sniper into my blackshield. A 6 to hit followed by a 6 to wound, dishing out a nice mortal wound, which was followed by a 6 on the injury roll. Good night blackshield!

This was the end of turn 2 movement and I've started pushing up. With the death of the blackshield I had to have a rethink and so I moved everything up to try and start gunning things down. This didn't turn out to well in the end. I'm going to blame the dice for this, which were heavily>n my opponents favour this game. For example, I moved my frag cannon up in to range of the group of guardsmen on the centre building and using the auto hitting round, did a massive 12 shots which spread across 4 guardsmen resulted in 1 flesh wound. Yep, 1. No kills, no mass casualties, nope, just 1 flesh wound.

This picture basically sums up my day, this guardsman stood up to combi-plasma, frag cannons, stalker boltgun, the works, and at the end of the game was sitting, alive, on 3 flesh wound. I could not kill him. At the start of turn 4, when all hope was lost, I decided that he would die and I threw everything I could at him and he just stood there, making saves or dodging bullets, well all but one bullet, which I rolled a 1 for my injury roll. At the end of the game my opponent had one model with 3 flesh woulds, 3 models with 2 flesh woulds and a bunch of other with flesh wounds. These are suppose to be the best that the Astartes have to offer and they couldn't even kill guardsmen!

The final stages, my lone survivor, the stalker boltgun vet being closed in on by the mass of guardsmen, still over half the kill team remained. A solid loss for the deathwatch. I don't know the score but I definitely lost.

Game 2 and a change of tactic. Seeing as the deathwatch couldn't do the job, the guard would have a go. I went with my usual choices, leader, vox comms specialist, sniper with sniper rifle and grenade launcher heavy, along with a plasma gunner and a second grenade launcher, plus the required 10 guardsmen.

Setup, I split the forces keeping a core back, with leader, sniper and vox acting as support and pushing up the rest. My opponent bunched up around the central objective, similar to the first game, a tactic that payed off first time around.

Another shot of the setup. 

My opponents setup.

I did not take any more pictures for some reason but the game went very well. Now I played the objective and managed to pull out a good lead. While there wasn't much death in the first couple of rounds but it picked up later in the game. By the start of turn 4 I was well ahead on points, pretty much unassailable, however, there was a minor issue, the break test. Now, turn 4 was not a problem, however at the end of turn 5 both of us were down to less than half number. We rolled off to see if either team broke and my opponent passed and I failed. So as per the rules of the game, I lost.

So despite being comfortably ahead on points, I still lost the game, which was annoying. I still think that the mechanics of the game, including teams breaking, however, I think as a game winning mechanic it isn't very good. After playing the mission and scoring points, enough to win the game, I loose on a dice roll. I really enjoyed both games and I'm counting it as one loss and one moral victory.