Facehammer GT my first tournament

[Kanamorf]

Well I went to Facehammer GT this weekend and it was my first multi day tournament, having only played one single day event before. And I took Bone Splittas. There are at least one hundred and one ways I can justify my army choice from “I have been playing orcs and goblins since 1986” to “I have a fetish for green skin”. The main reason was I designed the list to be good.

Just as the battle tome came out I had been using my Ironjaws army and had crashed into a skaven list that dealt mortal wounds like crazy, not a full Clan Skyre list but still nasty, and I lost. When the Bone Splittas book arrived I spent some time chatting with club mates and designing a counter to mortal wound spam. My answer to that was to flood the board with bodies. So after much tinkering this is the list I came up with.

1 x Savage Big Boss                          Leader                  General                                (1)         100
1 x Wardokk                                       Leader                                                  (1)         80
1 x Wardokk                                       Leader                                                  (1)         80
1 x Maniak Wierdnob                     Leader                                                  (1)         100
1 x Savage Orruks                            Battleline                                             (20)        200
1 x Savage Orruks                            Battleline                                             (30)        300
1 x Savage Orruks Arrowboys                                                                     (40)        400
1 x Savage Boarboys                       Battleline                                             (5)          120
1 x Savage Boarboys Maniaks     Battleline                                             (10)        320
1 x Savage Big Stabbas                                                                                   (4)          200
1 x Bonegrinz Warclan                    Battalion                                                              40
1 x Kunnin Rukk                                                Battalion                                                              60

Total 2000

 

I think some of you will see this list see Kunnin Rukk and 40 archers and cry filth. Am I apologetic about taking that? Hell no. It is the power house of the army but importantly it is also the unit that is wearing the big sign saying kill me quick please.

So I arrive, day one of Facehammer GT, with 2 goals in mind. First goal “Win a game” and a stretch goal of “Win more than I lose”.

Game one I played Gift from the Heavens against Marc Wilson’s Warrior Brotherhood Stormcast army with Drycha coming along to help. I love this scenario and have done well in practice games so I went with my plan.

I won’t go into massive detail but I lost this game badly. Most of his army stayed up off the board until his turn 3 when it landed and he got the double turn. I did not recover well, dithered too much and suffered badly from my poor choices, so combined with his better play I only killed 180 points worth of his army. Not the best start to my tournament playing J

Game two starts with me on the bottom table playing Blood and Glory against Russ Ward. I was faced with a mixed god Demon army with a unit of 30 bloodletters and Sayl. I have read quite a bit in the last few weeks about the “Letter bomb” and the damage it can do so I set up more defensively than normal.

Anyway the defensive setup did not work and I got the full force of a dammed terrain buffed bloodletter unit full in the face of my archer block doing mortal wounds on a 4+. Well my first bit of luck for the weekend. It bounced and killed 4 archers. Unfortunately for Russ the archers then went on a rampage and killed the bloodletters and the bloodthirster. I won that game with a major victory and 1780 kill points. Russ was great during the game laughing at his misfortune. I am sure on another day the bloodletters would have crippled the archers and the game would have been much closer.

Game three was against Mathew Arnold’s skaven army, playing Three places of Power. This is one of my nemesis scenarios due to the fact my characters all die when anything takes a moment to think about killing them, 5 and 6 wound guys with a save of 6 will not weather much shooting, and there were warp throwers and lighting cannons on the board.

My rough plan for this game was kill his shooting and characters early game when he tried to cap the objectives and then move up late game and grab them myself. This was the game where nothing went wrong for me. Mathew had nothing to counter my archer block and the maniac boars went loopy in the back field.

So now I have had two games where my plans have worked near perfectly and I have had a good chunk of luck and while playing I could hear a good chunk of chatter around the table about how insane the archer are.

Game three I was drawn against my good friend Justin Oxman, we have been playing wargames of various types against each other since the early 90s and they are not usually one sided games. The scenario was Escalation. Justin has a Soulblight army with 3 units of blood knights and a vampire on zombie dragon. Blood knights are incredibly hard to kill if you have no rend as their armour save gets better. Guess what I have no rend. We had also played Escalation a couple of weeks earlier with very similar armies and I had lost.

Turn two one unit of Blood Knights charged the archers and silenced their bow strings for the rest of the game. He killed 15 on the charge. I could have retreated and tried to reposition but I was happy to let him just slowly kill them. Blood Knights charging are a sight to behold, blood knights in a melee are not. I struggled to kill them and he struggled to wade through the bodies quickly.

This was the first game where the other part of my army did its job, yes in turns two and three I killed 2 units of blood knights with my archers when I got the double turn but after that I hardly killed anything until the last turn. What won this game for me were bodies on objectives. Big blocks of orcs standing on an objective are very hard to shift and I kept ticking up the points and denying him the points. Last dice roll of the game I cast Squiggly curse on the vampire lord on dragon killing him. My Maniac Wierdnob has a pet vampire squig for all eternity now!

So it’s my first tournament and I have reached the dizzy heights of table 6 and I know I am going to be playing someone very good and who do I get? Well it had to be really, I was drawn against @BenCurry and his Clan Skyre. The very army mine had been designed to fight against. This was a great game. I gave Ben 1^st turn and he popped up the storm fiends in front of my blocks and in his first turn did just over 60 wounds worth of damage. Critically for me he could not reach my characters. This is the point where the big sign saying “Kill me please” that my archers carry paid off. Ben knew correctly they were a threat, however what he did not anticipate was how fast the boars are when they can move double distance and fly after having Hand of Gork cast on them. He said as much during the game and I am sure he will post his own thoughts soon enough. This was the second game where bodies won it for me. It took him too long to get through them to be able to then deal with my chaff units.

So at the end of 5 games I have 4 major victories and a loss. I am over the moon at that.

So I guess the question is would I have done so well if I had not taken Bone Splitas? No I don’t think I would have. They are an incredibly strong army when you have not faced them before and don’t have the tools to counter them. However like most new things people are going to learn quickly where the weaknesses are. It’s been said on these forums several times, I will repeat it, the power is not in the archers, it’s in the characters. Reach out and touch them, they will most likely fall over and die.

Facehammer GT was an immense event. Anyone out there who is thinking about going to a tournament, stop thinking, go. The room was a buzz of positive attitude all weekend, I met many great people and played some amazing games.

I have to say thank you to Russ, Les, Byron and Liam for organising it all.

Thanks for getting this far with my ramblings and I hope to meet more of you at my next tournament

 

[Ben]

Don't care that I lost.  I killed SOOOOO many Orruks!!!!!

[Kanamorf]

I had one model left, my Maniak Wierdnob! It must have been the luck of the squig he made in the previous game.

[TDK]

You should link this on the FHGT thread if you haven't already.

Cheers,

Sam

[Gorgerak]

Great write up mate really enjoyed reading this

[Gaz Taylor]

1 hour ago, Ben said:

Don't care that I lost.  I killed SOOOOO many Orruks!!!!!

So you still Washed up then?  

[Arnie]

I really liked this list, you played it really well and looked amazing on the table. The shear number of bodies to cover areas where tunnelers could appear combined with the shooting made it pretty difficult to reach out and touch the characters even for ranged units such as the WLC (at best 2 rounds on them with a double turn). Overall very well played in my opinion.

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[Ollie Grimwood]

Great write up. 

I  thought I saw something about seminars at the event on Twitter. Did you attend them? 

[Marc Wilson]

Ian, you were a pleasure to play against and well done in what I think you said was your first tournament!

[WORGORE]

Just to echo others comments. Great write up! 

 

Good to hear bodies really do count and play to the objectives no matter what you face. 

[Kanamorf]

I did not attend the seminars. I would have loved to but part of gaining enough wife points to go to the event I agreed to go and have a meal with friends in the evening. I hear they were excellent and that the Facehammer team will be putting them up on their You Tube channel in the near future

[grunnlock]

Sounds look you had great fun! Tournaments in AOS are the greatest thing there is, meeting many players and gaming all week-end in a friendly environment is nothing but pure happiness source.

Congrats on your performance! I'm yet to play against a Bone Splitas army, but I'm eager to see it happening. They are a real challenge!

[Terry Pike]

The seminars will be available online once the video footage has been edited.

[Tizianolol]

Hi all, there are many post about sylvaneth wildwoods in the forum..have u faced this faction at facehammer tournament? What do u think about sylvaneth wildwood?:)

[Nico]

Quote

The seminars will be available online once the video footage has been edited.

Like - hit like cap!