Introduction

Good day all! Zak Ludick here from Cape Town, South Africa and this is the King of the Cape Warhammer 40,000 tournament!

These last two weeks I have not had the time to do a lot of posting, aftereffects of birthdays and loadshedding carrying on all the time, plus having a tournament to prepare for and models to paint, I had my hands full!

I put the work in, played a quick practice game, and managed to get ready on time.

Thank you @clairemobey for putting up with me while I frantically painted up my miniatures for the tournament.

I was not expecting to win the tournament. I played a tournament last in 5th edition and it is now the 9th edition of the game! Plus, Space Marines of all flavors have been getting a steady stream of new models and stratagems and this causes some new units to be a little MORE effective with their new gear and shiny rules, but I wanted to field my army as it was, and see how the game would play!

The day finally arrived and this is how it all went down!

Before the Tournament

Right I posted this up the other day but without much explanation. So I am playing Space Wolves, a Space Marine army (Space Marines being genetically enhanced super soldiers) who are recruited from and retain a culture from a planet called Fenris - and icy Death World where the Clans of humans on it constantly battle one another and all sorts of monsters. In short, they are sort of like Vikings. They are also a bit like were-wolves but without the ability to morph back and forth. Some of their members are very wolf-like and all of them have elongated canines.

So let's review my 2000pts army list!

HQ

• Bjorn the Fell Handed (is the shiny Dreadnought out in front.)

• Wolf Priest with Jump Pack. Saga of the Hunter. Armor or Russ. Master of Sanctity.

Elites

• The Murderfang

• Redemptor Dreadnought

• Contemptor Dreadnought

• Wolf Guard with Jump Packs

Troops

• Squad of Blood Claws

• 2x Squads of Grey Hunters

• 2x Razorback Transports

Heavy Support

• Land Raider

• Vindicator

• Long Fangs

All my infantry could fit in one layer of foam, the small carry box I have has two such layers.

The rest of the models went into this tank box. I just got some styrafoam and cut it to fit the box to keep the models safe. I also brought with my tape measure and dice in this box!

Before Round 1

Here are some scenes of the Battle Bunker in Tygervalley Mall before Round 1!

I will probably do a thorough playthough of each match in future posts. Let's just run through the matches as they were!

Round 1 - Imperial Knights

I have NEVER played against Imperial Knights. They were simply just not a playable faction in 3rd to 5th edition. Below is his whole army, 7 massive mech constructs. These guys are basivally noble knights of the Imperium.

It was tricky, I was quite unfamilliar!

Despite not knowing the Knights I managed to have a really fun game. They are not indestructible. I managed to kill 2 of the 3 big ones and 2 out of the 2 smaller knights.

I do not have progress shots of the actual battle. I also suffered a fair amount of casualties but it is not the casualties that determines the battle only, but Victory Point!

The Knights ended up win by a fair margain as they scored more points by the end of the game. But it was a lot of fun and I look forward to facing them again soon!

Round 2 - Death Guard

The foul Chaos worshipping Traitor marines of the Death Guard were next up! These are the same faction that my friend Nic plays, so I knew them a bit better in 9th edition.

With a fair idea of what these guys were capable of doing and knowing that taking control of the board would be a massive determining factor, I deployed my forces and got busy.

One thing that really surprised my opponent was my Long Fangs being able to move and then shoot with their Missile Launchers at zero penalty. The Space Wolves can use a Stratagem called Keen Senses that allows them to pull that off!

Glorious combat! Murderfang and the Redemptor rip apart a Bloat Drone. The sneaky thing here was that the Bloat Drone can be made to automatically explode and cause damage to everything nearby!

In the end I managed to beat the Death Guard and secured myself a fair win margain!

Round 3 - Emperor's Children

More Chaos! This time the worshippers of Slaanesh. Usually this army is painted in Black and Pink/Purple but this yellow color-scheme looks really nice!

I knew I was in trouble in this round. The opponent had a chess clock and knew his rules really well, all the marks of a player who has been playing at a competative level for a long while and having playing game after game after game.

So I kept it in mind not to worry about the loss and instead focus on getting some points!

The opponent hid most of his army for most of the game. When he did expose himself it was mostly a single unit of Terminator Chosen with a relic that made them tough and he boosted them with a psychic power that made them tougher!

With clever use of the terrain and stratagems, he scored his points and I learned a lot by watching him!

Predicatably he won this match but I learned a lot and I did manage the Assassinate 3 of his 4 characters! Mwahahaha!

Meanwhile

On the first day of the tournament @merenludick, my son came with and he hung around for most of the day, watching people play. He also played next door at a shop where you can play xbox.

Day 2

A new day and two more matches to go!

With 2 Losses and 1 Win the previous day, I was not disheartened. The whole point of this tournament was to get back into the game and get into the rules and force myself to have a painted army!

Onwards!

Round 4 - Tyranids Hive Fleet Kraken

So remember that I said I had time for 1x practice game at Sword and Board? Happens to be against this exact same player that I was having Round 4 against!

Not only did I know his army, I also knew what his "big bomb" move was, and I also... get this... knew this table...

The Tournament Organizer - Bernard offered me two other tables and I did loong them over briefly, but they were terrible tables!

So I waited for my opponent to show up and studied the terrain. I suppose this helps me ponder what to do.

I did make a mishap however with my deployment in any case, but corrected the mistake later.

At the end of a game, you get 10 points for having a painted army. This is something that did not count in Tiago's favour the whole tournament. He conceded these points as he was simply far too busy to paint his models.

That big bug in the above shot though... hate that thing...

But not the only big bugs that I needed to worry about.

Again, as yesterday, my opponent hid his forces. However, he could not manage to hide 100% of everything. So what I could see in the first turn, I killed!

Sometimes dice can be like this... 4x 1's where I needed 2's to HIT.

My lineup on the other side of the board.

Another fickle dice roll where I needed 3's to wound and cause serious damage to a big monster!

However... dice is not the only thing that determines success. I managed to beat the Tyranid by a small margain. Then applied the painted army bonus and it was a win by a better margain. This also cleared up the doubts of whether or not he might have won if he had counted objectives or kills here or there differently if something else had happened. But because of my lead plus the lead on the paint score, this was not possible.

Round 5 - Adeptus Mechanicus

Another faction that I have never played against! The Mechanicus have existed in the lore since the beginning and some years back, long after I had stopped playing.

So it was a VERY interesting game.

Robert Hunter is a very good player that knows what he is doing. I had those same vibes as with the Emperor's Children player.

However, in this game I went on the offensive and I managed, in the end of the day, to score massive amounts of points for Primary Objectives. In fact, I scored a solid 11 points more for Primaries.

However, you also score points for secondary Victory Points and there is where I lost the game, but not by a massive margain.

All in all a great game!

These are Ironstriders and they are extremely good at destroying tanks!

Robert plays with a massive 8 of these guys and I only managed to kill one.

Generally, he kept them hidden, they would peak out and look at one thing and obliterate it.

He also had massive bricks of infantry that were able to put out massive amounts of firepower. These things were also not that easy to kill as they had plenty defensive rules and buffs.

The Ad-Mech also have a plethora of characters that were able to boost their squads with all sorts of crazy rules.

Tournament Results!

Right at the top we have Anthony with Leagues of Votann - Ymyr Conglomerate.

Then Ashley with Imperial Guard and the TO, Bernard with his World Eaters! Well done everyone!

I found myself in 14th place after the 5 games - Loss, Win, Loss, Win, Loss and 284 Battle Points!

There were a total of 21 players in the tournament, only 18 are displayed here because the others pulled out of the tournament.

A Great weekend!

All in all, we had an awesome time! I am all Hammered-out but will be returning for more games in a little while!

Thank you for reading!

Cheers!
@zakludick

Hive South Africa