I’ve been playing my Eldar a lot lately locally in preparation for our local GT in June and also for WarGames Con. So for a change, this time, I decided I would take my guard. I’m a little rusty with the guard since I haven’t really played them since last summer. I think most people locally are probably still tired of my guard, but I figured here was a whole group that had never seen or played them before. From the signups it looked like there would be about 50% marines, so I decided I would tweak my list a little to include more of a threat to power armor (I will include my list at the end of this introduction).
The drive up to Meta was fun and we left at about 6 in the morning. From past experiences, I know that the more people going, usually the more fun will be had. We talked about lists and grey knights on the way up, and even had an extra 30 minutes to go frighten the workers of Burger King with our matching black Hog shirts and talk of daemons being smited.
Metagames is a top notch gaming retailer. I’ve seen lots of large shops, but not really any that were ever this nice and clean at the same time. Meta has a large store area at the front and they house the complete line of Warhammer, Warhammer 40k, Warmachine and Hordes. They also have a huge inventory of board games and roleplaying games, along with magic and numerous (count tons) of clear glass cases full of CCG’s. I was also really impressed with the amount of used minis and roleplaying materials that they had.
The whole store is also very organized and clean (a nicely appreciated odd quirk for a gaming store). The walls, trim on the tables and counters are all red and black. The floor is also a nice black and red tile. The back of the store held a large gaming area, a computer gaming area, and some nice large restrooms. They had a few excellent quality tables up front, and then more portable wargaming tables in the back. Terrain was good and ranged from the odd wood to more of the GW ruins.
As we started setting up our armies, it was pointed out that all the tables in the store were 8’ long! I asked if that was what we would be playing on and they explained that all their games were on 8’ long tables. Wow! That changes up the meta a bit! I’ve never played a tournament game anywhere (and I go to a lot of tournaments) on an 8’ table. I was pretty sure right then and there that I would be denying flank each and every game! The extra distance was going to be very helpful to my guard army – giving me more room to avoid outflankers and also more distance to take advantage of my long guns! I was liking my choice to bring the guard but at the same time my mobile eldar would have loved the longer tables!
The tournament games got started right on time and each game lasted for 2.5 hours. A nice long leisurely pace for the games, after being used to 2 hour 2000 poing games. The TO, Carl, did a great job keeping things running smoothly and he had matches out very quickly after games ended.
Stay tuned in the next couple of my posts and I will give play by play reports of what I was up against and how I fared!
Here is the list I took for those of you who are interested.
Company Command Squad, 2 flamers, 2 meltas Astropath, Officer of Fleet, Chimera w/ heavy flamer
(2) Veteran Squads with 2 plasma guns and a melta. Chimera – one with heavy flamer one with bolter
Platoon command squad with four flamers – chimera with heavy flamer
(2) infantry squads
(2) vendettas
Marbo
(2) 7 man psyker battlesquads in chimeras
Demolisher with plasma Sponsons
(2) hydras in a squadron
Manticore
I will post my first battle Report later this week! Stay tuned!