07/09/2023
Despite it being a quiet back-to-school club week, Charles and I had an, erm, epic game of Epic this week 😊 Two quite contrasting armies: the speedy shooty Yme-Loc space elves and the slow and stompy Thousand Sons. The glass hammer against the dusty rock. Or something. Anyway…
We ended up playing corner deployment for the first time (possibly ever), with the Eldar choosing a corner after winning the first roll-off. After some head scratching about how you place objectives with corner deployment, our blitzkriegs were about as far apart as they could get and there was a tempting but scarily dense cluster of objectives near the centre line of the board (but not illegally close, I hasten to add).
The game was a tense back and forth of Eldar sniping and cagey Chaos advance in the first couple of rounds, with the (absolutely horrible) Silver Towers doing some pretty nasty things to Falcons in return for the Scorpions and not-yet dead Falcons blowing holes in a fair few Sons formations.
At the end of turn 1, we had managed to create a situation in the middle of the board where the turn 2 initiative roll had become pivotal. A large formation of Disc Riders had zoomed up the board and had taken cover in a building within striking distance of a deadly formation of Yme-Loc Cobras and a line of Warp Hunters. It was pretty obvious that if the Yme-Loc won the initiative, the cobras would activate first, very probably followed by the Warp Hunters, though with my activation rolls this game, that wasn’t in any way guaranteed…), and if the Thousand Sons won, the Disc Riders and their champion would summon nasty demons and then do terrible things to the Engines of Vaul in a bloody assault.
We did the only sensible thing in such a situation and made a cup of tea, then came back to the table and carried out the critical roll off. Disaster for the pointy-eared ones!! With equal Stratedy Ratings on both armies, it all came down to the single roll, and the Thousand sons won it with a 5 to the Yme-Loc roll of 3.
The much feared summoning and subsequent assault happened, and the result was that only one Cobra survived, broken, and with only one damage point remaining, and the Warp Hunters were annihilated. Disaster!!
The rest of the game got far bloodier from this point on. It wasn’t clear until the last couple of activations of round 3 who was going to clinch this one. It looked all the way through like it was going to be a hard-fought draw with a turn 4 having to be played, but at the eleventh hour, a super fast headlong charge across the board by a unit of Falcons to take the chaos blitzkrieg and the destruction of a unit of Silver Towers by the Scorpion formation on the other side of the board meant that the Eldar just managed to clinch Blitzkrieg and Take and Hold, winning the game.
It was a genuinely close exciting battle right up until the last minute, and it could have gone either way. A rematch next week I think!!
