More breachers, an FLGS shadow-ban and narrative gaming with the worst army in 40k

Welcome back friends, to The Collardhammer Special! This week, I mostly spent time finishing the unit of Navy Breachers from last week and preparing for the narrative campaign day. I comfortably finished the breachers on Saturday morning before heading off to the game store for an afternoon of gaming. I think I could have squeezed in more hobby work this week but unfortunately work kind of got the better of me. I’ve been assigned to a project that we’re referring to as ‘the death pit’ at home and its is not going well. Anyway, for those of you still reading, you didn’t follow the link to read about my job/ongoing existential crisis. 

My Trello board looks like this now: 

Not much has changed, beyond the last 5 Breachers and their CAT unit moving over to the ‘competed’ column. This essentially continues the course of steady progress and meeting my weekly targets, so I’m overall happy with this. Here are the breachers from this week: 

These followed pretty much the same process as last week, making heavy use of contrast paint and drybrushing for the metallic armour. The little CAT unit was quite fun and quick to paint, and looks weirdly cute, with the one big, green eye. 

Just look at him!!!

Some closeups of the breachers from this week.

Beyond the painting, I also organised and played in a campaign game day. The logistics of gaming in London are a bit of a nightmare at the minute. My partner and I recently moved to Stratford in East London, and while the move has been very positive overall, I cannot seem to find anywhere nearby to meet people and play games. Essentially the only positive aspect of our previous flat (from my perspective) was that it was walking distance from Darksphere games, which is also where all of my players would prefer to play. I also wasn’t able to book tables there this week, marking the second month they have been fully booked two weeks in advance. There was some speculation that I had been shadow-banned from the store. 

In the end, we went back to Kingdom Wargames in north London, a relatively newly opened gaming store. Although somewhat inconvenient for all of us, they have a nice assortment of terrain, plenty of tables and probably the best customer service I’ve ever had in a local game store (apart from possibly Chimera in Nottingham, RIP). It also hasn’t yet developed that classic LGS smell, which is an added bonus. Overall, I’d definitely recommend the store as a welcoming play space, if sometimes a little loud. Unfortunately, one of the players we had set up for a doubles match cancelled at the last minute, so we ended up with Chaos vs Tyranids and an Imperial Agents (me) vs Astra Militarum vs Blood Angels free for all game, played with the recent multiplayer rules from White Dwarf. 

750 points of terrible decision making.

Veiled Blade Elimination Force was a pretty rogue choice for a 750-pnt half of a doubles army, but I figured it’d go nicely with Astra Militarum. For a three-player free-for-all, the army was extremely far out on a limb. Given that each assassin is nearly the same cost as the Leman Russ my opponent took, and I had three of them in the list, I don’t think I ever had the board presence to actually contest the five objectives in the mission we played. This was probably made worse by the fact that the Astra Militarum player and I attacked each other pretty strongly in the first few rounds, without really touching the Blood Angels. Predictably, when the Blood Angels dropped half of their army on what remained of our armies, we were both in trouble. 

The view from halfway down through.

The game turned out very close by the end. Although we’d beaten each other up in the early part of the game, the Astra Militarum player and I basically agreed not to attack each other for the rest of the game. My Callidus assassin proved an absolute menace, clearing out several units of Space Marines and almost making it back onto the central objective. Alas, I failed the last (admittedly quite improbable) charge, leaving the remaining two Sanguinary Guard in charge of the objective and the Blood Angels with a 10VP lead. All that said, the game was very fun and competitive all the way to the end, taking about 3 and a half hours at 750 points each. This was pretty perfect for the time slot we had, and we will definitely be playing more games like this in the future. 

The Astra Militarum face down a force of Blood Angels

Speaking of the campaign, I am really enjoying the narrative aspect of it as well as the gaming. I am not a tremendously gifted creative writer but coming up with little snippets of how my characters see the world we are creating has been super fun, particularly as a short lunchtime activity. It’s particularly nice that I can reclaim these times of the day for my hobby. Not only that, but it seems that my players are getting quite into it too, particularly the Astra Militarum and Chaos players. We are struggling a little to drive forward the core narrative I envisaged when we started, but it seems like everyone is having a good time with it and playing a lot more 40k. It’s also a strong encouragement to get stuff painted, mainly because more than one of my games has come down to the bonus points for being battle ready (both for and against). 

Anyway, that pretty much wraps it up for this week. Next week, I am not quite decided what to paint yet. I think it is between a batch of skeleton warriors and the inquisitorial agents, which present quite radically different challenges. Either way, I feel like I’ve done enough to treat myself to the Champions of Slaanesh box that’s going on preorder, so I’m pretty sure some Emperor’s Children are going to be spicing up my backlog before too long. Until next time, have a lovely week of hobby! Ben