A unit of Flawless Blades, lots of Boarding Actions and some thoughts on the reveals

Greetings friends and welcome back to the Collardhammer special. January is always a difficult time of the year, with it being so cold and dark outside, so I am hoping that you all have a good time with today’s post. Hopefully not in the same way the Emperor’s Children have a good time, please do not take this as permission to commit crime. Our calendar has thankfully slowed down a lot since the new year, so I’ve managed to get some gaming and some hobby in over the last few weeks. I’ve also picked up a new project for the new year.

Firstly, on the hobby side I’ve mainly been working on my Emperor’s Children:

I finished painting a unit of Flawless Blades and am about halfway through the last unit of Tormentors for my 1k point list. Over the last week or so however, my hobby time has been hijacked by the project I mentioned above. I picked up a full set of the Boarding Actions terrain as a holiday gift and assembled it in preparation for some games over last weekend. Now that I have somewhere permanent to live, I thought it would be nice to have some way of playing 40k at home but without taking up too much space. Boarding Actions is perfect for this and hopefully won’t get squatted when 11^th edition comes out. Assembling the terrain was quite repetitive but straightforward enough and still enjoyable. I am hoping to get started painting the terrain before the next post.

The terrain setup for the first game of boarding actions

In the meantime, here are the models I painted over the last couple of weeks: 

Flawless!

Continuing the Flawless Blades was great fun. After the first one went a little wrong, with the sword coming out very glossy, I practiced the glazing technique on the blades a bit more and I think they came out better. I also enjoyed painting on the orange tabards as a spot colour. One of the things I like about this project is that the units don’t need to be as uniform across the army as for my Sisters. My backlog has another unit of three Flawless Blades, which I’ll probably assemble with the two smaller swords rather than the one big sword. I also made some progress with the Tormentors, painting a boltgunner and a plasma gunner.

One of the main reasons to get the boarding actions terrain was to play games for our campaign. This started with some games against our Orks player over the last weekend, playing two games over the course of Sunday afternoon. I played the Pious Protectors patrol twice, taking a Canoness, a Dogmata, some Battle Sisters, Novitiates and Dominions, and some Celestian Sacresancts for the first game. 

The first boarding patrol

This list was good fun to play, and the game had some dramatic moments, with my canoness using her crusade upgrades to strike down the warboss leading the Ork Waaagh. This led to her finishing her last trial and ascending to living saint status, so hopefully she can now be martyred at an appropriately dramatic moment. For the second game, I swapped out the canoness and celestians for a palatine and seraphim. This game was much tighter than the first, with the ork beastboss charging my objective holding novitiates on the first turn of the game. This rapidly devolved into a brawl over that objective, with the novitiates, meltagun dominions and palatine fighting off the beastboss, flash gitz and kommandos. My palatine killed nearly 2 full units of flash gitz after passing an absurd number of her invulnerable saves. This game finished very close, although I managed to pull off last minute wins in both games.

I also managed to get a game of kill team with my colleague, unfortunately not using the boarding actions terrain. This was doubly unfortunate as I was playing imperial navy breachers, who are specifically designed for the terrain format. The game was against the new Deathwatch team, and the models are really cool. At some point I will probably pick some of them up to play in imperial agents (and kill team of course). The game was pretty close, with some awesome plays, including my Axejack hacking down the thunder hammer marine. Eventually, I just couldn’t do enough damage to stop the marines tabling me and I lost the game. It was fun, and I am looking forward to playing more kill team when the celestian insidiants come out in a couple of weekends time.

Somebody had to do it...

Before wrapping up, I thought I’d touch on the reveal show. Off the bat, I don’t think I’ll be buying anything that was revealed, at least not for a while. I do, however, very much enjoy pirates and both the Red Corsairs and the Eldar pirates are quite appealing. I’ve played quite a lot of both Sid Meier’s Pirates (a classic game I would highly recommend) and Sea of Thieves in my life, so the idea of doing a narrative campaign with either of the new subfactions would really scratch that itch for me. The AoS stuff was pretty cool, but I am generally not a huge fan of Bonereapers. They are, after all, budget Tomb Kings. I’ve also never been a huge fan of the Custodes as a whole, likely because I remember how awful they were to play against when they launched in heresy. That said, the new models look a lot better than the existing range to me, and it’s great that resin models are becoming plastic, at least as long as they remain legal in 40k.

At any rate, that’s me done for this post. I think we will be playing some more campaign games next weekend, but otherwise I have plenty of hobby time to get the Tormentors finished and make a start on the boarding actions terrain. Until next time, have a great fortnight of your own hobby!

Peace and love,

Ben