Well this all started back in the middle of March as someone started up a thread on the Maelstrom 40k forum asking forum members who they'd most like to play against on the forum. The trouble was, most of us live so far away from each other that there was little lightlyhood of any two of us getting together. A couple of days after the thread appeared however, Lamenter got in touch with me (oh BTW, I'm Edga Alunpo - annalytyka for the Bane of Fenris). Turned out, he lives in Stuttgart, only 2 hours drive away. While, what else could we do? The game was on.

Trying to decide on a scenario for the game was not quite as easy as it looked. Lamenter had a choice of Space Marine or Chaos armies. I had more choices but none of my armies were fully painted. We decided we wanted a reasonable length game so went for 2000 pts. The only painted army I had that came close to that was my chaos marines - the Bane of Fenris. This left Lamenter with little choice but to use his Lamenters army.

We both decided we wanted something different to the usual meat grinder but wanted to leave a few options open to increase the fun. We decided to go for a standard army setup and either a strongpoint or bunker attack. The final decision as to which scenario and who would be attacking and defending would be made by a roll of the dice on the day. It would be a dawn attack. We managed to book a table for 21st. April at the model shop where Lamenter earns his living.

At this point I'd like to thank Dieter Mucha, in the picture, and Bernhard Ploetz of Fantasy Empire, Lindenstrasse, Reutlingen for the use of their tabletop and shop and to Phil Matt, alias Lamenter, for supplying and editing text for me for the battle report.

Of course, what we now needed were a few bunkers. We decided on three; I already had a landspeeder base that would serve as a bunker but the other two had still to be built.

So, there we were with six weeks to get ready for the big game!

See what Lamenter go up to in those six weeks here!

I must admit it was probably the most productive 6 weeks in 40k that I've ever had. The first week I managed to turn out the two missing bunkers. You can get the details on how I produced these things by visiting the bunker on my homepage. Now all I had to do was paint 1 predator, 1 landraider, paint and base 5 plague marines, 8 terminators, 12 chaos marines and build, convert and paint a rhino. Well I finished my last plague marine 2 days before the game which left me just enough time to finish off the Bane's army list.

My army list was giving me problems. I've never ever played a points game before. With friends we usually just set up the sides judging whether it looked right or not and set both sides a particular target to reach. I needed an army that would be capable of defence or attack but in the end went for an attack army - the best form of defence is attack. It would also need some pretty heavy stuff to take out the bunkers. Natural choices were a predator, havocs and two dreadnoughts armed with plasma and laser cannons. Of course my exalted champion, Lycan Garawulf, with his khorne beserker entourage mounted in a Landraider would take the brunt of any close combat. These would be supported by 3 standard troop units mounted in rhinos and a troop of terminators. I now had my army list set up the way I wanted it and did a last check against the army options. Only then did I notice that I had too many heavy support units. Chaos Dreadnoughts are not elites as with the imperials. In trying to iron out the bugs I had to scrap a dreadnought and my havocs and put an extra elites option (my plague marines) in. I spread part of my havocs over the other troops selections. I was not happy about this at all - this was the end of my plan B should I end up attacking!

So, with all this behind me, and not wanting to see a paintbrush for another two weeks, I drove with my son down to Stuttgart on the friday before the game. We spent the friday looking around Stuttgart with Lamenter and ended up in the GW store (okay I'm addicted!).

Saturday came (and snow with it!) and we met at the shop and rolled off for the scenario and attack and defense. We ended up with Strongpoint attack and I was attacking. The normal scenario goes 4 moves but as we wanted to play the first two in darkness we decided to extend the game to 5 moves. We dropped the sentries straightaway - both of us were using tanks so they would've been alerted almost immediately anyway.

Epilog:

I did n't realise it at the time but the major part of the work was still ahead of us - getting all this information together and writing up the battle report. I think the major part of the work was getting the moves together with the pictures. However writing up the fluff side of the game more than made up for this. Here's our summing up analysis and what Lycan Garawulf and Bodo Custu had to say about this shindig!