A Mechanicum excavation gone horribly wrong, a T’au incursion and a complete failure in imperial communications leads to an utter mess of a skirmish over the remains of three destroyed vehicles, each containing valuable information for each faction.

Something verging dangerously close to art has been coming out of the Kill Team league with Dominic’s board setups – this lead to a sidestep away from the Kill Team league with the Three Tank Problem. This was a simple custom scenario devised by Dominic and developed by Aidan and David basically as they were playing.

Three Kill Teams enter the match, each has a vehicle near to their deployment zone that represents their faction. Holding a tank at the end of the round gives you one VP if it’s yours and two VPs if it’s an opponents.

As we didn’t specify any kind of denial on the tanks, this did lead to some rather daft situations like a Blood Raven reiver chasing a scion around a Leman Russ for a couple of turns, but also encouraged some mad plays to try and hold all three tanks. It quickly became apparent that to break a three-way tie, that’s what you needed to do.

The game was remarkably close with only a single victory point between Aidan’s T’au that took the win and David’s Scions that jogged into second and another victory point between those Scions and Dominic’s Blood Ravens.

The mission was essentially a tweaked version of Recover Intelligence, but it was an excellent example of how a few tweaks can push Kill Team in interesting directions.

Kill Team continues to prove to be an excellent game and I would strongly encourage anyone who’s on the fence about it to give it a shot!

Some Match highlights

• A T’au sniper with a rail gun turning the Scion leader into a fine red mist in the second shot of the game.
• Three guardsmen appearing in T’au enemy lines and managing to somehow survive all of the close-ranged out-in-the-open shooting that followed
• Blood Ravens mostly failing to chew through the guardsmen
• A mad dash from the guard to get across the board to hold a tank at the same time as a mad dash from the T’au going in the opposite direction
• The Blood Ravens’ irrational hatred of grav drones
• Aidan’s spectacular run of unlikely 6s to hit, followed by equally unlikely 1s to wound. Balance.

10/10 – would play again. Custom scenarios look like they could be a ton of fun, even if (especially if) you break them somehow.

Taking Care of Unforgiven Business clashes with Deff Bots and De Boyz, Ultrabork’an takes on For the Greater Evil and Knight Club scrambles for the relic against The Serpent and the Mon-Keigh.

Round 1 of the Escalation League has entered its final phases with some teams only having one last match to play before reinforcements are called in.

Taking Care of Unforgiven Business are currently the ones to beat (I guess expect a few anti-cultist lists in round two, Chris) with 2 wins, 1 draw and 1 loss whilst The Serpent and the Monkeigh and Knight Club snap at their heels with two wins apiece with Monkey Serpents currently claiming 2nd place by a single victory point!

Full results so far can be seen on the full Doubles Escalation League table

The escalation league continues – Ultrabork’an makes its debut game against Taking Care of Unforgiven Business whilst Deff Bots and de Boyz take down Knight Club in a brutal match that only really used 50% of the board.

As we break into week two of the league, six games have been played with nine games left to play before ESCALATION begins.

Results so far can be seen on the full Doubles Escalation League table – Taking Care of Unforgiven Business are hot on the heels of The Serpent and the Mon-keigh with Knight Club and Deff Bots and De Boyz tying for third, but Ultrabork’an and For the Greater Evil still have everything to play for with their remaining games in the round!

++++Transmission begins++++

The long dead former imperial world of Eyebi has remained ignored for centuries, a victim of unknown past wars – yet recent warp storms have cleared a path for a single message to make its way off-world and out into the void.

This transmission was intercepted by multiple factions across the sector, each interpreting the signal in a different way. For some it’s a simple distress beacon. For others, it’s evidence of an ancient weapon of unimaginable power.

In converging upon the planet, unconventional alliances of convenience have been drawn, motivations of each faction a closely guarded secret.

—

Day one of the 40K escalation league kicked off with no less than four successful games being played.

First blood was drawn by Alex and Ben’s Imperial-Eldar combo defeating the controversial Chaos-Dark Angel pairing of Chris and Max. Battle was later joined by Nathan and Tommy’s Chaos T’au fighting a narrow defeat to David and Nicky’s knights and guard.

A second round of fighting then broke out between the Chaos-Dark Angel team and the Kinght-Guard team with the swarm of Chris’ cultists proving to be too much to handle, breaking the majority of Knight Club’s forces within a single turn.

Olie and Rhys’ knights and orks also took to the field to try and snatch the relic away from Alex and Ben’s Imperium-Eldar, but in their exclaimed words, “we woz robbed!” as the Serpent and the Mon-keigh scurried away with the relic in tow.

As the dust cleared, the current leaders are The Serpent and the Mon-keigh with two wins, closely followed by Taking care of Unforgiven Business and Knight Club with one win and one loss each.

You can see the full league table at any point and it should be mostly up to date at all times.

If you have pictures from your games that you want to show off (you might see things be a bit David-centric otherwise) send them my way!

++++Transmission ends++++

After the first successful evening of fighting, the games played so far in round 1 as as follows: