My Tournament Game vs. Tyranids

At last weekend's tournament, myself and jRock brought along an army in case there was an odd number of people that showed up.  JRock brought his Chaos Marines and I brought my Deathwing, which had not seen any play in quite a while.  It turned out that we had an odd number of people show up, and our armies had a chance to shake off the dust webs that had gathered and battle it out on the table.

I only played one game with my army, which was game 4 against Curt and his Tyranids (the army that won the Player's Choice Appearance award).

His list consisted of a pair of Tyranid Primes, each leading a large squad of Warriors, a Genestealer squad with Broodlord, Harpy, and Tyrannofex.  We both brought fairly small, elite forces and I knew this would be an interesting game.

The mission was Capture and Control, with a tertiary objective of having units in your opponent's deployment zone.  There are a lot of missions that the Deathwing are just not good at, but Capture and Control is one of the better-suited missions for my army.  My plan going in was to deploy two squads of Terminators, one on my objective, and one across from my opponents.  Using the Deathwing Assault rule, I would deep strike 2 squads onto his objective on the first turn, one with Belial and one with the Librarian.  The last squad would come in normal reserves and help out where needed.

Curt got the first turn and surged forward towards me.  The Harpy and Tyrannofex laid down some fire, but couldn't punch through the Terminators' 2+ save.  He left only one squad of Warriors on his own objective, so I opted to stick with the plan and focus only on taking his objective while "strategically retreating" from my own objective in the face of 2 monstrous creatures, 10 Warriors, and outflanking Genestealers.

I was fairly aggressive with my deep striking units and landed fairly spot on, landing my close combat squad and another squad with an assault cannon within charge range of his Warriors.  The charge came, and my squad held their own taking surprisingly few wounds.  The following combat phase would find the Warriors squad wiped out under a sea of lightning claw and power fist attacks.  The Warriors' T4 would prove to be their undoing in this game, as my squads consolidated onto his objective and attempted to defend it against the portions of his army that were now wheeling around to engage me.

My last squad deep struck in near the center of the table to help intercept any of Curt's units that tried to harass my objective-holding unit.  In the end, Curt would not have enough bodies to be able to take his objective back.  In a moment of blood-lust, I brought my squad that was on the objective forward to lay down some supporting fire on his Tyrannofex that was coming across the table.  Had the game ended on turn 6, it would have found my squad off of his objective and lost me the game.  Fortune was with me, and I back-pedaled onto his objective, tying the game on objectives and gaining a narrow victory by having more units in his deployment zone.

Curt was a great opponent with a great-looking army and we had almost 30 minutes left after playing 7 turns in a 1:45 game.  We talked a lot about the new Tyranid codex, and having tons of plastic Tyranids at home that were made almost useless by the new codex (my first 40k army was Tyranids).  The game was a lot of fun and I hope to play Curt again soon.