The Corroad Goes Ever On and On: A Busy Year

It’s a fairly common occurrence for me to play a game against someone at an event, and them to clock that I’m from Goonhammer, and then they ask me: which bits do you write? You can see the interest die when I respond “Mostly I make sure that our authors get paid and take care of our cash flow.” Nevertheless that’s most of my job on this site now, though I do pitch in on our review content. Meanwhile Rob, who I believe is some kind of atomically-fuelled robot, puts out a weekly column without fail charting all his games and events and also contributes to almost everything else, while also being our CEO – by contrast the last time I published one of these was in January 2024.

To give myself some credit, it’s been a busy time since that last post. I moved house. I got divorced. It would have been better if those things had happened in the opposite order, but they didn’t, which added some complexity. For a significant period I wasn’t playing many games and didn’t really feel like changing that, so there wasn’t a lot to write about on a hobby blog anyway.

Over the last few months the situation has changed for the better. I’ve joined a nearby gaming club so I’m getting regular games in again, and Wings and I are now part of a burgeoning setup for 5-man teams events as well. I’ve previously played exclusively in singles events, so having teams to think about and learning how my army fits into our overall plan for pairings and planning my list around that adds some freshness. It’s also a lot of fun! The UK has a surging events scene for 4 and 5-player teams right now, so it’s a great time to be getting involved.

Even when I wasn’t playing I was still keeping on top of painting, and I’ve gotten through nearly 200 models already so far this year. Lots of Aeldari at the start of the year, lots of Chaos Daemons, and some Orks and Adeptus Custodes. If that sounds unfocused, it sort of is, but I’ve finished everything I own for the Custodes and massively increased the options available for the Aeldari, so there is a bit of method.

On the table, I’ve mostly played Aeldari and Blood Angels this year, with a game each of Imperial Knights and Custodes. It’ll be more Blood Angels for the next few weeks, as we’re attending the summer edition of UKTC’s ITT event in Birmingham. To that end, I took them out to the Into the Maelstrom RTT on the 19th of July.

My list for this event was:

++ Liam's list - click to expand ++

The idea here is to have multiple fights first blocks available and a lot of fast melee threats to push people back, with the Ballistus Dreadnoughts there to keep people honest – I don’t expect a lot out of them, but it means opposing shooting at least has to consider getting return fire, instead of me having to run up and punch everything to death. The big brick of Sanguinary Guard is joined by the Captain and starts the game in deep strike so they present a chunky Rapid Ingress threat; everything else goes on the table.

Game 1

Opponent: Mike, Space Marines (Gladius Task Force)
Mission: Hidden Supplies
Deployment: Search and Destroy

++ Mike's list - click to expand ++

I went second in all three games at this event, and every time it was a big help. This army has the same plan in most games – set up defensively, stage melee where it can get into people later on by taking advantage of my generally higher mobility, and hope to overwhelm them with threats while the scoring bits follow in and accrue points.

On his first turn Mike moved forwards pretty broadly across the table, staging his two Bladeguard bricks near the two central objectives. His Vindicators and Ballistus Dreadnoughts were generally stacked up towards the top of the board. He picked up the Scouts on my bottom right, and that was pretty much it.

A theme of this game was me getting horrible secondary draws early on. Compounding this I made a completely boneheaded move on my turn 1, throwing the Death Company out to charge a Vindicator and tag his other shooting as well with the idea it would force him to use Tactical Doctrine early on. I have no idea why I thought this was smart and to compound it re-drawing my first secondary pull meant I didn’t have enough CP to get Lance on them either, so they didn’t even kill the Vindicator they swung at.

This should have lost me the game, but Mike lacked the killer instinct to put the boot in when he should have. Instead he overcommitted to the Death Company, sending both Calgar’s brick up there as well as moving the Judiciar’s towards them, and also lining up all his shooting on them. In the event this meant that his melee threats were still in his half of the table instead of breathing down my neck, leaving me a lot more room to play in and allowing me to keep up on scoring when I shouldn’t have been able to. I slowly ground my way back into the game, and he overcommitted again later on, sending both Bladeguard bricks into the left of centre objective when he didn’t need to which allowed me to smash both of them in the same turn. Our final scorecard was:

Challenger cards: they’re fun for all involved. Mike was good fun to play, and after beating his next opponent he got the Goonhammer double tap when he played Wings in round 3 and was taken down by the Necron menace to finish 1-2.

Game 2

Opponent: Iain, Death Guard (Virulent Vectorium)
Mission: Terraform
Deployment: Tipping Point

++ Iain's list - click to expand ++

No deployment photo for game 2, because I’m bad at this. Reading the list prior to the game, I was pretty concerned – I’ll not surprise anyone by pointing out that Deathshroud and Bloat-drones are strong right now, there’s the 10-model Plague Marine brick, and a couple of Plaguebursts too. However, a couple of things were in my favour here – we were playing on GW layout 8, where there is one big sight line which I had no intention of going near, and otherwise is pretty well-protected through the middle of the table. Most importantly, the central objective can be held while out of direct LoS of the deployment zones, so Iain would have to push forwards to get visibility on it – bringing things closer to my army of flying vampires.

Going second here was a huge boon. Iain moved up fairly cautiously, putting some Poxwalkers on the central objective and moving onto the objective on my right with the other unit. His Rhino moved up behind the central ruins staged to drop PMs out. However, he made a couple of serious errors here. Firstly he was too worried about me being able to deep strike into his backfield, so he was using PBCs and drones to screen back there, and secondly he put the Rhino roughly in the middle of the ruin rather than tucked right back. This meant that in my turn 1 I could move a Ballistus up and take some shots at it – I came pretty close to just killing the thing, but ended up leaving it on 5 wounds. My Reivers went into the middle to pick up the Poxwalkers there, while my other units stayed staged at the back and on my left where they were well-protected from any shooting.

On his turn 2 he dropped in his smaller Deathshroud unit in the mid-board to take out the Reivers. In response I dropped the Sanguinary Guard down with Rapid Ingress, 12.1″ away from the Deathshroud so they couldn’t flame them. I was hoping to get a Heroic Intervention off here, but in the event his Deathshroud rolled exactly 6″ to charge so didn’t come within range. Annoying. However, the funniest thing happened next – he low-rolled for the Battle-shock test from the Reivers’ Fearsome Assault ability. This had two important effects – first, it stopped him scoring Area Denial. Second, it stopped him using Overwatch, Counter-Offensive, and Disgustingly Resilient in my turn. Woops!

This freed me up for a big play on turn 2. The Sanguinary Guard left the Deathshroud alone and flew into his backfield, blowing up the Rhino with inferno pistols and dumping out Plague Marines. The Bladeguard moved up in the middle to take out the Deathshroud, with some Scouts joining in to Terraform it. I saw the light die in Iain’s eyes a bit as he went to overwatch with the Plague Marines and I reminded him they were also Battle-shocked thanks to their ride exploding.

I picked up all of the Plague Marines and took his home objective into the bargain, killed the three Deathshroud and left the Lord of Contagion on a single wound (put a pin in this, we’ll revisit it shortly), and also picked up his Poxwalkers on my right and tagged the Plagueburst Crawler sat on his home.

At this point I felt like I had the game won, but Iain put up a valiant fight – the first Bloat-drone he fired picked up 5 Sanguinary Guard on its own, and he’d killed the whole squad with several shooting activations to spare. Amusingly two of the jump Intercessors tagging his PBC survived. He dropped his bigger Deathshroud brick to charge the Bladeguard in the centre, but couldn’t flame them since his Lord of Contagion was stuck in combat there. Thanks to Fights First I swung and killed the LoC, who promptly failed his 2+ roll to get back up.

On my turn 3, I picked up the second Deathshroud brick, and the second Lord of Contagion lay dead on the ground because it was the same battle round as the other one had hit the dirt and he couldn’t re-use the ability. From there it was pretty much game over – he had a reasonable number of assets left, but had no chance of scoring anything he drew with them, and I now had the run of the board.

Our final scorecard was:

Iain had beaten Chaos Knights in his first game, and pulled one back in game 3 against Deathwatch to finish 2-1.

Game 3

Opponent: Denis, Necrons (Starshatter Arsenal)
Mission: Purge the Foe
Deployment: Crucible of Battle

++ Denis' list - click to expand ++

Making up for game 2, I remembered to get photos of both deployments for game 3. I don’t remember ever playing on GW layout 6 before, and fuck, fuck fuck fuck. This is an awful combination of board, mission, and opponent – Denis’ list has great long-range firepower and the two Wraith bricks allow him to take 3 objectives, including that wide-open middle one, and sit back passively if he wants to and wear me down on primary. Even if I’m pushing him off the mid-board objectives, I’m unlikely to keep any of them by my next Command phase, and expose units for him to score kill more instead.

Even looking at the terrain and thinking how much I hated it, I still didn’t appreciate just how many sight lines there were down the table. Denis opted to try and pick up the central squad of jump Intercessors, but could (and arguably should) have taken shots at the Death Company behind my back ruin instead.

The game from here on was pretty much a progression of me trying not to lose too much important stuff at once, and him mercilessly picking up anything that tried to leave my deployment zone.

One quirk of the event is that half the tables were using GW layouts and the other half were UKTC – I don’t generally rate the UKTC layouts, but for round 3 that would have been a much better board for me in this game.

I think if I was given this in a teams scenario, I played it basically right – I managed a respectable score (which would have been much closer if I’d played the last turn a little better, but we were very much done by that point), but without much hope of a win. I did throw the Ballistus away stupidly, but it’s a tough board to try and stay hidden on with all of what I had – the terrain is just so open. In singles however, especially as the last game of the day to go undefeated, I should have just gone for maximum aggression on my turn 3 and tried to take out the Silent King and at least one of the DDAs. If I play cautiously I lose slowly, whereas taking a big swing with several hammers at once might have done enough to slow down his scoring and help me out later in the game. It’s low-probability, but it might have gotten me a win, whereas what I actually did ended up in a respectable but inevitable loss. Denis, for his part, played this game really well – he should possibly have been more aggressive about taking that turn 1 swing at the Death Company, but it didn’t end up mattering much, so who knows.

Our final scorecard was:

Another good opponent – 3/3 on the day for people I’d happily play again. With a big field, Denis wasn’t sure if he’d scored enough to get on the podium, but he ended up finishing in a well-deserved third place.

I ended up finishing 11th overall, out of 48 in the field, which I’m reasonably pleased with. I think the list basically works how I expected, and I’m confident in playing it for the ITT in a couple of weeks. Ahead of that, we have a scrim against our club’s A-team on the 22nd, which will be another chance for useful practice.

I am going to try and commit to writing this thing more regularly, and if I remember to do it next week I’ll talk about how those games went and our final preparations for the ITT on 2/3 August.

Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don’t forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website and more.