Burning Sands III – A grand day out

Sunday the 5th March saw 5 of us make the trip to Grimdice Games in Grimsby for the 3rd event in their ‘Burning Sands’ series. With 150 miles to cover and an 8.30 start, all eyes turned to Russ as our designated Master of Transport for the expedition. Full credit to him for offering to drive, and planning the logistics. Everything ran super smoothly from my pick-up at 5.35am – we even made time for breakfast, meeting up with Gordon in McDonalds next to the venue!

Between us, we had a good variety of lists:

  • Dave was running Legio Interfector, fully embracing the madness of the Chaos Gods
  • Jack – in hist first event – took Legio Gryphonicus
  • Gordon ran a high activation Legio Laniaskara Janissary Maniple
  • Russ played a House Indra Knight Household with Psi Titan support
  • I ran a Pact of Morbidia Mechanicum Knight Household

Hats off to the guys at Grim Dice, the day ran extremely well from the outset. Dom and the team did a great job laying the tables out and keeping us all on track throughout the day. The selected missions and restrictions put in place via the event pack felt balanced. From our collective preparation games using the pack, and those played during the event, the win never felt out of reach. Playing two games before the longer lunch break was a good move, giving everyone a chance to switch off and re-focus before the final match of the day.

My first game of the day was against Dan, who can be found over at Redtoofs Mostly 40k Blog. Dan hadn’t played in a while and it was his first time using the Matched Play Guide. Both of us had to secure an objective in the enemy deployment zone, whilst killing / protecting key targets. Utter carnage is an understatement, with very little being left on the board by the end of the game. Dan had doubled down on creating an extremely survivable, hard hitting Mortis force that my knights really struggled with in the early stages of the game. A key moment mid game was his Melta-equiped Reaver taking a pair of Asterius Knights off the table in a single shot. The Asterius had been pretty lack-lustre in the opening, and paid the Iron price for letting the Reaver in close – using D10s for the Fusion trait bumped the chances up to 1/4, from around 1/40 on the normal D6. Definitely something to bear in mind for the future (and I wont mention the fact that my High King was piloting the lead Asterius). The end game saw the battlefield laid bare with only a Knight Lancer and a few Moirax surviving. Neither of us achieved our Primary objective, and I edged out the win on a combination of secondary and tertiary objectives.

Game 2. Not quite sure what to say about this one. Being paired against Russ was ‘interesting’ to say the least. We’d spent a good few weeks prior to the event discussing and tweaking our respective Knight-based lists, so were both pretty aware of how the other list played. AS AN ASIDE – even when you know it’s coming, nothing quite prepares you for a pair of resurrected Acastus Porphyrions appearing on top of an objective in a key turn of the game!

I always enjoy my games with Russ, especially with the amount of knights on the table that we had in this game. It’s a very different game, with a lot of puzzles that you don’t see in the Titan-on-Titan or Knight-on-Titan games. It’s fair to say that this time round, I really struggled to play my way into a strong position, Russ maintained control of the game and was able to force me to engage on his terms. Russ came away with a solid win, and I failed to score a single point.

Something that we’ve discussed at length since is the relative differences between the Lancer and Atrapos versions of the Cerastus chassis. Against Titans, both are effective, with the extra abilities of the Atrapos (Fusion and Macro-Extinction Protocols in particular) giving it the edge. Knight on Knight however is a very different proposition, with the base strength 6 of the Atrapos Las-Cutter struggling to get through the shields of the Lancer. It’s a fantastic piece of game design, and really reflects the lore of the Atrapos being a dedicated Titan Hunter, rather than an all-around melee duellist.

In the third and final game, I was paired up with Dave. I’ve played Dave before, as he’s a regular up at South Tyneside Tabletop Gaming – not far from us. Our last matchup saw my Mortis Lupercal supported by a Warmaster be completely annihilated by Dave’s Astorum, failing to score a single kill. Brutal, but fantastic fun nonetheless. This time round, I was facing off against a Warhound-heavy Solaria list, with support from a Neutron-laser Dire Wolf and a Melta-equiped Reaver. Dave had elected to go for a “Kill everything” and “Get to the enemy board edge” mission. My Primary mission for this game was to secure an area towards the centre of the map, and my secondary was to eliminate 3 designated titans, so Mr Melta Reaver started the game with a massive target on his back for obvious reasons. Looking at the list composition, I was facing mostly shorter range weapons, so I made a conscious decision to go against the knight paradigm of ‘push forward’ and hold my forces back until the late game, and make the most of my Household Banner of Perspicacity in this game. When activated, it would allow my two banners of Atrapos to push out of lance coherency and provide a cordon around the Asterius who would hold the objective. Alongside this, I could use the once per game loyalist household trait – valorous charge – to give all of the banners in the lance an extra 2″ of movement. The combination would give me an effective 16″ threat bubble for the Atrapos charge, and the Asterius could then move up to 9″ into a holding position. Having built the list around this ‘springboard’ concept, this was the first time I’d really been able to lean into it fully from the outset of the game, having seen it more as a reactive strategy in the past.

I feel like this was the moment that Morbidia truly gave themselves over to the Dark Gods. Having been unable to hit anything in game one, and banging their heads against a ceramite wall in game 2, something changed. The blood sacrifice was honoured, and the prayers were finally heard. With incredibly strong dice rolls throughout the game, it felt like the Knights of Morbidia could do no wrong. Where they shot, Titans fell. Where they charged, weaknesses in armour were exposed. Holding back had forced the Solaria Titans into the open, where both the Asterius and Porphyrion could work in tandem, removing shields through weight of fire, and cracking armour with Magma Lascannons and Conversion Beamers. With both heavy hitting units working in unison, I was able to pick off at least one Titan per turn, starting with the Melta Reaver. Having weathered the early and mid game, I was in a much better position than I could have hoped, making the end game much easier to manage. Activating my banner, the Atrapos sprung out, charging the remaining Warhounds, whilst the Asterius made a move to grab the objective. With a lack of remaining titans, Dave was unable to counter, giving me the win.

Its really hard to look at this last game objectively, as I feel like the dice were extreme on both sides. Whilst the knights were continually hitting and doing damage, the Titans were failing across the board. All credit to Dave, it was a cracking game against a great opponent – and a horrible experience for someone’s first game against knights. It’s definitely set us up for what the combat sports would market as a trilogy fight 🙂

My takeaway from this one was that as a concept, springboard knights does work. I’ve got some ideas on things I would change, but as a list to play and take to events, I’ll definitely be keeping it on the shortlist. Something I definitely need to explore more are stratagems, and how I can use them to either lean into to the concept, or mitigate against the weaknesses. That’s maybe something for a future post.

So after 3 games I ended up with 2 wins and a loss, placing 4th overall. Congratulations to Stu Oliver (Also from South Tyneside Tabletop) on taking the win with his Venator / Astorum mixed list and Russ for coming 2nd. It was great to see Phil place 3rd with another Knight list, and everyone else do so well with their placings.

For all it was a long day, we’ll definitely be making the trip to Grim Dice again. Thanks for a top day guys!

I thought the tables were good set ups. A decent amount to terrain for cover, not so much it disadvantaged bigger engines. Was great to see a real spread of different Legios / Households. Strat hands definitely speed up set up and work really well. 2.5 hours was a good time limit and also drove decision making well

Russ H