Trying Warhammer 40,000 10th Edition - Deathwatch vs Thousand Sons

 

A few weeks back I took my Deathwatch down to the club to try 10th edition Warhammer 40,000. I'd found 9th edition a bit fiddly and hard to keep track of, and was quite hopeful for 10th. I certainly found list building a significant chunk easier!

My opponent was running Thousand Sons, and had been playing a few games of the new edition. We picked a pretty standard mission and deployed, with me taking the first turn.

I advanced my bikes, claiming an objective, but my fire into the Thousand Sons was pretty ineffective.

A squad of Thousand Sons with flamers and Ahriman headed into the midfield. They used some kind of magical ritual to remove the armour saves of my assault intercessors, who basically exploded.

Some Thousand Sons teleported into my backfield to score a secondary objective.

On my turn, I charged a Dreadnought and Bladeguard into the Thousand Sons.

But the counter attack started to whittle them down...

Kill Team Cassius then rolled into the Thousand Sons squad who'd charged my Spectrus Kill team...

At the start of the Thousand Sons turn 2, Magnus turned up. I was definitely in a lot of bother.

That's . . . that's a lot of casualties.

My Phobos Librarian charged into the Tzeentch sorcerer to try and finish him off...

Buti it was basically all over - my Captain got run over by a Rhino (the ignominy!), while the surviving Hellblaster tried to facedown a (proxied) Mutalith Vortex Beast on his own...

Magnus smushed another Killteam on his own - the sole survivor got charged.

My dice were not helping, though. Here's a typical round of armour saves...

After some ineffective flailing at each other for a few combats, the Phobos Librarian eventually fell to the Sorcerer, despite having had a relatively good chance of killing the sorcerer outright...

And it was then basically down to the mopping up. At the point of turn 3 that I was tabled, I was down 22-57 victory points...

That said - I had a lot more fun than with 9th edition. The Goonhammer game tracker is excellent and makes it easy to keep track of what you're meant to be doing, picking which special abilities your army has means that you only have a few things to keep track of, and all the units having some cool special ability on their card was fun.

I'm going to put the Deathwatch away for a little, though. They currently lack good anti armour options with the models I have, and I don't want to invest money in them until their Codex comes out. So, it's time, I think, to pull out my rather dusty Astra Militarum...