Chaos Day Report Part 1: Dark Eldar Vs Imperial Guard

As regular readers will know, I recently took my Kabal to Warhammer World for a friendly weekend of gaming. The intention was to play three games on Saturday and three games on Sunday but for various reasons things didn’t quite go to plan. In the end I only played two normal games and one battle mission over the entire weekend. I was a bit disappointed but nevertheless the games I had were good fun. Here’s how I got on:


Game 1
Opponent: Imperial Guard
Mission: Capture & Control
Deployment: Dawn of War

My opponent has a fairly balanced list with a good mix of infantry and armour. He wins the roll off and decides to go first. I notice that he has the officer of the fleet in his list (forcing rerolls of successful reserve rolls) so I decide to deploy nothing and have everything arrive on turn 1. He deploys all of his force in one corner apart from a couple of infantry squads who sit in the middle of the table in cover and he puts the bane wolf and two chimeras carrying veterans in reserve.

I make two noobish errors on the first turn. Firstly I bring everything on spread out across my half of the table rather than focus all of my firepower onto one flank. Even more stupidly somehow I let my Disintegrator Ravagers find themselves placed in front of tanks instead of the infantry. The second mistake is that I take the bait and send out my Wyches to wipe out the squad that was deployed away from the rest of the army leaving them in cover but still horribly exposed. Because of the night fighting rules my Dark Lances can’t find a single target.

The next turn my Wyches are wiped out from an order which forces me to reroll any passed cover saves. Raiders start popping left right and centre while I pick away at the infantry squads and tanks. Pretty quickly I get drawn into a slug fest and for the next few turns I end up playing to the Imperial Guard’s strengths. I do however manage to castle up using a Ravager and Raider to shield my objective. I also try to send out turbo-boosting Raiders to contest the Guard objective but they inevitably get shot down. Late in the game he sends his Veterans in Chimeras to contest my objective however I manage to repel the advances and the game ends in a draw.

I was pleased with the draw but not pleased with the way I played. In retrospect I should have rushed the squishy infantry flank and then moved onto the tanks. I think the severe lack of LOS blocking terrain really made me hesitant and fearful of his heavy weaponry but ultimately led to me taking more shots than I needed to. It did however give me a good grasp of what to look out for when I next play a Guard army.

Game 2
Opponent: Imperial Guard
Battle Mission: Imperial Guard, War of Attrition.

Because my first game went on longer than expected my previous opponent and I were left without anybody else to play. Figuring we might as well make use of the time we decided to play each other again using the new Battle Missions book. We rolled off to see whether the mission would be Dark Eldar or Imperial Guard based and he won. We then rolled a d3 to decide the exact mission. I read the title with a sigh. A war of attrition is certainly not the typical way the fragile dark kin do things.
The mission basically works like this: the point cost of any enemy unit completely wiped out is added to your tally. At the end of the game whoever has the highest tally wins. The only catch is that anytime any of your troop choices are killed they arrive from your board edge again the next turn (unfortunately for me dedicated transports don’t count). Deployment is table halves with no restrictions on how close you can place units to the enemy.

I didn’t take many notes for this game as I was despairing the whole time. Basically it was not a mission suited to Dark Eldar and things instantly went downhill for me after a crippling turn 1. My opponent ended up killing twice as many points worth of stuff as I did. Fortunately he was a really nice guy so it still ended up being good fun.

I did manage to have a read through of all the Dark Eldar missions and they look really interesting. 

Dawn Raid
Can’t remember the specifics of this mission but I remember that night fighting stays in effect until a 6 is rolled at the start of a turn.

Slave Raid
A mission to simulate a Kabal on the hunt for fresh slaves. Every time you kill an enemy unit within 18” of one of your own they count as being taken as slaves and you add a point to your tally. The winner is determined by who has the highest tally of slaves.

Feigned Retreat
From first impressions this is my favourite of the three Dark Eldar missions. The table is divided into three sections down the length of the board. The enemy gets one of the end sections and the Dark Eldar get the other two.  The Dark Eldar player gets to place two units in the centre section and these units gain the Hit & Run special rule. The rest of the army is placed in the remaining end section. The idea behind it is that the Dark Eldar are attempting to lure the enemy into an ambush. I personally can’t wait to give this one a go.

So, so far I’ve a draw and a loss (if you count the Battle Missions game) for part 2 I'll have a proper detailed Battle Report, so stay tuned to see if I manage to turn things around!