Showdown at Snyder's

Talk about a bad ass event!  Hosted by the one and only Kris Snyder - this was a blast - we had a very fun group of people come out to the event:

Host/Organizer/Adjudicator - Kris Snyder

Team Imperium

• • Carson Street (Knights)

  • Matt "Grizz" Myers (Salamanders)

  • Chris Rice (Eldar)

Team Chaos

• • Bill Foster (Death Guard)

  • Mike Holstein (Traitor Guard)

  • Paul Street (Daemons)

Essentially the format of this event was three rounds of games:

1. Round one consisted of players pairing off and playing 1v1 in a custom narrative scenario.

2. Round two swapped those players around and had them play another 1v1 in another custom scenario.

3. Round three was a mass 3v3 game in a single scenario - the side that one the last game would win the gameday!

Games were played in early December (2023) at Kris's place.

Preparation

Gamesday and other events are a great reason to get models paintined - for this event I thought I needed to get some daemons ready - I had these models for a while and this was the perfect reason to get these models painted up.  The biggest models I painted were Belakor and Slaanesh Daemon Prince.  Here are a few pictures:

Round One

Round one consisted of three scenarios:

1. Trench Line - Where my Daemons played against Carson's Knights.

2. Rail Yard - Where Mike's Traitor Guard faced Chris's Eldar

3. Ruins - Bill's Deathguard assailed Planetary Defense Forces defended by Grizz's Salamanders

A review of every scenario is shown below - Kris set them up ahead of time and made gray scale photos of the terrain as prep for players.  Talk about a cool setup.  You can browse the scenarios below.  Games were played at 500 points for the 1st round, 1k for second, and 1k for each army (3k per side) for the final round.

My game: For my first game I got paired against my wife, Carson, and talk about getting my shit kicked in.  Whew 500 pts of Daemons vs Knights did not go well.  From memory I field a unit of Plaguebearers, Nurglings, Bloodletters, and Slaanesh Daemon Prince.  I believe I played against a single Knight and did maybe 7 wounds to it.  Otherwise it was a pretty big blowout.  The amazing thing about this scenario is that it let you use the earth shaker cannons to shoot other tables.  As we were playing we mostly supported the game with Grizz against Bill (to little effect).  

Other games: On the other tables Mike (Traitor Guard) had some horrendous dice rolling and lost to Chris's Eldar while Bill (Death Guard) managed to kill all PDF forces in his game against Grizz (Salamanders).  This put the Chaos forces down 1 games to 2 however both games that Chaos lost did not affect the final battle; the game we won did however - so all in all we thought we (Chaos) had a pretty good chance here.

Round Two

Ok round two is certainly where we probably lost overall gameday - while Bill would continue to carry us (Chaos) it was a complete disaster for myself and Mike only had a draw against Grizz.  Games were 1k points in size and featured: 

1. My Daemons against Chris Rice and his Eldar - talk about a freaking catastrophe - this game did not go well - while Belakor and the Daemon prince would acquit themselves well the Eldar units massacred my infantry units.  The end result was tragic Eldar victory where they would command an additional two tanks and a Baneblade in the final battle!  We played the mission Tank Factory but I just did not have enough tough units to wishstand any shooting from the Eldar and lost many of the objectives.  Lacking enough maneuver elements to get those objectives back really hampered my chances of making this more competitive.

2. Bill (Death Guard) would play against my wife (Knights) for the airfield on a second table and managed to come away with his second win of the day.  Carson really enjoyed this game and said Bill is the best of my friend group for her to play against.  Bill would try his best to carry us (Mike and I) through the campaign with this second victory.

3. Mike (Traitor Guard) and Grizz (Salamanders) would fight to draw in their game (over the cathedral) - being a little behind the other tables in game resolution - however their game had a negligible impact on the final game.

Images below show how my game went - Belakor almost made it through the dire avengers and striking scorpions but eventually fell to the mass attacks - mostly because he took six wounds from an Eldar driven Leman Russ earlier in the game!

The Final Round

So the final round battle was a wild time - with so many advantages for the Imperial side we needed a lot of luck to pull out a victory.  Unluckily for us that did not happen - although Bill would try to drag us across the finish line to victory (destroying multiple units including the Baneblade with his Knights) - in the end the Chaos forces lacked enough melee threat to take the Cathedral from the Imperials.  Unable to commit Belakor to the front and instead having to use him to old the opposite side of the table objectives resulted in not enough forces concentrated on the cathedral half of the board.

Overall it was a great game day but ended up in an Imperial victory.  Congrats to Carson, Grizz, and Chris Rice and thanks to Kris Snyder for hosting and setting everything up.

Enjoy some pictures and captions of the game below.