Dark Eldar: Octoberfest!

Dark Eldar: Octoberfest!

So here it is! Our favourite tourney and it didn’t disappoint. We got heavily drunk on the Saturday night. And I had plenty of great games.

A bit of background about Octoberfest. This is probably the oldest tournament on the scene at the moment. It has a unique rule set and as such to do well you need a ‘Mayhem’ army. What I mean by this is that taking just one objective isn’t enough to win well. To get full generalship marks in a game you have to take EVERY objective. Tabling an opponent doesn’t get you full points you must take the objectives. Similarly in kill points winning by 1 doesn’t help. You have to win by a lot to get the full quota of points.

Below ill briefly go through my games what I learned and I’ll give a quick review of the tourney itself. And so on with the show!

What I learned

First of all, venoms still blow up if there last hull point gets taken, you can blame James Taylor for my misunderstanding on that one! I must get his modified copy of the rulebook some time…

Secondly grey hunter squads are a nightmare on the turn of charging. But if you charge them solo it’s easy to take their 2+ av save wolf guard out of the play with a challenge.

And by fact the most important fact of the day… My army is competitive against the imperial guard wolves combination

However it’s not so good against tau!

I also learned the telepathy tree is very powerful and as such I should give that a go as well, I’ll review this next time.

The tournament

Ok the tourney I think had some 6^th ed teething issues. That being said it was still a very enjoyable weekend. Ill list out my thoughts below…

Mayhem changed one of the secondary objectives (First blood) to kill the most expensive non character unit. I have mixed feelings on this one, in the games I’ve seen first blood has often livened up dull drawing games when one gun line gets first blood, the other has to go for it or lose. Saying that by removing first blood it means that the person who goes first doesn’t get an unfair advantage by being able to get an ‘easy’ vp.

There was also no Warlord traits, I think this was silly and they agreed so there in for next tournament.

No roll for night fight, I don’t see why not really.

They also said that one roll wins deployment zone and goes first. I don’t think many people actually abided by this anyway but again I don’t really see what the issue is will rolling for table edges separately.

The mission set ups were odd with the guys keeping the old table quarters deployment. I think this was fine but maybe they should add that no model can be deployed to within 24 inches of an enemy to move this in line with the other rulebook set ups.

Lastly the missions themselves well they’ll probably be developed for next mayhem but I think they were fine. Only issue is having not using the big guns never tire or allowing fast attack to score in scourging.

As I said this is the first tournament in 6^th for mayhem and as they use a different system to everyone else, there were bound to be issues only a full tournament would pick up and overall still a great tournament and it’s hard to top really.

The Result

So I have no idea where I came however I achieved 74 points. In normal 40k terms that equates to 3 wins a draw and 2 losses. Not a bad outing, but I had a few frustrating dice rolls, a few things that didn’t go my way. What I haven’t been able to point out here is that I was two points away from winning the tournament! But I’ll get to that later…

So in my first game I played Rob Buckley. We’ve played four times before and it had been a draw in each game so would this time be different? Yup, I managed a 15-5 win. He was using space wolves an army I thrive against (which is good in the current edition!) It was a tighter game than the score suggested but Rob left the ravagers alive and with 9 dark lances a turn winging his way the game ended up with a win to me.

Game 2 I played Sharan Reddy and his Tau Eldar combination. I was tabled by Sharan but not before eliminating all his troops meaning I only lost 12-8. Tau are VERY good against dark eldar and as such I’m very happy with the result.

Game 3 was against Space Wolves (again) against Owen. Owen had a very hard plasma death unit  who drop podded down on me and shot the bests who took the fire like men…. Ok beasts. In the end Owen again couldn’t kill enough before he got venomed and made the mistake of going for the beast unit with his plasma unit allowing me to have all my vehicles up turn 2 and as such  allowed me to dominate the game and win 19-1

Game 4 was a great matchup for me with poor old Al Pidwell and his jump pack blood angels army. This is the sort of army mine just eats up and as such it did and I got a 19-1 win. A special mention here to eldrad who managed to get line breaker whilst being half the table edge away from any other model!

Game 5 was space wolves with guard (anyone shocked?). I was playing Henry a guy I’ve known from tournaments for a long time and we had a fantastically close game. Henry and I ended the game on turn 5 and we ran out of time. At the end of the game neither of us had more than ten models left each but Henry held onto an objective and I had every secondary objective. And so I lost 11-9. It was at this point I realised if I had won 11-9 I’d have played James ‘the Master’ Taylor on table one for the tournament. James was using tyranids. In all intents and purposes if I had played James we both knew I’d win and win well. Unfortunately I missed out and so I got to play….

Ed in game 6. It was a very close game again full of ridiculous luck on both sides. Eldrad died in combat against 2 grey hunters and one venom survived 8 or 9 penetrating and glancing hits being two of the highlights! I ultimately lost the game 15-5 and it was my own fault really, I was a bit too aggressive with my beast unit and got charged by three space wolf units.

Thanks for reading! I’ll be back in a few weeks with an article on the next thoughts on my list…. Until then Au-revoir!