[Imperial Commander Gent]

On Saturday, Wordbearers 81007, myself and a buddy of ours got up somewhat early to make the one hour drive up to colorado springs to play in a 40k team tourney that was taking place at a store up there. We got there at about 10:45 and took stock of the place. The store looked nice and big and there was a rather large group of 40k players standing outside the doors waiting to go in. We introduced ourselves to a few of the people there and immediately the talk went to past games and hopeful thoughts about the day ahead. Wordbearers and I were just an alternate at this tournament and we didnt know if we would be playing or not. By 11:20, a few teams had dropped and so we did make it in and our other friend teamed up with a guy whose partner was a no show. So our trip wasnt a waste and we all got to play. Each player on each team had their own modified FOC's and 1,000 points to play around with. Wordbearers brought his fallen Dark Angels and I brought Thousand Sons. Our lists looked like this;

Wordbearers
Chaos Lord, Terminator armor, Lightning claws, Mark of tzeentch

9 Chaos Terminators with a plethora of fun toys

10 Plague Angels (Plague marine rules) with a pair of meltas and aspiring champ with powerfist and a rhino

9 Fallen Angels (chaos marines) with a plasma gun and aspiring champ with power weapon.

I brought
Daemon Prince, Wings, Mark of tzeentch, Bolt of change

2 9 man thousand sons squads with doombolt on the sorcerors

2 predators, one kitted out for anti infantry and one tri-las set up.

With our fees paid and our lists turned in, we started the tourney. Our first game was against a pair of black templars armies that were almost identical in composition. They had 2 LRC's (YIKES!), 2 Vindicators, 2 venerable dreads, 25 initiates, 5 neophytes, one chaplain and an Emperors champ. These guys were real laid back and we greatly enjoyed playing them. Each team had to assign a player to complete and objective out of the primary and the secondary. I took the primary and wordbearers would be left to take the secondary. The primary objective was to hold the center of the board and the secondary was to have more scoring units in your opponents deplowment zone than they had in yours and the tertiary was to score more than 200 victory points than the enemy. We got first turn and began our advance. By the end of second turn, we had destroyed the demolisher cannon on one of the vindis, blown up an LRC, destroyed the other vindi and killed one of the venerable dreads with the other locked up in CC with the demon prince. It was going really well but the templars really put a hurt on us in CC and wordbearers rolled abysmal saves for his terminators, but our destruction of a large portion of their army in the opening turns and them immobilising their LRC in a building on the last turn helped us to claim a victory while I held the Primary objective and they held the secondary. The game was so close that the victory points difference was 3 in our favor. a 3 point difference. It was a hell of a game.

In our second round, we played against a sisters and Imp guard team in a heavily wooded area. They had like 50 sisters and like 70 carapace armored guardsmen. The mission was marked for death, each member of each team had to pick an enemy unit and mark it for death. If that unit was completely killed they scored double points for them. They marked our termies and one of my 1k sons squads. the primary objective was to ensure a sound victory with a 200 point victory point difference, the secondary was to control more terrain pieces than your opponent (which would have been easy because they had twice as many scoring units as we did) and the third was to ensure a crushing victory by scoring more than 1600 more victory points than the opposing team. Escalation rules were in effect. We took all three of the objectives in this entirely one sided fight and neither of our marked for death squads died. The only survivors for those guys were 2 celestians who were fleeing at the end of the game. We felt bad about it.......

Our third game was against a World Eaters and Iron warriors team with the models fully painted and looking AMAZING! Their models were beautiful and the guys were very nice and friendly and we had a great time. We had to use objective markers and the objectives were to hold more markers than the opponents. We lost this game in a complete and utter slaughter to our opponents. Our dice left us in this one and we just completely rolled like never before. I went and bought new dice in the middle of the game which helped, but it was already too bad. The opponents even said there was nothing we could have done differently tactically, it was our dice rolling that failed us. This loss really set us back but we were fine with it. In the end, we took 6th out of 18 teams that were at this tournament and our buddy with his makeshift partner took 7th. The guys we played in the last round took 2nd and the winning team was a ravenwing deathwing team that looked absolutely amazing! Overall we had a great day and we are looking forward to the next one!