League Night 3, Game 1

Headed on up to The Gamers Realm for my third night of the escalation league play.  Joked around with some folks for a bit and watched a Trygon eat a Land Raider.  So I thought what the hell, and asked Greg if his bugs were full or did they have room in their bellies for more marines.  We deployed for the insane round 2 scnerio with a ton of dangerous terrain and lots of cover.  For this deployment we had half the board except a 12*12 box at the back of our corner.  That puts most everything up front.  Greg changed out his list and brought more swarm then the game before, I think the Trygon ate something that didn't agree with it so it was sitting this game out. 

Turn one started out simple enough, with a large swarm not to far away the predator parked and opened up with everything.  Yes Lascanons are overkill for hormagaunt but I wanted to kill them all.  While I took a pretty good dent out of the squad, it was no where near enough.  First turn they charged across the field at me with not allot of shooting.  Second turn started with a repeat performance from the predator but with less luck in the wounding department.  I realized I was running under my old 3rd ed tactics and fear of bugs.  But those days I was playing Tau, and you just shot everything that moved and hoped it didn't eat you. 

Greg was a touch frustrated I wouldn't get out of the Rhinos so he charged anyway.  This gave me my fun shooting phase of the night in turn three.  I backed the rhino up and turned it while a good brother popped the top hatch and bathed the side of the gaunt squad in holy promethium. Sitting the Predator still would be its undoing but again lots of shots little wounds.  The gargoyles arrived to beat the snot out of the tracks in a one sided assault.  The zoenthropes arrived too.  It was now time for the Pred to die.  But it just wouldn't do it.  Turn 4 I brought the boys out of the tracks to try to thin out the swarms.  The command squad jumped out to put some plasma in the rippers and the tactical squad put a ton of fire into the gargoyles.  The hormagaunt piled in on the tactical squad in turn with the remaining gargoyes joining the rippers.  Turn 5 I had a mess of hormagaunt on my tactical squad fighting for their lives, and the command squad was now facing a warrior prime, with a mess of termigaunts.  Some amazing rolling on my side sqeeked out some saves till the end.  Greg finally got his predator kill after several turns of chewing it to peices.  A huge explosion resulted in a wound to a near by venomthrope. 

We rolled and sure enough turn 6.  The command squad chewed through termigaunts and puts some wounds on the prime.  While the tactical squad fought for its life chewing away at the gaunts.  By now i was down to half a squad and the command squad was down a member.  Gregs turn he shuffled the thropes around and we went strait to hand to hand as everything else was locked up.  I managed to kill off the rest of the termigaunts and finish off the Prime.  Shock of shocks the tactical squad finished off the hormagaunt as well.  Issue was i was now out in the open with no heavy support staring down two venomthropes and three zoenthropes, and a spore tossed in for good measure.  There was no way I could survive a turn of shooting and two rounds of close combat.   Greg rolled and luckily it came up with a game ends.  After it took us 10min to tally up our points on a model by model bases for the odd scoring of this round, I pulled out a win by less then 100 points.

All in all it was a really fun close game, and Greg's new bugs preform as well as they look.