3rd Overall and Undefeated with CSM at the Dark Star GT

The title says it all. This last weekend 70 players gathered for a two day, five round, 1850 point warhammer tournament.

I had a blast, going 5-0,  and successfully beating my 3-2 record from last year, despite having the highest strength of schedule of anyone in the top ten. Despite my strong record I must say that out of all my events with the Chaos Space Marines, this weekend actually was the most challenging. The Minnesota meta brings a fantastic variety of armies, and this leads to many unique challenges. I found myself consistently saying, "You have me on the ropes," to my opponenets as I faced new threats such as multiple wraithlords, speed freak orks with triple dakka jets and more bikes than I have ever seen, hyper-aggressive Dark Eldar (going second and not having my preferred wave with night fight) and of course there was the finals too.

Connor, a friend who I traveled to Indy with and who I have playtested against, was my foe on table one in the last round. He was playing Fateweaver, three units of screamers, three units of flamers, and four of plaguebearers. Five months ago I said this was the one list my army couldn't beat. Back in December we played each other and he clobbered me.

Here we were. The last time we both would be using the old daemons. We had been saying for weeks we didn't want to play each other for the sake of how silly it would be. Not only that, but this table was covered in tons of impassable terrain. It was a great game. All my energy went into killing Fateweaver. On the last turn, after all my shooting, he was grounded with only one wound left. I charged my three remaining flamers into him, doing one wound. Connor rolls a '2'. Reroll...'1'. The crowd (well, mostly me) goes wild! Fateweaver is dead.

We had a huge combat involving two zombie squads, Typhus, and my screamers against a flamer squad and two of his screamer units. I ended up getting Typhus free the turn before with only two zombies left to take bullets for him. Connor needs to kill Tythus to win the game. Thinking that the table quarters mission is on lock Connor chooses to not deep strike his last two plaguebearer squads. He does a suicide drop with this last flamer squad, scattering two inches, but still being in range of Typhus. He uses all of their shots/flames and a few from a partial squad and Typhus is still standing with only one wound and no friends. I had been using a zombie squad to hold his last screamer squad in place, but they had finished my squad the turn before meaning the last four of them were coming right at Typhus. They do one wound. This is it. I fail my invo. The final roll for the game...I get a '5', and Typhus doesn't feel it.

We shake hands but then things go down hill. We realize now that while checking to see if Typhus is within 6" of the center of the table that our center marker is misplaced, which makes me lose a table quarter. This is the difference between me winning and the game being a tie. I want to win as it locks me in for best general (as the other 5-0 is clearly getting best overall), and Connor can't afford a loss as he is in the running for the "Best of the Rest" award for armies which have less than five people playing them, of which there are several 4-1 players.

We start talking through it. We both kept our calm, which I am thankful for. The TO came to check what was happening because we were late with our score sheets, but he let us work it out. The people who were watching backed off as well. I offered to wrestle Connor to decide who won, but he felt since we both wear glasses that would be a bad idea. We were in a tough position. If he had deep struck them in while he was in the mentality that quarters didn't matter anymore would he have put them in the one quarter that could have got him those points, when if would have been the hardest quarter to not mishap in? We talked for a while, and Connor decided that because he was the one who made the mistake and said he wasn't going to deep strike them I should take the win. While it is not the clean win I had hoped for, I accept it, because at the end of the day, we can't agree on where he was going to put them, or what we would have done with another turn, but we can agree on is that we can never skip things like deep strikes when the game is ending. Speaking of Connor being awesome, seeing how he needs a new list, he might be writing some daemon guest articles for Turn 7 Wargaming! Woooo!