Cypher beat down.

Burning ...for you. 

The Bob and I decided to play a full game of 40K, and we had so much full with chasing Cypher that we thought we should do another Cypher mission. This time we played Turn the Tide. The idea being that the aggressors have more-or-less ambushed Cypher and his minions as they were doing whatever it is they were doing, and they have him back against the proverbial wall until help arrives. This one has a rather unique deployment which I found exciting and challenging.You can see in the map that I get to set up in that gray corner and he gets to set up 12" away in the other three quadrants. 

How the deployment works is that I essentially split my force, and if the aggressors, in this case Bob's Dark Angels, can destroy the force that I started the game with, then he'll get the big share of VPs (6 VPs in fact) whereas if I have survivors, I would get them. The big catch is that my Reserves don't arrive until Turn 4. Oddly enough the other Special Rule, Backs Against the Wall, forces broken units to auto-rally when they hit the board edge. 

 Sadly my camera phone was acting buggy today and as a result I barely had enough power to review the Cypher Dataslate and could take just two pics. Bob took a lot of great pics which I hope he'll show on his blog soon (update: and here it is). Therefore I won't be doing my typical  battle report but instead giving you a brief summery. 

We totally forgot to check for Night Fighting, which might have helped me in the first turn. The Dark Angels hit me hard with a sledgehammer-like alpha strike that saw my Black Legion unit all but wiped out. Only the Aspiring Champion survived, and of course my dice chose that moment to start rolling high and he broke harder than my first car and ran screaming for the table edge where he would ultimately rally before being picked off (by a Krak missile!).

Bob has some great shots of the Ravenwing attacking Cypher. Cypher and his Fallen goons dove out of their Land Raider to vaporize the bikers, however the Sgt and the Attack BIke survived and pulled back to make room for the two units of Deathwing that 'ported in on Turn 2. In short, only a wounded Cypher survived that hail of bullets and he dove back into the Landraider. On Turn 3 that surviving Attack Bike rolled up and lanced the Landraider like a boil with it's multimelta, leaving an exasperated Cypher sitting in a crater. 

The bottom of Turn 3 saw me trying to cobble together some sort of force with which to survive Bob's next turn. The Vinidicator, which couldn't roll a HIT on the scatter dice if I had bribed it to do so, was ultimately wrecked (see top pic). 

The final stand for Cypher saw him being captured, again, while the rest of his goons were all executed. And this was done before my Turn 4, denying me my reinforcements (a Chaos Champ on a Juggernaut and a squad of Khorne Berserkers).

It was a fun game despite my abysmal dice rolling in the beginning, and a fun scenario. Very challenging. I would like to try it again I think, but with a more hardier army composition. In the game victory was very much absolute so we didn't bother with VPs (and I doubt I earned any regardless!).

Anyway, I was trying to pressure Bob to write out a battle report, or a least a photo dump with play-by-play comments, on his blog. Especially since it's been awhile since he last posted on it. And if he does, as promised, I'll link it back here. (Update: Here it is)