With 8th edition right around the corner we thought we would try to do a test game to see how it plays and what we think about it compared to 7th edition. To kick things off, we have Jason’s Death Guard going up against Max’s Blood Angels.
Game Setup
Points:
We played with Power Levels / Open Play to get a taste for the new system. Jason was running his list at 77PL while Max’s was at 80PL.
Mission:
Again to keep things rolling we thought we’d give Only War a try. The Victory Condition was Slay and Secure.
Deployment:
Long edges of the table (picked by Jason).
Armies
Death Guard:
Battalion Detachment — Typhus, Plaguecaster, (3) units of five Plague Marines, (1) unit of ten Poxwalkers, (2) Rhinos
Super Heavy Detachment — Renegade Imperial Knight
Auxiliary Detachment — (1) squad of five Havocs with Missile Launchers
Blood Angels:
Vanguard Detachment — Librarian Dreadnought, (1) unit of five Assault Terminators, Land Raider Crusader, Furioso Dreadnought, (1) unit of four Sanguinary Guard, Sanguinary Ancient, Sanguinary Priest, (1) unit of five Death Company
Photos
We have more photos available to view on Google Photos.
Highlights and Score Breakdown
- Jason took first blood!
- Terminators mean business. Hammernators mean SERIOUS business. Them striking first on charge is no joke.
- Apothecary-like abilities to resurrect fallen models is extremely powerful and very useful.
- Disgustingly Resilient saved Jason’s hide more than once.
- Invulnerable saves in general are great.
Final Score:
Jason: Slay the Warlord, 4 VP
Max: 2 VP
After 5 rounds, the Blood Angels couldn’t escape the brutal wrath of the Death Guard. Jason won 5-2.
So what did we think about 8th Edition?
- Overall the game felt very fast. Took us a bit over 3 hours but we took breaks to eat and had to look up a lot of rules. Once we’re used to it, we can totally see these games being 2 hours or less.
- Imperial Knights put out a lot of damage but they are not as invulnerable as they were in 7th. One of Max’s marines took off one of the last wounds on it with a bolt pistol!
- Land Raiders are equally durable and hard to take down. Would have been tough for Jason without an Imperial Knight (and good rolling)
- Load up on stratagems if you can. Re-rolling die in key situations was super useful.
- Expect lots of your units to die.
- The default Pysker ability, Smite, can be super powerful. Also, the Pysker phase is really fast now.
- The Power Point system seems to work pretty well. The game felt fairly balanced for how quick it was to make a list. It all came down to dice rolls.
- Max, as an assault army player, liked the the changes to assault. Even though the number of attacks has gone down overall it feels fierce still.
- Getting used to more wounds on things that used have one will take me a few games, Sanguniary Guard for example have 2 now.
- While Max misses Feel No Pain everywhere, reducing it as much as they did is a good thing.
- Changes to characters are very nice, loving that we will see more than librarians as HQ’s.