A long promised game

      The same conversation that reminded me to finish painting a couple of units I had put aside for Dragon's Rampant, also reminded the same mate and me that we had promised to have a game of Battlefleet Gothic after I finished my fleet way back in this post: Space Marines for BFG.

       To keep it simple we both picked the same faction for our fleets, Space Marines in this case, and put together our lists. I went with more capital ships, while he went with more of an emphasis on escorts, this making our core fleets really similar; we both had a Battlebarge, 2 Strike cruisers and a unit of Cobras, but I had an extra Strike cruiser to his unit of Nova Class ships.
       The other big difference were our tactics, I went as a solid block in the middle hoping to smash straight through his lines, while he tried to be a bit cleverer, with a flanking move on each side.

      Keeping with my hammer approach to tactics, my first move was straight forward firing all my torpedoes at the closest targets, there was no way these would hit but I wanted to make him have to start thinking from his very first turn.

      The first salvo or two we both fired brought home just how brutal this game can be, both of us losing a Strike cruiser early on and him losing one of his Nova class ships. We learned at this point just how much firepower a Battlebarge can put out and the answer is staggering.

       After the initial straight line jousting, we both had to think about coming about, I had the upper hand at this point but in our struggles to turn our capital ships quickly enough his escorts came into play taking out nearly all of my escort squadron and taking out another of my Strike cruisers.

        I am missing a few photos at this point, but our Battlebarges danced around each other for a handful of turns, just out of effective range before he decided to send his off across the board to turn around in peace. This left my Battlebarge and last cruiser to deal with his remaining escorts which it managed easily, losing the already damaged Strike cruiser in the process. It was now Battlebarge on Battlebarge, both having taken the exact same damage. We both reloaded our ordnance and went around the planet that was in the way and got ready to unload everything we had. When the two ships finally met, it was close range and his turn, a full broadside into the prow of my ship later, and his Battlebarge was the last remaining ship on the board. A close run game and a proper laugh.

We have loads more plans for this so expect to see a lot more random snippets on this blog in the future.

Thanks for reading