I always enjoy launching into a new GHB with something easy to play, which in my case usually means Ogors or Gargants. This time around I’d had my head turned by the new Gatebreaker warscroll: various group chats already seem to be filled with epic stories of 4D6 movement and D6 shooting attacks per Gargant resulting in Round One knockouts. Going off the reporting, you’d think it might as well be D2 + 4: nobody ever seemed to roll below a 5, and certainly nobody was laughing about the easy wins that come when your opponent craps out and rolls 1s across the board.

But that’s kind of the point, too: even if you do crap out, you’re still talking about tough units with good OC, so the solid baseline is there and you can just treat spiking at the right time as upside. That’s the theory, anyway, so let’s see how it panned out in our local Autumn League.

The Local What Now?

Our group has a format going where we all play one game against each other across the space of a few weeks, then the two top performers meet in the Grand Final, with the rest of us there to watch, sink a few cans and sledge the shit out of them observe respectfully. And when it’s done we re-wrack and start a new league. I published a write-up on our Summer League earlier this year¹, which you can see here:

KBS Wins the KSL

My opponent for this game was Aaron. We’ve both been travelling pretty well but qualification for the Grand Final is still up for grabs, so I guess this was a competitive game in its own way even if we were both pretty clueless about the new book. Call it casually competitive, or GHB 26-27 for Dummies; either would be accurate.

The List

I’ve been working on a Cogfort scratchbuild that I wanted to get on the table, so into the list it goes. That means stepping away from my beloved King Brodd’s Stomp and into [shudder] Sons of Behemat allegiance.

With the ROR in there I couldn’t really go low drop, so I split the Rego’s up into 4-drop to go for the Prio reroll. Not much point landing in that 3-drop No Man’s Land, where you might not dictate turn order but don’t get the reroll either:

In terms of loadout, I knew I would miss the attack-stacking that KBS brings, which can be crucial to offset your shitty To Hit rolls. So I did something I haven’t really tried very often in Sons of Behemat and loaded up on all the aggro Enhancements, to engineer a big Go Turn: Mantle of Tusks and Horns for the +1 to Hit bubble² and Furious Temper for +2 extra attacks on every profile for one Mega, once per game. At the table I took Glowy Shield of Protectiness (bounceback mortal from your save rolls) as my Takers second artefact.

So it was a bit of an experimental list for me: seeing how much impact the Gargant Gunline could have and taking Go Turn tech that I haven’t used much in Sons, to see how it would all go.

The Game

We rolled up What’s Yours Is Ours, which has a pretty interesting map shape:

That whole Go Turn idea got off to a rocky start as Aaron deployed his reinforced Cav and that tanky warband everyone takes (Questor Soulsworn) on the table, but his Longstrikes and Annhilators in the sky. So his hammers were going to be impossible for me to reach without them doing some serious damage first:

Aaron took first turn and that meant I was on for the double. I sent one Gatebreaker off on an adventure to start whacking Aaron’s Priest and terrain, and hopefully remove his teleports as a factor. They would still have deep striking, but once the Stormcast were down, they were down. Bastian was out of reach so the Scrapfort started blasting into the Questors and picked up a few of them:

The new Gatebreaker shot into the faction terrain for lack of better targets but it was proving a pain in the ass to kill. Turns out it’s still easy to miss with most of your 3 or 4 shots. With the Priest and Porta-Potty both still hanging around I took the double to finish off the job I’d only got half done, and duly lifted most of what Aaron had on the table (other than Bastian):

Aaron’s path to victory from this point was clear:

• Bring down his Longstrikes and Annies
• Dogpile one Mega
• Double me back
• And dogpile the next one.

That’s what he said we was gonna do, and that’s exactly what happened. On my right flank, down came the Annies and Longstrikes, ready to set about dismantling my army with the smug efficiency of a parking inspector being paid by commission:

On my left flank, with the Questors gone, I thought my lonely Scrapfort was in a good position to hold up against Bastian for a few turns, but Azza up-ended that equation by using that once per game Stormcast thing to summon back a couple of Dracoth cav on that side. On this turn he was happy to drop them onto an objective, ready to pounce on me across the double.

SCE have various Strike First / Last tech, so my next 30 minutes was largely spent watching his combat units smash the living shit out of my Gargants, interrupted only by watching his shooting units blast chunks out of them for a bit of variety.

Those fucking Longstrikes hit 11/13 Hit rolls and then 11/11 Wound rolls, all of them going straight through with no armour save thanks to the extra rend they get into my whole army. So that was nice for them.

Yes, I kept count. And yes, I had a whinge about it. I’m a Pom after all, having a moan is just factory settings.

When the smoke cleared, this was my dead pile with the Cogfort limping along behind on a handful of wounds remaining – tied in combat with Bastian and the Cav, and about to die on my own turn. Down it went and now I was looking down the barrel of a large VP deficit with essentially one model left (the fully-intact Gatebreaker), and that mountain proved to be more than I could climb.

Result: Major Victory to Stormcast

I was left scrambling for excuses, and while I of course reserve the right to simply outright lie in future batreps³, the best I could come up today with was getting ahead of it all a revisionist claim that this was an experimental list, along with maybe calling out Azza’s cooked dice as the batrep progressed.⁴

I retreated home to put on the Sunday roast and switch into Ogor mode, nursing a bloated belly and thinking about where it all went wrong.

The Denouement

So what can we take from this first game under the new GHB?

• The new Gatebreakers are only a modest improvement, but they are an improvement nonetheless. You’ll only hear about them rolling 1s and 6s but when you’re rolling say 3 or 4 dice, you’ll probably drop a couple of chances along the way and only force 1 or 2 saves. Handy for sure, but it never felt like a true Gargant Gunline for me in this game.
• The Cogfort is less effective with Covering Fire than I expected. The main cannon hits on 4s natively, so four shots hitting on 5s in your opponent’s turn is gonna need to get pretty damn lucky to spike. Never happened for me.
• Obscuring Terrain is not dead. There’s less of it on any given map, but when it’s there, it can still be bloody impactful:

There were three such pieces clustered on one side of the board for this mission, and Aaron surveyed the map and then made great use of it. In future games I’ll be trying to do the same, and I suggest you do likewise.

The other thing I would maybe do differently is to have used my Prio reroll to actively avoid having the early double. What was proven quite emphatically here is that my army can’t stand up to being doubled by Stormcast, so I should have been doing everything in my power to avoid that happening, and that would have meant going out of my way to decline the double and keep it on IGYG.

I reckon that for my next game – which could be a rematch in the Grand Final this weekend – I’ll go back home to King Brodd’s Stomp, possibly with King Brodd and 3x Aqshy Gatebreakers. I’m also interested to see how this army feels in the new GHB with a tank build, taking Breaker Tribe for those 6+ wards combined with the 40 Health Heroic Trait (Monstrously Tough).

One final thing I’ll note is that the new Strike Last prayer is great for this army. It’s cool to take potshots at it with a Bobby Hill Mancrusher, but maybe the smart play is to hold a few Prayer points back on Brodd so you’re ready to pop it on your opponent’s turn on effectively a 2+. It wasn’t a factor here when the Annihilators are in the sky since they’re not around to be targeted – they just dropped from the heavens and one-shotted King Ding-A-Ling – but it’s something to keep in your box of tricks for future games. It’s powerful enough that it could be worth cooking the points rather than popping off a different prayer right away, just because you can.

So that’s the story of how I got my ass handed to me: Onwards and upwards from here!

Have a good weekend, nerds. Catch you on the other side.

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1. If you’re in the Northern hemisphere, and you think January is winter, you need to remember that your seasons are upside down. ↩︎
2. The actual best reason to go Sons over KBS in my opinion. ↩︎
3. History is written by the bloggers. ↩︎
4. They were fucking cooked though. ↩︎