Time-Lapse Video Session Report
Warhammer Fantasy Battles
2,000 pt Chaos Daemons vs Vampire Counts

Recently my cousin/life-long best friend Hugh visited for the weekend, and we managed to get in a couple of (increasingly rare) Warhammer Fantasy battles.

I fielded my newest army, Chaos Daemons (of Khorne & Tzeentch), while he unleashed a shambling horde of undead led by fearsome Vampire Counts.

In the first game (not seen here), a Lord of Change led my forces and fortune did not smile on me as one bad die roll after another sealed my fate. I watched unit after unit fall to calamity, and the deal was sealed when the Lord of Change himself was ripped into the warp on an unlikely miscast followed by snake eyes on the miscast chart.

So, it was with little hesitation that I totally changed the primary philosophy of my force, punting the Lord of Change in favor of the more straight-forward brutality of a Bloodthirster of Khorne.

Hugh’s army remained unchanged from game to game.

In the first tilt, we had terrain equally dispersed across the battlefield, including a ruined Chaos temple in the middle. As both of our armies are really about just getting to grips with the opponent, we cleared the middle of the table for the second game and decided on blind deployment, using some large game boxes to shield our deployment zones from the opponent.

Once the dividers are removed and you see our respective deployed armies at the beginning of the video, the arrayed forces are as described below.

The Chaos Daemons are on the left side of the screen. Starting with the unit closest to the camera, they are:

• 5 Flesh Hounds of Khorne, led by Karanak
• 20 Horrors of Tzeentch, led by a Changeling (my lone painted unit in this game)
• 1 BloodThirster of Khorne
• 10 Horrors of Tzeentch
• 20 Bloodletters of Khorne
• 2 Bloodcrushers of Khorne, led by a Herald of Khorne on a Juggernaut who is also the BSB (3 cavalry models total in unit)
• 5 Flamers of Tzeentch

The Vampire Counts are on the right side of the screen. Starting with the unit closest to the camera, they are

• Direwolves
• Big ol’ unit of Zombies
• Big ol’ unit of Skeletons, led by a Vampire Hero
• A Vampire Lord leading a unit of Black Knights
• A unit of Fellbats
• A unit of GraveGuard led by a Vampire Hero
• The Black Coach
• A unit of Ghouls

I won the roll for first turn and elected to let Hugh make the first move. He, of course, shuffled his host en masse toward my army.

When it came to my turn, I had a difficult choice, but elected to throw caution aside and charge the Dire Wolves with my Flesh Hounds and the Black Coach with my Bloodthirster. The greater daemon was within his charge range by just a half inch. If I had failed, it pretty much would have been the whole game right there.

As it was, my primary goal was to stop the Black Coach from charging in and ripping apart any of my units with impact hits. It had been nasty in the first game. Also, I anticipated dispatching the coach quickly and, hopefully, would find the Bloodthirster behind Hugh’s battleline where he could wreak havoc with a rear charge.

To cement this, I would bait his other units with my biggest blocks of infantry, the Bloodletters and Horrors.

In close combat, the Bloodthirster didn’t do quite enough wounds to destroy the Black Coach, but the Flesh Hounds mauled the Dire Wolves, overrunning into the unit of Zombies (where they would grind away for most of the game)

During Hugh’s turn, his Lord + Black Knights charged my block of 20 Bloodletters. His Vampire Hero + GraveGuard charged my Herald + Bloodcrushers and his Vampire Hero + Skeletons charged my large unit of Horrors.

His Ghouls shambled forward and his Fellbats moved behind my battle line. His aim, I believe, was to dispatch my Flamers with these units and then have two decent units available for rear charges.

On to close combat:

My heart sank when my best unit from the first game, the Herald + Bloodcrushers, miscalculated in the combat against the Graveguard. My herald declared a challenge, but the Vampire Hero with Killing Blow dispatched him, even doing overkill wounds on the unit, which the rest of the GraveGuard (also with killing blow) finished off. I believe the final wound may have been a failed daemonic instability check. At any rate, a great many points, around 20% of my total, went bye bye in a hurry.

I was pleasantly surprised, however, to watch my Bloodletters weather the charge from the Black Knights. I believe they lost a rank, but they stuck in there, and since the deadly charge turn was out of the way, it would be a much more fair fight from that point on. (Note, my Bloodletters are notoriously difficult to rank up, so rather than remove casualties, I marked them with a six-sided die counting out the fallen from each rank.)

Similarly, I was pleased to watch Hugh’s face when my Changeling declared a challenge against his skeletons. He knew something was afoot and accepted with his unit champion. As the changeling gets to pick and choose from his opponent’s best stats and trade with him for the fight, he easily dispatched the champion. Hugh knew his hero would have to accept the same fate or run to the back ranks to hide in the next turn. The rest of the Horrors and Skeletons just began grinding away at one another with somewhat equal degrees of ineptitude.

The Bloodthirster finished off the Black Coach and the Flesh Hounds absolutely tore through the zombies (although, frustratingly, not enough to eliminate them).

All in all, at the end of the turn, I couldn’t feel too bad, even having lost the Bloodcrushers. I had weathered his charges admirably, had an unengaged Bad MoFo Greater Daemon behind his battle line, and was looking to punk another Vampire Hero the next turn with my Changeling.

I began my next turn maneuvering in supporting charges — one from my Bloodthirster slamming into the Black Knights from the side and my smaller unit of Horrors joining their painted brethren with a flank charge against the Skeletons.

My Flamers hopped back up on their hill and tried some shooting, but that would wind up being somewhat depressingly ineffective overall.

The supporting charges were terrifically effective, with the Black Knights being dusted completely except for the Vampire Lord who led them and the Skeletons being largely butchered (mostly by combat result) after my Changeling played his dirty trick in a challenge against the Vampire Hero.

The comedic moment in this round of combat came when my unscathed Flesh Hounds continued their onslaught against the large Zombie unit but, even after combat result, found themselves engaged against a single rotter.

A single, frickin’ zombie, holding up my stupidly dangerous unit of daemonic dogs. It was maddening.

During Hugh’s turn, his Vampire Lord defiantly stood up to a half-strong unit of BloodLetters and the BloodThirster himself while the GraveGuard and Ghouls maneuvered to give support.

This frightened me more than you might think because the GraveGuard, with their killing blow ability, could get a lucky strike against the BloodThirster, putting him down despite his embarrassment of wound points.

Meanwhile, the Fellbats swooped down on the Flamers in a skirmish that would go down in legend and song as, well, a pointless sideshow with no discernible impact on the larger battle.

Ultimately, the GraveGuard and Ghouls rallied to their dark Undead Lord, but they were hopelessly overmatched against the bloodthirsty daemons of Khorne. The lucky Killing Blow never came, the Bloodthirster destroyed the Lord in a challenge and would join the Bloodletters in wiping out the pesky Ghouls and GraveGuard.

Obviously, the battle was well in hand as the Flamers would finish off the Fellbats, and the Flesh Hounds would bite the head off the lone remaining shambler and turn to position themselves to accelerate the demise of the Skeletons, who were now boringly grinding away against the units of horrors in a battle of close-combat lightweights.

At the end of the day, the cries of “Blood for the Blood God, Skulls for the Throne of Khorne” were bordering on, well, just bad hospitality, and we decided that with two wildly different games of Warhammer under our belts, we’d spend the rest of the weekend enjoying less competitive games of Descent, Arkham Horror and Runebound.

Still, Lord Khorne was most pleased. Most pleased indeed.