Legions Imperalis (1) - First game

 So in normal blog tradition, I hit the ground running. Below are some photos from our first outing with Legions Imperialis. I'm going to pic dump and then add my thoughts and opinions at the end.

The Details - 

We played a 4 player, 3k a side game. We had Fists (me) and Blood Angels v Thousand Sons, and a combined army of Death Guard and Iron Warriors. There was a mix of everything the rules have to offer. Highlights of the game include warning the Tsons player that we had AA batteries, him forgetting and then getting blasted out of the sky. My knight blowing up a whole building to get to one command stand. The BA allied warhound titan shooting a laser up the table and wiping out most of the IW in one go and the BA Kratos tanks leveling a building to "help" his assault marines win a close combat. We started at 10 and wrapped on turn two at 2pm

 

The Good - 

So the game was a lot of fun. It felt very combined arms and it was a good way to spend an afternoon. We challenged one another with a game day planned on the day of release and everyone had paint on everything with only one player not having a completely painted force. Ironically our Tsons player finished all his infantry which never left his wip rhinos. It was so rewarding to actually get my force finished and it was great to get the game on the table. I'm super happy with the terrain i contributed (need to paint still) (more details on the army and terrain at a later date)

The less than Good - 

GW reccomends 3k as the standard size for a game. The way break points and morale work, 3k is a ton to keep track of. Comments on the game during clean up focused mostly around, "it'll go way quicker when we know what we're doing and with less players" which I agree with. The game is surprisingly crunchier than I was expecting which is good but was a lot to keep track of. My quick reference sheets helped but i need to slim them down significantly before another game.

 

Whats next - 

Theres a new book on the way with more options. We've scheduled a game for 2k, 1 v 1 for next time and I plan to add to this. I may run solar aux instead though, I'm not sure yet. For the blog I'll try and take some nice glamour shots of the army and terrain along with a guide on how I painted it all at some point. For now I'm taking a break from this project to paint something totally different as a palette cleanser. 

I wanted to do a bit of a yearly preview type teaser photo but to be honest it's mostly what we discussed in the year ahead post. Theres 2 big projects I've made some very real headway on but am not quite ready to share yet, though stuffs coming soon.

Imperial Fists (1)

For one reason or another I find myself bit by the 40k Bug again. When I got into wargaming fresh out of high school the first game I really got into was 40k. I started with Ultramarines as one does and found that although I enjoyed the game, I didn't really have people to play with because of the costs. This led our group to try Malifaux and eventually Historical Gaming and the rest is history.

While I was at Fall-In this year a friend of mine ran a Badab War game using a modified version of the Betrayal at Calth Board Game GW put out a few years ago. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. I hadn't written off 40k by any means but between AOS and the various indie and historical games I play it wasn't high on my radar. Once the seeds had been planted with that game and several discussions with several friends I decided to take the plunge.

The first figure I painted was a Terminator Captain. This was part of the Start Collecting: Space Marines Box. I decided to go with Imperial Fists pretty much solely based on looks. I wanted the challenge of painting yellow and thought they would look sharp on a tabletop.

There's no concrete plan with this force so far (Never a good start). I'm simply painting and collecting models I like and building an army I like the look of. So far this is the only figure I have finished but as of posting this there's a tactical squad awaiting primer. I also picked up a dreadnought and a librarian as well as Tor Garadon.

Like anyone will tell you yellow is a tricky color to paint. I'm very happy with how this came out although the finish is just a tiny bit more matt than id like it. 2 boxes of snap-marines sacrificed their lives for this yellow so I hope it does it justice. I tried both the Army Painter and Vallejo spray primers but found them just too bright. The process was actually pretty simple once I figured it out and uses all available products but does require an airbrush.
Prime with Stynylres White
Basecoat with Averland Sunset Airbrush Paint
Layer on Yriel Yellow with the airbrush
Wash just the recesses with Contrast Gulliman Flesh
Paint the details

Pardon the terrible photo. You can see there were several attempts.

Here are some photos from the above Badab War game. You can see more awesome photos of the terrain over on Keith's Instagram.

So there you have the first of my new 40k army. There isn't a real plan yet but there's talk of playing some Necromunda and Zone Mortalis games (more on that in the future) so I'm mostly focusing on smaller units instead of vehicles to start but like I said, I'm mostly just hobbying to hobby as opposed to a specific force or game with these guys.