Shaking off the 40k rust with 8th edition

Good morning wargamers and welcome to another post up here at WR!  I hope you all are doing well as usual and the dice have been in your favor.  Today I wanted to talk to you all about my first game of 8th edition!  Now that GW has released the rulebook, the indices, and the starter set it has been a great time to get back into the game.  Joining me in my first foray into the game is my buddy Wells who is still a wee lad in wargaming and this is his first game of 40k ever!  So let's roll some dice!

Getting our deployment on

So to make things easy we decided not to worry about making lists or anything like that and we just went with the Dark Imperium boxed set.  Wells being the houseguest got to pick which force he wanted to try and he chose the Death Guard, leaving me with the Primaris Space Marines.  We ended up rolling for one of the Eternal War missions and ended up with Front Line Assault deployment and the mission was the Scourge.  I didn't have any easily available method to mark the objectives so we settled on each objective being worth 2 points instead of the 1-4.  We deployed and I had Wells go first as I wanted him to move up the field a bit before I started gunning his troops down.

Turn 1

We deployed up and the first turn was not as exciting as I hoped.  Wells moved the Pox Walkers into the building with the Lord of Contagion and Noxious Blightbringer.  The rest of his force stayed behind cover preventing me from shooting him as I had no LoS.  As a result I ended up moving my marines around to get a better shot off and into position to gun down those zombies!  As a side note I derped with my Inceptors and instead of flanking them like a good general would I was like "lol they so good, stand out in the open!"  So his sorceror just smited the crap out of them.  Fun times.

Turn 2?

The Pox Walkers were getting gunned down with the two Intercessor squads laying the bolt rifle shots into the massive horde.  Here's where I started to notice something.  Well had this ridiculously uncanny ability to roll 'Disgustingly Resilient' saves.  I would cause 8 wounds, he'd save 5.  I would get a couple hits in on his character, he'd roll 6's.  It was unreal but kudos to him.  Eventually his zombies were able to get a charge in and tie up a Intercessor squad for combat.  My Hellblasters moved out of cover with the Captain to secure the objective out in the open with a Lieutenant securing my far right side.

"Bro it was a prank, we killed the zombies for YouTube! See the camera?!"

Now things were starting to get a bit rough for me.  Keep in mind this whole game Wells had stupid luck with DR.  The zombies?  Dead.  His Lord of Contagion though? Untouched and ready to mingle.  His Foetid Bloat-Drone? Took 10 wounds, and his DR saved 6 of them.  Inceptors? Smited.  Plague Marines? Coming ever so closer.  My face?  Priceless. The Lord of Contagion massacred the Intercessor squad and had hungry eyes for the Lieutenant, who did not last long either.  Things were not going so well for the Primaris marines at this point.

That damn drone!

While Wells' kept chewing through my troops on the left, the right side was not doing much better.  My Hellblasters, Captain, and Lieutenant who long abandoned his objective to help the men were stuck, and I repeat STUCK in combat, trying to take down the stupid drone.  Oh and Wells' plague marines came up to join the fun too.  Meanwhile my Ancient tried for a last ditch effort to pull a victory.  If the game ended here at turn 5 I would have secured enough objectives to win the game.  However.  Turn 6 came and with it death followed.

My last hope for a W

Wells was able to secure enough objectives to win victory and the Primaris marines were forced to concede the field licking their wounded pride in the face of the might of the Death Guard.  Victory to Wells!

I'm pretty sure this is what Wells had in his mind

We chatted afterwards about the game and Wells seemed to enjoy it.  It was pretty easy to teach from a veteran standpoint and Wells picked up the flow with the only big difficulty being the weapon profiles, but otherwise the main meat of the game wasn't hard to grasp.  A couple of quirks I had to personally kink out because of my long standing history with 40k.  Rule-wise I felt that it still was a 40k game, but smoother.  Combat was easier to process and not only is it effective (I mean the Lord of Contagion wrecked so much) but it's not a huge debacle anymore.  A couple of things I felt were a bit odd and we house ruled it but I felt that cover was a little restricting in that you only gained it if the whole unit was in the area (we played without advanced terrain rules).  So we house ruled it that since his Pox Walkers were all obscured by the cover, not necessarily IN the area, he was able to claim it.  Yes not RAW but it worked for us and we felt that it was only fair that a model obscured by cover could claim it as well.  Otherwise the game felt like 40k, played like 40k, was fun like 40k, made us laugh and groan like 40k, and was 40k just without all the bloat that time brought to it.  I am definitely excited to get more games in and I think Wells has now been thinking about his own army.
So I was definitely pleased with the changes and it's back on my menu for gaming as gaming goes.  If you've had a chance to play 40k feel free to let me know what you've thought of the edition so far.  I've not played as many games as others I'm sure, but I've enjoyed what I've played.  Well that's it for now, I hope you all have a wonderful time with the wargaming and we shall talk again later!