Nuns With Guns

 I brought a lot of minis to work this week, using the tech lab's light box to photograph them. Wednesday was the turn of my new, but nicely-painted Sisters of Battle army.

I got a couple teens to help me set up the field of battle:

Assorted rocky outcrops surrounded a ruined shrine, which would be the objective for the game. Each side got three squads and one vehicle. The players varied over the course of the hour-plus we played, some dropping out and others turning up.

The rules were Third Edition, using the army lists in the main rulebook. I made two mistakes - I gave the Sisters better ballistic skill, and forgot that the Immolator tank's weapon had a special quality.

A new player ponders his first move.

Another learns to measure moves.

In the first turn, the two sides simply moved; nothing was in range to shoot. The side with the blue Sisters made its first mistake - it advanced the squad over the hill, and rolled poorly on its difficult terrain checks for the rest of the game.                                       

STEM requirements of the program were met when one of the teens started taking some fairly good pictures.

A transported squad.

In the second turn the mounted squads - a command unit and heavy weapons squad - dismounted from their transports and fire was exchanged, to little effect.

I explain how to disembark figures - placed near the hatches.

Explaining how Tank Shock and Death or Glory work.

Jump-pack Seraphim tackle heavily-armed Retributors...

... as the Immolator tank flames an oncoming infantry squad.

Sadly, I counted the Immolator's weapon as a regular heavy flamer; in practice it should have been an Inferno cannon which automatically breaks its target. Given that the blue squad also on the Immolator's side never got into action, this would have made a difference to the result, as that side was thus badly outnumbered in the center of the field.

Sisters advance upon Sisters. This is where a different army
would have come in handy. I'll have to paint the base edges.

The game ended at 5:30pm, four or five turns in, after an internecine combat between assault and heavy-weapons squads over the shrine. The heavy-weapons sisters eventually broke and fled. The assault side, at this point, had only one unit on the shrine - its Rhino transport. Victory to them. The players of the other side learned a lesson about not isolating half their infantry (still standing on the corner hill and plinking storm-bolter shots across the board). I learned a lesson about learning rules better before demoing a game - or at least making clear unit cards so I didn't have to keep checking the army list. Such instructions were extremely useful for new players in many of the games during the convention, and I'll take them into account in future.

Ultimately a good game, and I had about a dozen players or observers in the course of it. Next week we'll go back to DnD. But STEAMFest is coming up in less than a month, so I have to build and prime the Games Workshop freebies before then...