Elysians - First Game

Had my first game using the Elysians last night after work. My mate was after a friendly game and I had time. He was using Tyranids, with large numbers of genestealers, 3 winged hive tyrants, plus some other stuff. We did mission and deployment selection using the Open War Cards which I highly recommend, even if they results often heavily favour one side over the other. The way the cards work is you draw a objective card, a deployment card and a twist card.

For example we got a relatively standard deployment, but the objective was that at the start of turn 3 a comet lands in one of 5 places on the board determined randomly, and whoever holds this objective at the end of turn 5 wins. And the twist we drew was that it was night-time with all shooting and psychic ranges limited to 12", and at the start of each game tune go up by 6" on a roll of 4+. For us it stayed at 12", only going to 18' for turn 5.

I deployed half of my army for turn 1, mainly the mortars and snipers, but also the vultures, Tauros's and 2 infantry squads. My opponent went first and moved up fast and over the next 2 turns killed one of the vultures, some of the Tauros's and a few of the sniper squads. I was saving most of my drops till I knew where the comet would land.

The Tauros's performed rather well, with their 5+ invul save greatly helping, and the heavy flamers doing quite well on the overwatch.

So on turn 3 the comet landed, placing the objective right in the middle of his 3 hive tyrants who have just killed a vulture, whereupon he consolidated the rest of his gaunts to that location.


So my turn 3 deepstrike did not go as well as planned, with me unable to get within 12" of many useful targets. I did take out his warlord and a some heavy weapon Tyranids, plus a bunch of other stuff. But he still had 3 hive tyrants going into his turn 4, although one was almost dead.

So by now he had lost most of his genestealers and gaunts and still had quite a lot of infantry, but not much of it was close to the objective. But as I went 2nd, on turn 5 I manged to move, move, move an infantry squad close enough to the objective to claim it as he had not enough objective secured units close to it. He probably could have won if he had camped the objective better, but it was just a friendly game so winning wasn't a big issue.

Overall I think my army performed well. Obviously the snipers and mortars did not do much due to the range restrictions, but one sniper squad did do 2 mortal rounds in one round of shooting at one stage. I was impressed with the resilience of the Tauros's who lasted longer than I thought they would against genestealers. And the infantry squads dropping in with FRFSRF output a lot of shots for a cheap price.

I should have another game this weekend at the club so will take the same list and see how it performs against a different army.