Over the past 2 days I played at Axemaster, a tournament run by the Hampton Games Club in my home suburb of Hampton. I used my trusty Tomb Kings with a slightly different list than I normally run, one with less magic and a Destroyer of Eternities wielding Tomb King to bludgeon people over the head with.

Tomb King: Destroyer of Eternities, Collar of Shapesh
Tomb Prince: Great Weapon, Brooch of the Great Desert
Liche Priest: Dispel Scroll
Liche Priest: Hieratic Jar, Cloak of the Dunes
23 Skeletons, Banner of the Undying Legion, Champion, Standard
10 Archers
3 Chariots

22 Tomb Guard, Full Command, Icon of Rakaph

2 Tomb Scorpions
4 Ushabti

Bone Giant

Screaming Skull Catapult: Skulls of the Foe

Round 1: Dom Holloway – Brettonians

My first round Grudge match against Dom was set up a while in advance, but I was none too confident facing Brettonians, especially Doms unit of 9 grail knights who I knew could really cause some damage if left unchecked. The game was fairly even until I managed to flank his Errant knights (with bsb) and run them into a building, then I got a sneaky flank charge onto the grail knights using the Icon of Rakaph on the Tomb Guard and after a few turns of chasing ran them off the board. Dom did manage to kill my Ushabti and my Bone giant and the game ended as a minor win to me.

Result: Win 13-7

Dead guy of the match: Probably to Tomb Guard champion, slaying 2 Grail Knights in successive challenged is no mean feat!

Round 2: Jack Brown – Lizardmen

I recently played Jack at the GT and managed to get a minor win over him, this time he'd improved his list a bit by making the Saurus units bigger and throwing in a unit of Kroxigor. Things didn't go well for me this round, my infantry were beaten up by his infantry and his Kroxigor just fled from my Ushabti. In the last turn I almost clawed some points back by rear-charging some saurus with the ushabti, Jack promptly rolled snake eyes to hold and rear charged me with 4 Kroxigor, just in case he charged his oldblood in aswell.

Result: Loss 0-20

Dead guy of the match: The second Tomb scorpion, emerged and killed the Salamanders and then a pair of Saurus cav before crumbling.

Round 3: Anthony Chen – more Lizardmen

Anthony had a very different army to Jack, 3 units of 15 Saurus and a stegadon with 2 units of Kroxigor as flankers, a few Salamanders and some skinks rounded off a well tuned list. This game seesawed throughout, Anthony got the jump on my and killed my Ushabti with his Kroxigor and BSB and his Stegadon impressively killed the Bone Giant outright on the charge, so suddenly I had a stegadon, a BSB and 3 Kroxigor behind my army. Using my large array of movement spells i rear charged the Stegadon and flanked the BSB with the Tomb guard. The Tomb Guard then broke the bsb and persued into some skinks, before breaking them and hitting some Kroxigor who fared just as badly as the skinks. The stegadon killed the Tomb Prince out of the skellies before running the turn before support arrived, and my chariots who flanked some Kroxigor and ended up behind Anthony's lines turned to prepare for a rear charge on some Saurus. The poor Saurus were charged by the chariots in the rear and then magically charged in the front by the Tomb Guard who broke them and in the following turn reformed and charged into the rear of the Oldbloods unit. With the Oldblood breaking in the last turn Anthony didn't have much left and the game finished as a massacre

Result: Win 20-0

Dead guy of the match: The chariots, braved the horrors of S7 to charge some Kroxigor and then arrived at the end to make some timely rear charges.

Round 4: Clint Millward – Brettonians

Mmm more Brettonians, this time 4 lances of knights and a general on a Hippogriff, very interesting. The game started well with the archers who thought the Hippogriff's lack of armour made it vulnerable actually doing a wound to the lord as opposed to the Hippogriff they were aiming at With some realm knights then falling for my trap by charging a scorpion and being flanked by Ushabti. The Hippogriff got charged by the Tomb king and Skeletons while the Tomb Guard had to beat back a unit of Ream knights. After chasing the Hippogriff off the board the Skeletons turned to face a charging Realm unit and beat them down, these knights were then chased off the table by the Ushabti who had (with the assistance of the Tomb Guard) broken the other Realm Knights. With most of his Knights off the board at the end the game finished as a massacre to me, which I was happy of considering I don't normally fare too well against knight heavy Brettonians

Result: Win 19-1

Dead guy of the match: Screaming Skull Catapult, 4 turns of misfiring and the one glorious shot halfway across the table to panic a Knight unit off the board, the turn before being destroyed by the Pegasus Knights.

Round 5: Chris Cousens – Tzeentch Mortals

Chris had a pretty Cheezy list, Tzeentch lord on dragon with the staff of change, 13 power dice, 2 Knight units and some Chariots. Things went bad for Chris, the one shot at the Dragon I got with the catapult did 2 wounds to the rider and sent his fleeing, a tomb scorpion killing blowed 2 Chaos Knights and then ran them down with help from the giant. The Giant then terrored a chariot, through another chariot and into a forest. The other chariot got charged by another scorpion and fled, into earlier mentioned forest. The fleeing chariot did rally so fled through more forest and exploded and the panicked unit of hounds fled the table. After destroying the Ushabti the non-chosen knights were flanked by Tomb Guard and crossfired by archers who minutes earlier had performed the ultimate injustice. Noticing the (just rallies) Lord of Tzeentch sitting mightily atop his dragon with one wound the archers drew back their bows and let loose 7 arrows. 3 of which hit, all of them on said rider, one measly S3 arrow penetrated the lords thick skin with a roll of 6...

Armour save 3+...

2

Ward save 4+

1. and thats the lord dead. A roughly 500pt Tzeentch Lord of awesome terrifying death slain by an archer. Kinda summed up the game really, 4 Turns of horrifically good rolling on my part and horrifically bad rolling on Chris' meant that the Tomb Kings held the field (and the objective)

Result: Win 20-0

Dead guy of the match: A lone skeleton archer, the skellie that could...

Round 6: Ben Morrison – Undivided Daemon Legion

Last round and I'm sitting in second, 12 battle points behind Ben who hasn't yet lost a game. With a mix of Khorne and Nurgle Daemons (one of each infantry and cavalry) plus some furies and a Daemon Prince and Herald (of nurgle) I certainly wasn't confident. I deployed centrally with my Ushabti on my left flank, which worried me when Ben placed both the Bloodcrushers and the Plagueriders on my right flank. In the first few turns I managed to lose the Ushabti to a flank charging herald on Daemonbeast (in 1 combat phase) but this left his out in the open and the catapult shot the beast out from under him and then did a wound to him with a second shot. I baited the bloodletters with a scorpion and then flanked them with Tomb Guard which wiped them out. I managed to cramp the movement of Bens cavalry with some clever scorpion moving and this got me a flank on the Plagueriders with the Bone Giant, and a frontal charge with the Kings Skeletons to help it out. The King slew a Plaguerider with his Destroyer of eternities (to go with the one he killed in the magic phase) and this led to me winning combat by 8 and popping the remaining cav. To mix things up a bit I frontal charged the Bloodcrushers with the Bone Giant and flanked them with the Skeletons (hey so I like variety :)) I still won by 8 and popped the unit after more Destroyer-iness from the Tomb King. This signaled the end of the game and the tournament for me, i managed to get a solid victory over the Daemons which I was very happy with.

Result: Win 14-6

Dead guy of the match: Tomb King, with 4 Daemonic cavalry killed personally in HTH and a bunch killed with the combat res that generated he was a definite match-winner and proved too strong for Ben to stop.

In the end I came equal 2^nd with Ben Morrison, Phil Cottrell took out 1^st with his Wood Elves (well done, thats 2 Tournaments in as many weeks for him). I'd like to thank all my opponents and Owen the TO, hope to see you all again at Axemaster 2008.