The WAAAGH! is growing!

I have officially bought all the models I need (and a little extra thanks to a great deal I found at I-CON) to put together my 500 pt Ork army. Now I face the very fun but very time-consuming task of finishing assembly, painting and basing. Here’s what I’ve done so far:

This is my warboss in mega armour. Pretty awesome isn’t he? I assembled him this week because I want to bring him to falgrim’s on Sunday. As you can see, he still needs to be primed, painted and based.

The core of any good ork army is boyz, boyz and more boyz. I’m a little jealous of Barry Lutz that she only needs to assemble and paint 15 chaos marines while I need to assemble and paint 31 ork boyz. Below is the progress I’ve made so far. Two are fully painted and based. Six more are assembled and I started painting them. The rest are still in boxes.

Leading my slugga boyz will be my slugga nob. He’s bigger than the boyz but not as big as the warboss. He’s assembled and primed but needs paint and basing.

I love Killer Kans! To me, they are the epitome of the ork aesthetic. They are tough and badass, but at the same time kind of adorable. My 500 pt army includes two which I assembled this week to bring on Sunday. I should have put an ork in the photo for scale. Kans are about twice as tall as ork boyz. Again, these need to be primed, painted and based.

I bought two of the exact same killer kan models, but I didn’t want them to look the same, so I got creative. On one of them I used toothpicks to represent spikes. And Barry donated a chaos marine head to put on one of the spikes. I also need to give credit to herzwesten, whose brilliant idea it was to heat up a nail and use that to make the hole in the plastic head.

At I-CON last month I picked up a kannon at a 50% discount. My current 500 pt army list doesn’t include this kannon, but I could easily swap out one of the 45 pt kans for the 30 pt kannon and then have 15 points left over to play with. The kannon also still needs to be primed, painted and based. Aren’t the little grots cute?

My first battle!

500pt Orks vs. Chaos Marines game that me and Barry Lutz played:

Here’s Barry’s army hiding in the woods. To be specific, she has two units of nurgled-up chaos marines (one with a lieutenant) and a space marines dreadnaught which is standing in for a chaos marine dreadnaught.

And here’s my army ready to go. In the back is a large unit of slugga boyz and in front of them is a smaller unit of shoota boyz (mostly represented by 2nd edition orks and grots supplied by cawshis). The two big grey dudes are standing in for killa kans and the black dude in front is standing in for a warboss in mega armour.

Tactical error number one was putting my warboss out front. Apparently Barry’s Dreadnaught was in range to fire it’s multi-melta, against which the warboss’ mega armour was useless. So with the very first die roll of the game, barry melted my 106pt warboss. Over the next two turns, I fired many rockets at the dreadnaught but never rolled high enough to penetrate it’s armour.

But things got better for my orks! They shot up one of the marine units and then charged in for the assault with 56(!) close combat attacks (which means I got to roll 56 dice at once, which was awesome). Here’s the battlefield just before the charge. The slugga boyz in the bottom left are about to charge the two space marines remaining in the unit ahead of them. At the same time, my remaining killa kan (the other had been melted by now) charged the dreadnaught. Again the dreadnaught prevailed. But I didn’t mind because I wiped out a unit of chaos marines! Waaagh!!!

Then came tactical error number two, if you can even call it a tactical error. I would just call it a dumb mistake. After killing the chaos marines, I used my consolidation movement to engage the dreadnaught with my slugga boyz. I could have sworn they had a strength of 4, which would be enough to potentially take down the steel beast. But I realized next round that I was wrong, they had a strength of 3, meaning that, try as they might, their huge choppas couldn’t penetrate the dreadnaught’s 10 armor. This was the beginning of the end for my orks.

On my next turn my shootas charged barry’s other marine unit and were defeated. Then barry moved her unit to surround my orks that had surrounded the dreadnaught. Barry used her marines’ nurgle rot power to make three of my orks drop dead from disease which was crazy. And then she finished me off.

A victory for disease and filth over green-skinned angst. But I still had a lot of fun and learned A LOT about what NOT to do:
1. I shouldn’t have put my warboss out front.
2. I shouldn’t have spent so much energy attacking the dreadnaught. Although it killed my warboss, it was not the biggest threat on the field.
3. I definitely shouldn’t have engaged the dreadnaught with units that couldn’t hurt it. That was just a dumb oversight on my part.