Issues of Etiquette at the Shooting Gallery

What a complex, intricate and eternally surprising thing life is shown to be by the unexpected questions of correct behaviour thrown up even by a fairly routine wargame. This is of course another way of saying I was the recipient of yet another grand spanking in the traditional style.

Interestingly, though, it seems like my first mistake occurred days before the game even started. I arranged this via the club website, at which juncture I casually mentioned not just the points value of the game but also the army I’d be taking (the Deathwing, again).

I was a little crestfallen when I turned up for the game and found my opponent cheerfully unpacking squad after squad of Pathfinders and Fire Dragons, along with an Avatar and a Wraithlord – lots and lots of low AP guns and close-combat attacks: basically this was a list custom-built to pop Terminators. ‘Well, you told me you were bringing Deathwing,’ he explained cheerfully.

Hmmm. I must confess I haven’t been above doing vaguely similar things in the past – most notably, I suppose, buying a Whirlwind and some assault marines to take on an all-scout Marine army that had given me some trouble – but I still wonder about the sportsmanship of this kind of thing. Obviously you’re going to play to win and take advantage of every edge that you have, but it seems to me that custom-building to take on a specific opponent is only really justifiable if both sides have the chance to do it. Did I know I’d be facing Eldar? No. I had been promised ‘Eldar, or possibly Space Wolves, or possibly both’, which gave me considerably less to work with than my opponent had. Hum.

Anyway, we proceeded to the game, which involved an attempt to grab a portable objective and hang onto it until the game’s end (the objective is one of those mystical game-balancey items that can survive a battle cannon going off on it without a scratch but irretrievably shatters if you load it into a transport plane), played along the length of the table.

I can’t ever recall going into a game with such a conviction I was going to get crushed, but going second against such an imposing Eldar gunline, that was how I felt. Vague thoughts along the lines of ‘why are we even bothering?’ flitted through my brain. I was so rattled I forgot my usual ‘never Deep Strike the Deathwing’ mantra and put three squads into reserve, planning to drop the Master and the Librarian on the objective and try to cheekily zap the Eldar Avatar with Psychic Shriek and two assault cannons, hopefully allowing me to get stuck into the Eldar up close on the following turn.

(I expect this was a mistake and I should have deployed all five squads  at the front of my zone, waddled them all foward and tried to assault the nearest target no matter what. I suspect this may have meant the game lasted three turns rather than five, but I think I would have taken more of a chunk out of the Eldar. We shall never know.)

Anyway, the massed Eldar fire killed six of the ten Consecrators on the table, then I got my first turn. The Librarian’s squad teleported in on top of the objective, passed their terrain test for partly being in a crater and I breathed a sigh of relief. I popped the Master down a little way away and my relief dissipated rapidly as they scattered on top of the Librarian’s squad. They were not atomised, which I suppose is something to be grateful for, but they ended up back on my table edge facing a long slog up to the bloodbath which was shaping up in the centre.

The attempt to Psychic Shriek the Avatar backfired and took a wound off the Librarian, the sole assault cannon in range missed all its shots, and that was it from me. What followed was essentially a game of whack-a-mole for the Eldar, with Consecrator units either lumbering or teleporting into view only to be gunned down by snipers and melta-guns or flattened by monstrous creatures. At point I managed to smash a Wave Serpent in an assault, but then the surviving passengers clambered out and slagged the Terminators responsible. I was able to assault the other Fire Dragon squad, but only after they’d fried the Master, and it took three Terminators three turns to kill three Fire Dragons, which is hardly an optimal performance. I was wiped out in five turns, accounting for six Fire Dragons, one Guardian, and a Wave Serpent in the process.

So I knew I was onto a loser from very early on: this was basically just dice-rolling practice for my opponent, who still appeared to be enjoying it to a degree I found slightly baffling. I mean, I like the occasional big win as much as anyone, but this was in a very real sense not an actual contest. And so I found myself wondering at what point it would be acceptable to concede – if ‘the moment at which I realised I couldn’t win’ qualified, I would have conceded at the point I failed to seize the initiative, but this could be seen as unsporting, I suspect. I suppose there was a point at which it became mathematically impossible for me to win, which would have the logical time, but the nature of the scenario made this very fiddly to keep track of.

And long-term readers may recall my concern about poor behaviour when being handed a spanking: it’s just a game, after all, and there’s no call for being snide and grumpy (especially when losing is nearly always at least partly your own fault). So I abandoned the challenge of trying to win the game almost at once and reluctantly accepted the challenge of being wiped out with good grace. This was such a one-sided encounter it was difficult to summon up the enthusiasm to even attempt to play competitively, but I did my best in this department rather than start walking Terminators off the board or hiding them in corners. There wasn’t really a competitive option available, so I just concentrated on looking cheerful and not sounding too pissed off.

In the end I think I just about managed to pull off a draw in this social meta-game (the game that no-one ever wants to play, let’s face it), and quite possibly the moral victory when it came to being up-front with my opponent. To be fair to him the Eldar guy, noting we had rattled through five turns of 40K in not much more than an hour (my goes had been pretty short, obviously) offered me another game – but I had to get away, and couldn’t really forsee a different result between these two armies. Hey ho. There was another Deathwing army getting panelled on the next table by Orks (a less purist Deathwing army, too), which was some consolation, and the guy playing that one offered me a game in a fortnight’s time, which I happily accepted.

Naturally, I did not tell him what army I’ll be bringing.