Warhammer 40K 11th edition: Blood Angels vs Tau battle report

For the first two rounds of my first proper game of Warhammer 40K 11th edition, I was winning. My Blood Angels went first, hit hard and led the Tau 5 to 0 after round one. Then a Riptide took out my Ballistus Dreadnought in one activation, and while I'm not going to pretend one dice roll single-handedly decided it, it felt like that was the moment things shifted. The Tau took over, and I lost 98 to 73. I came away with a clear idea of what matters before your first game, and it isn't what I'd been worried about.

It was 2,000 points a side, Blood Angels against Tau, after months of feeling like I wasn't ready. This is what happened, what I got right, where it went horribly wrong, and why I loved it anyway. It isn't one of those battle reports where I remember every dice roll.

Going into my first 11th edition game, I expected to lose

I'd spent ages rebuilding a secondhand army, trying to learn the rules and seeing people explain things on YouTube that I thought I understood. Then somebody put an actual Tau army opposite me, and most of that information left my body. I think I did all right for a bit, but by around turn three my concentration started packing its bags. I made one particularly horrible mistake, and the Tau began doing what they do best: "killing things from approximately another postcode."

Going in, my biggest worry wasn't losing. I fully expected to lose. My goal was to get through a game and vaguely understand why things were happening, because seeing 40K explained and playing it are two completely different things. When someone online says sustained hits, reroll the wounds, spend a command point here, you nod along. Then it's your turn, you're staring at Dante, and you're thinking you definitely should be doing something right now.

The short version of how a game works: two 2,000 point armies, five rounds, and every round you score victory points, some from your main mission and some from secondary objectives. Most points at the end wins. There are about 17,000 rules underneath all of that, and we dealt with those emotionally as they happened.

My Blood Angels list against Tommy's Tau

My Blood Angels are still very much a work in progress, and most of the army was bought secondhand. Commander Dante led with the Sanguinary Guard, alongside Death Company with jump packs, Bladeguard Veterans, two squads of Assault Intercessors, two more squads with jump packs, a Ballistus Dreadnought, and Scouts holding the back. I was running a Stormraven task force. The simplified version is go very fast, get very angry and hit something, which was roughly the full extent of my tactical planning.

Opposite me was Tommy, playing Tau. He had Shadowsun as his Warlord, plus Farsight, a Coldstar Commander, an Enforcer Commander, two Riptides, a Ghostkeel, Crisis Suits, Stealth Battlesuits and Pathfinders out front. My deeply emotional space vampires were trying to get into combat against what looked like somebody had emptied a Gundam display cabinet and given it all railguns.

We played layout A with five objectives. My primary, Take and Hold, wanted me controlling most of the objectives by the end. His, Purge the Foe, let him score steadily just by doing what Tau do: removing models from a very safe distance. That mattered a lot later. We both got the full 10 point bonus for turning up painted and legal, which was generous considering parts of mine were still gray plastic. I won the roll off and took first turn, so the Blood Angels went first every round. It turns out going first and knowing what to do with that are two very different things.

Round one: the Blood Angels strike first and lead 5 to 0

In round one I came out flying. Using the Stormraven bonuses, two units of Assault Intercessors went into the Pathfinders and the Ghostkeel, and my Jump Pack Intercessors hit the second Pathfinder squad. By the end of my turn, both Pathfinder units were gone and the Ghostkeel was down to three wounds. I picked up five points from Engage on All Fronts and was feeling extremely pleased with myself. Dangerously pleased.

The Tau response was, in effect, that's nice. A flamer Crisis squad completely erased my Jump Pack Intercessors. The Ghostkeel limped back onto my own objective, and Riptide fire thinned what was left of my Assault Intercessors. Tommy reminded me quite quickly that the Tau are happy to let you run towards them, because it saves them finding you.

At the end of round one it was me five, Tommy zero. It was my best round of the entire game, which probably should have worried me more.

Round two: a Riptide removes my Ballistus Dreadnought

I was still feeling good in round two. My Jump Pack Intercessors survived overwatch and wiped out one of his units, and the Death Company charged straight into the flamer squad that had torched my Intercessors, for a bit of revenge. I banked Assassination and Cleanse and genuinely felt like I was still in it.

Then Tommy moved a Riptide into line of sight of my Ballistus Dreadnought. Four overcharged shots, devastating wounds, and the Ballistus was gone in one activation. It had been sitting at the back feeling like a big, dependable part of my army, and then a Gundam looked at it and suddenly I owned slightly less army. I'm not going to pretend that one dice roll single-handedly decided the result, but it felt like that was the moment things shifted.

This is the part I didn't appreciate before playing. One mistake doesn't cost you one unit. It changes the whole board. Something else is exposed, you've lost an objective holder, and another unit has to move somewhere it wasn't supposed to go. It's tactical Jenga, except every time you pull the wrong block a Space Marine dies.

In the same turn, Farsight and Sunforge squads dropped into my backfield, my jump pack Captain went down, and Tommy scored three secondaries in one go. I'd spent two rounds building a nice little lead, and Tommy decided we'd done enough of that.

Round three: Commander Dante finally delivers

Round three started with unfinished business. The three wound Ghostkeel finally went down to my remaining Assault Intercessors, after taking most of my army about half the game to finish. Then Dante did the thing. He charged into the Sunforge suits, a Coldstar Commander and Stealth Suits, and started deleting things.

That was my favorite moment of the game up to then. He'd been an extremely expensive golden man standing in inconvenient places, and suddenly he felt like Commander Dante. When a character you bought does something ridiculous in your name, that model means a little more to you. Lemartes, meanwhile, refused to die, passing feel no pain roll after feel no pain roll, until at one point we both accepted that he was part of the terrain now.

But there was a lot going on: units, objectives, secondaries, command points and things I'd forgotten my army could do. My brain was like Windows XP with 15 programs open. Everything still worked, but you could hear the fan. I stopped thinking two moves ahead. Tommy had the firing lanes, and I stopped dictating the game and started reacting.

Rounds four and five: the Tau close out a 98 to 73 win

By round four there wasn't much Blood Angels left, so we started mathhammering some of the remaining fights instead of rolling everything out. I still scraped together Behind Enemy Lines and No Prisoners and killed his Enforcer Commander. Then Tommy killed Dante. Rude, right after he'd finally done something. The Bladeguard went down too, and a unit of Aggressors that Tommy had loaned me before the game helped finish the job.

My table presence had collapsed by this point, and by round five I didn't have enough left to contest anything. Tommy closed out Center Ground and A Tempting Target and that was that. The final score was Tau 98, Blood Angels 73: 45 to 29 on primary, 43 to 34 on secondaries, and both of us with the full 10 point painted bonus, which was a fairly generous interpretation of the word painted on my end.

Weirdly, the score looked much worse than the game had felt, because I'd been properly in it for two rounds before the wheels came off. Tommy summed it up afterwards: the Blood Angels won the early game, the Tau won the mid game, and board control won the late game. That was exactly how it felt. For two rounds I was thinking, "Hang on, am I actually doing all right here?" And then the Riptides got involved.

What my first Warhammer 40K game taught me: know your army, not more rules

Turn one taught me that going first and being aggressive works, which is good, because run at it was the full extent of the tactical doctrine I'd hoped for. Round two taught me the other half: you can spend ages thinking about charges and objectives, then leave one Dreadnought visible to a Riptide and lose your fire support in about six seconds. If I run this list again, protecting the Ballistus is priority one.

The bigger lesson isn't about the Dreadnought, even though that has bothered me. It's that I don't need to know more rules before the next game. I need to know my army better. Every time I stopped to remember what a unit did, that was another decision made with half a brain. The part I liked most wasn't the rules. It was the decisions: when do I move, what do I expose, do I go for points now or set something up for later. "Not the rulebook, the decisions."

I owe Tommy thanks for putting up with me asking what my own army did for several hours, and for writing up a turn by turn account afterwards so I could dissect it properly. I couldn't have asked for a better first opponent. For a first proper 2,000 point game, I got an early lead, a couple of genuinely brilliant moments, and I finished wanting to play another one straight away. I think I'm going to take that.