Alex's First 11th Edition Warhammer Game Ends With a Wiped Unit, and Now the Tau Hate Makes Sense

My first game of Warhammer 11th edition ended with an entire unit getting wiped off the table, and after watching it happen one failed save at a time, I now understand why people talk about Tau the way they do.

This matters if you have been sitting on the fence about facing Tau in the new edition, because the way this particular sequence played out shows exactly how quickly a unit can go from fine to gone.

Rolling a Wall of 5 Up Saves and Watching It Collapse

The moment centred on a unit that suddenly had to make eight separate saves on a 5 up. As I said going into it, "I've got to make eight five up saves," which is already a tall order when you need most of them to land just to keep the unit on the table.

There was a brief flicker of hope as the dice started to roll, with the reminder that "cuz you might get lucky. You never know." That hope did not last. Save after save failed, and each failure was called out the same way, with a flat and increasingly funny "Next guy's dead" repeated over and over as models were removed.

By the time the laughter died down, the count had gone one more, four times, with the same result each time: "Next guy's dead." It was not a single unlucky roll, it was a whole sequence of them stacking up against the same unit.

The Unit Dies and the Music Says the Rest

Once the dust settled there was no ambiguity about what had happened. "So the unit does die," summing up a squad that had been reduced to nothing over the course of that one save sequence.

The moment was punctuated with a bit of music layered over the aftermath, cueing up with "Hello darkness, my old friend," which said everything about how that part of the game felt without needing more commentary.

Between the eight failed 5 up saves and a unit erased from the table in a first game of the new edition, it is easy to see why this kind of moment has shaped the reputation Tau carries among players.

Has a single string of failed saves ever wiped out one of your units this badly?