I hope you dirty xenos players will forgive my enthusiasm, but I played my first 40k game in months yesterday. My Salamanders took on my friend Tom's Orks, probably our last battle with the old Ork rules. The new book is out in a couple days for the advance orders.

The game was an incredibly fun one, with Tom and I exchanging heavy blows throughout. Tom and I know each other's tactics very well, and often use similar styles of army composition and maneuvers. Needless to say, we do a good job wiping each other out most of the time, with games usually ending in a draw or minor victories.

This time around, we battled right down to the end in a Secure and Control mission, where after six turns his only remaining unit was a 20+ strong mob of Slugga Boys with some Kommandos mobbed up as well, meaning even more Burnas and another Nob with Power Claw in the unit. I had my untouched Devastator squad and my Chaplain's Retinue holding one of the objectives, but that damn Ork mob was close enough to claim two of them.

Luckily Salamanders can prove to be as stubborn as Dwarfs, and I rolled a 4 to extend the game by a turn. My Command Squad stretched out to claim/contest the second objective while remaining within 6" of the other one they were claiming. The Devastators laid down some more heavy firepower and in the end I whittled the Orks down to slightly below 50%, so that they couldn't claim objectives any longer.

In the end, I turned what would have been a minor loss into a massacre (he had 131VP more than I did before turn 7, and in this game you need 126+ to break a tie). I ended up winning by nearly 1200VP when I took away those two objectives in turn 7. It was raging good fun from start to finish, I made one big blunder that left my Termis stranded with nobody within charge range (I killed too many with my covering fire, and he removed the ones closest to the Termis), and they obviously got hammered by the Orks the next turn. After that, it took some extremely careful management of my left flank to avoid being overrun by the ~50 Orks on that side of the table. With covering fire from the Devastators, a single 8-man Tactical Squad was able to destroy the Kommandos, the Ork mob led by the Warboss, and the survivors sacrificed themselves to soften up the big mob holding the objectives. Their good rolls with flamer shots and in combat made a huge difference in turning away the green tide of Orks.

The rematch is planned for the next week or so, but it'll be against a new Codex. Should be interesting to see what I'll be up against, there's some really nasty new units in the Codex but the basic Slugga Boys took a huge hit when they lost their Choppas, Burnas, and Mob-Up rules. That's a radical change in Ork army composition, big footslogging units of combat troops might not be able to form the core of the army anymore.