My son - who talked me into this journey to Birmingham - is visiting and we have been talking a lot of warhammer. Meanwhile its a heatwave here in the UK

So with getting the Aeldari preview yesterday and having seen the stream games we decided to test out a few ideas we have about how 11th will play. This was not going to be a real 11th game - we simply don't know all the rules - but the idea was to test out some thoughts we have had on the table with the information (and some educated guesses) we have.

Its hot. So a few pieces of plywood and a G clamp turned the garden table into a warhammer table. My son cut out templates for the new terrain and off we go. We decided that using the mission they used in the reveal - Death Trap - would be a good enough test. Our best guess is that both our preferred detachments will be Disruption so its roughly the right sort of mission structure for us to practice even if this particular combo will never be an actual 11th mission pairing.

Aeldari (Corsair Coterie & Twilight Flickers)

vs

T'au (Kroot Hunting Pack & Experimental Prototype Cadre)

I will not do lists in detail as really that's not the point and we don't know the points so we used 10th ed for that! My list was similar to my usual but I decided to try out Farsight with some Sunforge as that is a fragile but powerful mech killer. Slightly less actual kroot as a result

Pre-game

We play an infiltrate play and counter-play game. Aeldari then redeploy the 2 units of rangers into safety against being eaten by onrushing kroot

Aeldari win the roll to go first

Minor Aeldari scouting on their right flank toward my natural expansion and they scout onto their natural expansion

Kroot scout up close to the center objective and onto the natural expansion with multiple units of kroot, hounds and riders. The twin lance scout into the pocket behind the main push in the gap left by all the kroot scouting forwards but is well hidden.

Turn 1

Aeldari push up and put a unit of flying corsairs in front of my natural expansion to try to jail me. They do movement trickery to grab and sticky objective the central objective. Shooting is largely ineffective - one Krootox rider dies. Harlequins charge some farstalkers and remove them

Kroot keep pushing up but rather than doing a lot of shooting I do a lot of actions - using the booby trap action on 5 pieces of terrain 2 of which are objectives.

Turns 2 - 3

We play a trading game. My first wave of kroot largely get lifted, my second wave comes forwards with my bigger units in support. Farsight and his crisis rapid ingress and pop Yriel and his unit out of their Falcon then charge one unit of Fire Dragons through a wall and leave only the Exarch. The Aeldari then mob Farsight with Howling Banshees, Harlequins and Yriel. The crisis go down but really compact a lot of Aeldari in one area to do it. Meanwhile elsewhere the Harlequins are beaten back by Krootox riders and the sudden arrival of the Twin Lance pushes back the Aeldari so they really have no way back onto the centre objective. The Twin Lance do their fall-back thing to shield a unit of vespid that deep-strike onto the Aeldari home objective and booby trap it.

Turns 4 - 5

Its late and a nice cold cider calls so we talk these turns out - also its clear at this point that I will nearly max score

The Aeldari clear out their home objective but Rejoin the Hunt kroot keep his backfield unsafe and with hounds and Lone Spears rushing up I can pick off secondaries. The Aeldari still are scoring but having lost their uppy-downy unit to the Twin Lance can't do a jump onto my home objective which frees up my Kroothawk Flock Lone Spear to join the fight and somewhat limits his scoring

T'au win 95 - 83

There were definitely a couple of minor misplays but the overall flow of this was quite as we had discussed. These new missions are going to be very high scoring if you build your list with the tools to score them. Both of us had Sticky Objectives which is very strong in missions where being killed on objectives (not strictly true here but effectively true with the booby traps) earns your opponent VP. I lost 5 on scoring less than max on some secondaries - you need to average 4.5 per secondary and I averaged 4.  My son fell 5 short on primary (purely because he could not copy my uppy-downy trick onto either my home or natural expansion objective) and a little more short on secondaries because I pinned him back a bit towards the end.

As for the mission itself, we know you will never play this one symmetrically but there are still things to learn. Its very easy to max primary if you can afford to spam actions. If you booby trap early that makes the terrain a problem for your opponent as they give up VP should they be killed on that terrain. I am not sure this aspect will be important in a lot of games - you are likely to be capped on primary a lot of times if you have a list suited to the mission.

We finished our ciders as we talked it over waiting for the heat to die down and the game really did reinforce to both of us that the game rules changes are largely QOL stuff each of which individually will not usually swing a game. A game might swing on one of the new rules interactions but also often it will not. But the mission changes are a really big deal and the use of terrain as objectives is a big deal. What is going to decide games will be the missions much more than - for example - the new rules on deep strike or precision. 

Also - that Corsair Coterie ability to sticky objectives then mortal wound anything that rushes onto the objective is really cool and quite effective  against MSU. I can really see why my son thinks that might be good at messing with cheap action monkey builds.