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CRUSADE GAME 5 - TAU VS DEATH GUARD A frank exchange of views. The third game day in our Crusade began with a more interesting set-up, at least! Outflank against @Agnostic Doggo's Death Guard, with me on the defence. Seems fine, right? Tau gunline, plenty of cover, but this was a rough, but enjoyable one. Lost, in the end, but a fine scuffle. Fully surrounded? Not with so many Scout/Infiltrate units! Bit cramped, innit? Shi-ur Monat, my hammerhead, did some damage, but didn't quite manage any kills. The same can be said for my Sunforges, locked in close combat with some plaguemarines for most of the game. We're still playing at a low points cost, which can muddle things, at 750 points it's easy to not really have a good matchup for every model. So it goes. Got some good kills in, though, with the bodyguard of a certain not-quite-a-demon-prince-but-soon getting wiped off the map alongside a number of plague marines and lighter vehicles. Vroom! Yes, the army is largely 30K marines, which is always fun. Less trim to worry about. Not a huge amount to say, really. Didn't get the rolls I needed, but didn't get cleared off the board on turn one, either, so I'm happy.

CRUSADE GAME 4 - TAU VS IMPERIAL GUARD Spending a lot of time in close combat in this Crusade... My next game was a rematch, of sorts. Not for the armies so much as for the two most intimidating hulls currently in the Crusade! Yes, Andrew's Rogal Dorn - now a commander - against my Hammerhead, Shi'ur Monat. Oh, and some other things happened, I guess, but the two big tanks having another shooting match was the main thing. At this range it was practically a knife fight. We played the 'go get blackstone from objectives' mission, which seems fine... When you're not doing 500 point games with maybe one character model per side. Andrew only brought his tank commander, so in the end, this worked out the way most casual games do: Whoever still has models on the table wins. Still, we scuffled over some points as we went, with my Piranha scoring an early Sentinel kill, and his Rough Bikers running down my stealth suits... And getting blasted in overwatch by my Breachers. It was a fun, close game! In the end, while I crippled the Dorn with smart missiles, the railgun shot was saved, and my poor Hammerhead destroyed in kind. A loss, but a fun one.

CRUSADE GAME 2 - TAU VS ELDAR Who could have foreseen this? Immediately after successfully fending off an Imperial tank push, the two order-aligned Xenos factions have, inevitably, fallen to their own squabbling. Game 2 for the Crusade saw 500 points of Tau V Eldar on an alarmingly small board. It's fine, neither of us brought much in the way of close combat, which is more than can be said for the Chaos fight that used the board before us. We're probably going to enlarge our standard board size for the rest of these low-points games. Danger close! James brought his guardians and bikes, I brought more infantry and my battlesuit commander with retinue, and at 500 points those elite units really throw their weight around. This one also ended in a victory for my Tau, but a costly one. It seems my stealthsuits crave death, and are granted it gladly, and my ethereal managed to catch a powersword the moment he was done doing his mid-board objective. Both the battlesuits and strike team took a beating, too, though both squads ended up winning things for me by sheer weight of firepower, and a dogged refusal to die. None of these units should be in close combat. Things to take away from this one: massed pulse pistols can, sometimes, make up for the abysmal Tau punching, and I really, REALLY need to make my ethereal a firewarrior bodyguard if I want him to keep doing that 3DP agenda. Don't worry, I have plans. I'll leave you with some shots of James' delightful Ulthwé force, on what turned out to be their final index game! We'll see how it does with a new set of rules and points costs. A commanding presence. Gotta go fast, again.

CRUSADE INTRODUCTION & GAME 1 Mêlée à Two-V-Two Aaaah, it's been too long! Truly, Crusade is the only way to play modern 40K. 10th may not be perfect - far from it - but for largely casual, theme-focused Crusade games? It's a lot of fun. After ending my last Crusade early - you can find how that all ended over on my WIP Thread Post Here - we all took a break to paint something other than Space Marines and Tyranids (and, in one case, to have a child!) before finally getting our act together in January this year to start something fresh. The line up this time is a little more diverse, which is always a good thing. Man cannot live on Marine-Nid matches alone, after all. Here's what everyone is bringing to the party - which may change, we have a few armies that are being tried out, and may be swapped for other options as the Crusade rolls on. - @Agnostic Doggo - The Treachery of Twilight, a Death Guard warband, currently infantry with some vehicle support. - Andrew - Balhaut 23rd Armoured Recon, Imperial Guard with plenty of vehicles. - Heath - The Blood Masons, World Eaters Warband, who may transform into Emperor's Children once those kits get downunder. - James - Craftworld Ulthwé, Infantry with bikes and more to come. - Kieran - WAAAAAAGH Grot-Snicker, a veritable horde of Grot Tanks. - Your Humble Blogsmith - The Ky'Vash Recon Cadre - Disorganised T'au stuff in camo. We're running Pariah Nexus, though I don't believe any of us are that interested in Blackstone, just after a different set of missions to flail at! We're also starting with more evenly painted forces, too! That extra time between Crusades has paid dividends, and we have a minimum of bare plastic, which I just LOVE to see. GAME 1 - TAU & ELDAR VS IMPERIAL GUARD The Engines of Balhaut. The Guns of Ky'Vash. Game one was lightly derailed by a positive COVID test, so we did a mix of 1v1 and 2v1 games, 500+500 against 1,000. Andrew's Guard was most ready to play at that size, so we started with James and I having a team-up. We won, too, with some casualties. My Hammerhead put in some real work, the first casualty of the game - if not for the Crusade as a whole, because by the time we started playing the 1v1 was in full swing - was the unfortunate Chimera it obliterated. It then proceeded to put holes in tanks, and be weirdly hard to hit until finally exploding on turn 4, having sat on top of a building soaked up the attention of both of Andrew's tanks. Poor bugger wasn't lucky with those hit rolls. It was other wise pretty standard. Rough Bikers taking down my Ghostkeel, James' Windriders taking out the other wing, and all our infantry scuffling over the middle objective. My Firewarriors didn't move all game, they just sat on the home objective and blasted away. Love that Fireblade, though he put in WAY more work in game 2. What really matters is that I got to shoot my railgun. Felt good. Balhaut 23rd Armoured Recon - 1,000 points. Craftworld Ulthwé - 500 points.

2024 - YEAR IN REVIEW KY'VASH RECON CADRE A whole lot of Tau. So, my first Call to Arms was productive! Pictured here are all the Tau I painted in 2024, all but the pathfinders and sniper teams being painted during CtA 2024. That's 1,550 points, and 63 models, including the first tanks I've painted since returning to the hobby in 2020. I'm quite happy with them. While most of these models have shown up on the B&C either elsewhere in my blog or on the CtA, I've pulled out a few that photographed nicely when I got them all out. Shas'El Ay'Va and her Breachers. Tabletop gaming is about infantry. Much about with tanks and walkers if you must - I've done a little - but it always comes back to some poor, doomed idiots with rifles. This army was designed infantry first, with a scheme I wanted to see on Pathfinders and Fire Warriors, which was later adapted for the bigger guns. 20 fire warriors, 10 pathfinders, three characters, and three sniper teams, and I think they look pretty OK. Painting Tau faces is interesting, though I've not entirely sold on doing their eyes in white. Shas'Els Ay'Va and Yr'Anto. Not a lot of conversion in this army. It was more about the scheme, but ultimately, I am a creature of habit, and that habit is kitbashing. It's mostly been kept to these two, and the snipers, at least for now. I have plans for some weird battlesuits some time in the future, but for now it's these 5. The big guns. Battlesuits and tanks. As fun as it would have been to just rattle off endless waves of pulse-rifle infantry I did want to try out something new. Shas'O Vioraan with his nifty little drone shield, and all the magnets I could find to future-proof these idiots for when they bring back points costs. Wahey. That Hammerhead was fun, too, and put in some WORK in the first game of our 2025 Crusade, of which I'll be posting soon. The camo pattern isn't QUITE as effective on the suits, but it works OK. I do like how the yellow pops on the missile racks and other weapons. I'm quite proud of how these all came together, and have already painted a pair of new models - tokens, but extra ones - in 2025!

As a new year has started it’s time for another project! My son suggested that we theme our collection around the Eastern Fringe (we already have some Ultramarines and Nids) so the only thing missing was some T’au! The idea is to build 1250pts of each faction before we expand on them. So by the end we’ll have 3 full armies. So this will be the start of the T’au, the intention is for the Cadre to be as mobile as possible plus loads of Auxiliaries. Here’s the start, a Cadre Fireblade: I think I’ll add some snow to the base but apart from that I think he’s (For the Greater) good to go! Thanks for looking!