League game: Sons of Taurus vs. Dark Angels - Overwatch!

I played a league game with my Sons of Taurus Chaos Marines against Peter's Dark Angels, Relic/Vanguard Strike, 1500pts.  Peter brought Lion's Blade Task Force with full battle company for free pods and razorbacks and a Ravenwing Strike Force.  A bunch of 5-man tactical, assault and devastator squads, chaplain, company master, and for the Ravenwing a librarian on bike, an attack bike and a Dark Talon.  All the Rhinos pictured are Razorbacks with TL heavy bolters.  One of their command benefits is overwatch at full ballistic skill, which could be painful for an army largely built for assault. 

Chaos marines and Minos (aka Huron) infiltrate up.

Takin' it to the streets!

Army moves forward, minotaurs cover the relic.

Pods come down with flamer-toting assault squads and characters.

3rd pod with devastators drops down, devs soon run upstairs.

Marines advance and take aim at the minotaurs.

Minotaurs are reduced to two models, who charge towards one of the combat squads.  Dreads move up, shooty cultists head towards the relic while survivors of the assault cultist squad prepare to charge some marines.  They fail their 3" charge and are very sad.

Devastators pod down behind vindicator and Stun it.

Ravenwing reinforcements arrive and shoot up chaos marines.

Some Dark Angels marines have been cleared away and cultists grab relic.  Chaos marines take out the librarian and attack bike.  Minos wins his challenge easily after being amped up from a 6 on the Perils of the Warp table earlier.  His reward is Shred, which he already has.  The problem of having so many special rules already.  "Independent Character Problems".

Maulerfiend scoots back to tackle the devs, and takes a hull point from an overwatch lascannon on the way in.  They proceed to slap fight for quite a while, with the maulerfiend rolling horribly to-hit.

Another pod of marines in a soon to be unfortunate location.

The Dark Talon fires its rift cannon at the vindicator and generates a vortex, which unfortunately ends up on top of some nearby Dark Angels.

"Oh, is that a hand-held plasma cannon?  We only seem to be able to put them on walkers.  Lovely power coils."  "Oh thank you, we just had it blessed.  More tea?"

The vortex tries to interrupt the tea party, scattering over to the maulerfiend and vindicator, but accomplishing nothing.

Dreadnought tries to charge marines and clear relic, but overwatch plasmagun and krak grenade take it down.

And drop pod shoots the other one in the back with a storm bolter, finishing it off.

"The tea is lovely."  "Thank you.  One krak grenade or two?" "Two please...what?  Wait..." KRAK!  Bad round for walkers.

But all is not lost!  Minos can still clear the relic and I can win on secondaries, first blood and slay the warlord vs. linebreaker.  Three marines should be no problem.

One surviving marine with a BS4 overwatching plasmagun however, may be a problem.  Victory Dark Angels!  Bring that guy into the Inner Circle!

Fun game with some big swings, and some fun vortex moments.  We were hoping that it would scatter onto the relic itself (we decided if that happened the relic would disappear) for an especially cinematic moment, but it was not to be.  Still, we ended up with a few good moments anyways.  The full BS overwatch is a beast, especially against my foot army without dirge casters to bypass it.  Overwatch in general, and especially that plasmagunner, won him the game.  

Sonofsonsoftaurus had come along to hang out and help, and after the game we went to late lunch at Taco Bell, where I encountered insult added to injury:

The fiends.

We had a good turnout, with two other games, Eldar/Imperial Fists and then Eldar/Necrons going on and another father and son who collect and play stopping buy and showing off some figures that were very nicely painted.  Hope they'll be back!  Some pics of the other games below:

Some of Chris' spiffy Necrons, with cool airbrush effects

You down with RP yeah you know me

Thanks to Peter for the game, to sonofsonsoftaurus for the help and some of the pictures, and to everyone else who came out!