Played my game with Michael today.  We played at a newer game store near his house Gameshire.  It’s got some real nice tables and is well lit and clean.  Seems like a friendly place to play.  We ended up rolling mission 5, Elrdad’s Will and Hammer and Anvil deployment.  He took first turn and hid most of his army.  He was playing his  Tyranids and didn’t have the tools to really take care of all of my skimmers.  He really struggled to do much of anything the first few turns of the game, as he was scared to run his little bugs out into my fire lanes.  I managed to kill off a lot of his stuff by the end, leaving only a couple Genestealers, a single Hormogaunt and a couple Hive Guard at the end of turn 5.  He did bring down two of my Wave Serpents, the Nightspinner, the Rangers, a squad of Dire Avengers and all but one Wraithguard (who would have died had we opted to continue on).

The stand out units of the game were definitely the Wave Serpents.  Loading them out with Scatter Lasers and Shuriken Cannon is just disgusting the amount of firepower they put out.  I managed to roll two 6’s for finding out how many shots the Serpent Shield would have and just managed to tear units apart, I think it’s probably the best transport in the game with how survivable, fast, and damaging it is.  It’s kind of sad that it vastly overshoots the Falcon and doesn’t take up a slot being a dedicated transport.  The jetbikes were also awesome, but only because they were able to turbo boost across the table and take his objective.  I liked the Dire Avengers over the Guardians as I found that extra 6″ and the 4+ armor save really helped to keep them alive.  The Wraithguard with D-Sythes were also very nasty, instant killing a Mawloc, though they were brought down by Genestealers, but required a multi-assault were one unit was all but wiped out on over-watch so the second could get into close combat.

It was fun to play, but I did feel a little bad for the Tyranids, as they are really showing their age/bad codex writing.  It doesn’t help that Michael doesn’t like Tervigon’s which seem to be the real useful unit in codex.