40k is a chess game. It's all about movement. I've heard some top players say dice don't matter...but that's bull. Dice do matter when a failed charge means you lose the game. I won a game awhile back because I command rerolled a save and got a 5 on my daemonettes that scored me a ton of points. As I recall that single daemonettes was worth like 15 points based on where she was and the action her squad was doing. Dice win games. However, movement is much more impactful. Movement denys points. Movement scores points. Movement determines what lives and die. Mastery of the movement phase is essential to winning. I played, 'Git gud' the other day. He beat me with his World Eaters on Tabletop Simulator. (I'll play you too, if anyone wants some games) He did a great job of setting traps that I was forced to deal with. He moved trash units, Jahkals, onto two objectives in the center of the board. It could have shot them off the table BUT Jahkals make an objective they die on sticky so I had to touch the objective to take it and the moment I did, it was full send on his 20 man beserker squad staged behind a wall that I couldn't get an angle to shoot. He also sent in two hell brutes that ping pinged back and forth killing basically my whole army. I knew it was going to happen and despite knowing that I made some choices to see how it was going to play out. I didn't fully understand how stupid his hell brute rules were. They're similar to how dumb Murder Fang is in Space Wolves, but they can take three of them, with 6" consolidate movement. So I took the bait, intentionally and hoped that my army would get enough 4++ invuln saves to survive the first onslaught. Spoiler: They didn't but I learned a ton about playing as melee army. Then, the next day, I put together a new list of Slaanesh demons and beat the new BS Ultra Marines over powered Victrix squad list. I fought this guy with a list of 30 daemonettes, they hit hard but are not hard to destroy. He had two tanks in his list, which I had no answer for other than move blocking them.

I fought the Ultra Marines 3x recently and all of the lists were similar. First two games, I lost with Thousand Sons. I was able to get the win today though with Slaanesh, legions of excess. The Victrix get hit hard by the Chariots!

They say that this game is won in the movement phase. I often think of what can I destroy that is in my way but really the question is how can I out manouvere my opponent so I am in their way of have more OC on an objective than they do. I fought knights the other day with white scars. White scars are fast and mobile but so are knights! Knights aren't easy to hide and just rely on a massive amount of firepower to remove the objective threats, meanwhile, white scars are fast and not too durable. Take a few knights out, and they're cooked. Stand in their way or where they prefer to move, not just in their way, because they can move over you sometimes and they can't score. White scars can have a flat 6" reactive move when something moves within 9" The other day fighting chaos knights in a game winning play, I reactive moved a squad of intercessors behind a wall. He then shot and killed Khorsarro Khan and then realized he couldn't charge my intercessors to take the point because they were too far away and behind a wall. That one movement denied him 10 points for scorched earth in my deployment zone. It wasn't crazy fire power. It wasn't a powerful unit. It was a weak unit with a 6" move who couldn't take a knight down if it fought the whole game!

You ever feel like ya suck at this game, no matter how many games you play? I currently have over 300 games under my belt and occasionally feel like I get a game in that I do well at but most the time, I'm just struggling on the back foot. Josiah Cook once told me to chose three objectives that you plan to hold the whole game and look for ways to deny your opponent scoring their points. I just watched a whole video on YouTube about this concept too. The guy on YouTube said to focus on primary missions and do secondaries when they're convenient. 🤯 Most rounds of we hold two primary objectives we will get 40 points total, so if we can deny our opponent one round of points from their two objectives, we are way more likely to win and force our opponents into a position where they have to take risks to score or stay behind the rest of the game. I played in a similar way into my Votann (newbie) friend the other day. Denied his movement the first two rounds with some obnoxious movement shenanigans on my part. This is why jail lists are so powerful. Infiltrate unit denying scouting keeps units in their deployment zone. Move block or position in a way that makes charges damn near impossible or at least unlikely, to keep your opponent off the objective or away from the point far enough that consolidate can't happen. Save those command points for an overwatch that will deny a secondary. Tactical secondaries can be somewhat predictable based on whats left in the deck. So position in a way that gives you as much primary control as possible, then worry about secondaries. One thing the video I watched pointed out is if you can deny your opponent primary or you can score a secondary weigh the point value of each. So if you can walk a 2 OC unit into an objective and deny primary scoring for your opponent, which is typically 5 points, then scoring establish locus for 2 or 3 p points in the center is a bad choice, make sense? This added a lot of clarity for me and hope it helps you too.

I've been thinking about my last several games, some where I was beat, some where I won. The main difference, was not who killed what unless it was a specific important unit, doing something in the moment, like taking out a sabotage unit. The main factor that won games was move blocking which also controlled either my own movement or my opponents movement. So I was thinking it would be fun to hop on a video call this week and share some stuff on TTS. Let me know if you'd be down? 👇