First game with the Wood Elves

I played my first game with the wood elves last night, a 2k pitched battle against their arch enemies, the beastmen. I was a bit apprehensive about the army, it looked very small and weak compared to the big blocks of muscle and horn across the table. Things started quite badly with some abysmal dice in the shooting phase - 30 Glade Guard shots and just 4 chaos hounds dead. The next turn was similarly disappointing, my dice really letting me down - even the Hail of Doom Arrow failed to cause a single wound. I was starting to think that my pre-game thoughts on the power of shooting (or lack of) would turn out to be true.

By turn 3 combat had started. Dryads were torn apart by minotaurs, but the doombull failed to make an impact on the wardancers thanks to their shadows coil dance. A second wardancer troupe led by a noble leapt in and sliced the mighty beast to pieces. The wardancers went on to rashly charge a full unit of bestigors in the front, thinking it was suicide, but caused massive casualties and eventually defeated them, with a little help from some dryads.

Towards the end of the game the one surviving unit of glade guard finally found their aim, felling a giant and a tuskgor chariot. There were quite a few dead elves around, but even more beasts. A solid victory for the wood elves in their first outing.

Looking back at the game, I played the elves reasonably well but was far too cautious. My treeman ancient spent most of the game hiding in a wood, worried about bestigor axes. The wild riders defeated a tuskgor chariot but then were defeated by a unit of bestigor, even though they managed to get the flank charge. I learned some lessons for my next game, was pleased with their debut but doubt they would have such an easy ride next time.

I'm still puzzled by the beastmen. The lack of skirmish troops really hurt them in this game, it was reasonably straight forward to neutralise the slow blocks, deal with the fast troops, then turn back to pick off the infantry units at leisure. Maybe I'm missing something, but they still look poor at the moment.