Tyranids vs Space Marines

My youngest son wanted to play a game of "humans against aliens", but "the aliens shouldn't look like humans, they should be really alien".  I thought Tyranids would fit the description. Several rulesets came to mind for the game but in the end I settled for 40K (5th ed.) and resurrected an old army list consisting of hormagaunts, genestealers and a Tyranid prime as HQ (represented by a Lictor model). No ranged weapons just a mass of sharp claws and teeth.

My son never played 40K before so I thought I would let him play with a Space Marines force consisting of a few squads of marines, a terminator squad, a heavy weapons squad and a dreadnought.

The Game:

A shuttle has crashed in a remote region of a newly discovered planet. A space marine force is sent to investigate the site and look for survivors. Little do they know that the area is infested with Tyranids who have already consumed all passengers of the shuttle. When the marines arrive at the crash site, the lurking Tyranids spring their trap.

Here they come!

The wave of Tyranids surges towards the marines into a hail of fire. Marine missile launchers blast holes in the swarm but they keep coming.

Captain Usophagus, the leader of the marines, fires several shots, but despite his supreme ballistic skill he fails to bring down a single Tyranid.

The first wave of Tyranids now smashes into the marine lines and close combat ensues.

Classic 40K: 21 hits out of 33 attacks;

5 actual wounds out of 21 hits;

and the marines wipe out the attackers in subsequent close combat rounds....

When the genestealers attacked the dreadnought I found out that they couldn't actually harm it, so we made a quick house rule: a penetrating hit would be scored in case of a 6 (to hit) and a subsequent 6 (to wound).

The genestealers couldn't beat these odds and where being crushed by the dreadnought so the Tyranid boss joined the fight.

And brought down the dreadnought!

This was too much for captain Usophagus. While his men where steadily pounding the Tyranid horde into goo around him, he charged towards the Tyranid boss screaming: "I didn't bring this ridiculously oversized power sword all this way for nothing. Make a hole and make it wide!".

 

His men backed away and the captain plowed into the giant beast, bringing it down while only sustaining minor injuries himself.

An enjoyable game for both of us. I don't play 40K that often so had to consult the rule book a lot. Probably missed some special rules, but who cares: we had fun.