Hey there folks, yesterday I participated in a small town tournament at the Giddy Goblin in Hanover, Ontario. Usually, I’m not much for competitive games of any sort, in wargaming I prefer pick up games and fluffy battles over bringing the newest fromage. But, figuring it would give me a much needed kick in the pants to paint up my army, and to help me learn to play even better, I signed up! It was overall a good experience, and I while I do have some constructive feedback to give them, for their first time running a 40k Tournament, they did really well.
All the tables were really well thought out, with lots of LOS-blocking terrain(more on that in a moment!) and were fun to play on, I heard very few complaints.
The ruleset used was ITC 2019 Championship Missions pack. The basic ITC rulings were in play, and most notable of these is that enclosed buildings, which we counted as any with 4 walls, if not a roof, could not be shot into, out of, and blocked LOS completely. This was a good rule, since most of the terrain I supplied to the clubhouse is absolutely riddled with windows, realistic but in 40k terms making them almost useless as cover. On the tables with buildings, this turned out to be super important. Another was that objectives had to placed on a ground floor, and could not be placed in an enclosed building; This was also nice as meant all armies could theoretically get to the objectives, and prevented a melee heavy army from guarding one in a building with little to no consequence.
Then we get to the meat of it; 6 bespoke scenarios from the Championship pack! These were fun to play for the most part, and the random regular deployment meant that each table had a slightly different experience of the same mission. However, the Championship pack had an interesting way of scoring points; You got your objectives from the scenario, the primary ITC objectives, and 15(!) secondary objectives one could score, picking 3 that a player liked. This is where I felt the ruleset failed us; The secondary objectives were, in my opinion, really fun, but having to pick 3 of them from the available 15, tailoring them to your opponent, and keeping track of them slowed game-play significantly. There were easy to forget if you didn’t write them down, and only a couple of us printed a list of them, me included, to reference. That combined with a two hour gameplay window meant that unless the players were really sharp and played extremely fast, most games only got to the second round, and in my case, only 1 game completed a full 2 battle-rounds. There were a couple of newer players learning the ruleset on top of trying to remember the objectives, and in the case of Tau and Guard shooting armies, we spent a vast majority of our time in the shooting phase, rolling buckets of dice, which while fun, took almost 30 minutes a piece to do. Bear in mind that I still had a great time, and this is constructive feedback I will be informing the tournament organizers of, and to their credit they have asked for.
With that out of the way, lets get some pictures in! I did take at least one picture of each of my games going on, but got so caught up in the game I don’t have enough pictures for a play by play, but you’ll get a brief overview in the captions! I took my 2000 point Vostroyan/Aeronautica Imperialis army I have been working on and blogging about in the past few months, and while it was a blast to play, was probably not the best list I could have brought; it had teeth, but a chin like glass and not enough bodies for the grinder. Getting to play with all my aircraft was fun though, so no regrets there!
In the end, I didn’t win the tournament, and to be entirely honest I forgot where I placed; my brain was fried after keeping track of all the awesome stuff from the games I played! But I received an unexpected boon…
In something I didn’t see coming at all, I won the award for best Sportsmanship, the only other prize in contention! I was truly humbled, and honestly, not winning the tournament mattered little to me, but this made me feel like a million dollars. Thanks to everyone who voted for me! The award came with a 15 dollar gift certificate, which I will be using to buy the Astra Militarum Datacards, something I really need, and which will help me remember the crazy amounts of strategems I could use, as I always forget about them. I didn’t go into the tournament expecting anything, so this was a happy surprise!
Unfortunately I didn’t take as many pictures as I would have liked, but the Giddy Goblin has allowed me to use their pictures of the event for this blog, an act of generosity I really appreciate! So without further ado, on to the picture dump! You can click on the picture for the caption containing details of that specific photo!
All in all, I had a great time at my first tournament, and while I can’t see myself playing a bigger tourneys, I am more then willing to play in the Goblins’s local tournaments, as it is with people I know! A neat side-effect of the Tournament was that a few locals who got to see the boards and armies in action were really impressed; This is how you make a community folks! We may have even gotten a new recruit for the clubhouse!
I will be making another post today on hobby stuff, so if you stick around your going to get a twofer today! But for now, Ave Imperator, and happy war-gaming!
Not by Strength, By Guile 