I’m going to split these posts into “Games” and “Colour” to keep them from getting overly long. 🙂

I went down to OFCC to play Warhammer Fantasy in Vancouver, WA this weekend with 9 of my CHOP! club members. We drove down last year and had an absolute blast – met a bunch of new people, and they have a team tournament format which I really enjoy. There is only one award given to individuals – Best Joke – every other award is given to a team.

This year my club split into 2 teams – xXx and Boat Anchor. On xXx was Dale, Little Pat, Pete, Scott and myself. Boat Anchor was Jamie, Big Pat, Owen (Pip), Nick Klose and Kas, a fellow I’d only just met this weekend.

Click through photos to see the bigger versions!

Friday

We left at 6:45am on Friday morning. Last year we were stuck in Seattle rush hour traffic for 3 hours and didn’t want to repeat that ever again. We arrived at about 1pm and had to wait around until about 3pm when the rooms became available. At that point, the guys didn’t want to stand in the line so we waited until 4pm to actually line up.

A bunch of folks drove off to pick up some supplies and Little Pat and I hung out in the pool for a bit. It turned out that two members of our very first team match-up the next morning were hanging out in the pool and we had a fun time floating about and talking with them. We joked that 4 nerds standing in the pool talking about Warhammer scared off a pair of young ladies! 😛

Our rooms all had a second door which led out onto a massive shared balcony that looked out over the Columbia river. When the other group got back from their drive, they brought back 3 big bags of fried chicken, some salads and chips to eat together out on the balcony. A few other tournament-goers heard us out on the deck and joined us, and the Chumphammer guys recorded a some semi-drunken interviews that I’m looking forward to listening to, while everyone sat around in the sun.

The gaming hall opened after this and we gathered a few games and set out to play! I had a game of Dreadball with Scott which was a ton of fun – first time with my painted Veer-myn, and boy did they fail to throw a Strike 6 times in a row. Finally managed to roll a single 5 on 2 dice and won the game. 🙂

That night I got about 7 hours of sleep, but was disturbed 5 times by people knocking at the door! Jordan claims that the highlight of his weekend was being greeted at 4am by me in my underwear. 😛

Saturday

Woke up early and Patrick and I went for a 20 minute run to get the day started. Patrick likes to exercise to get the guilt of eating fried chicken off his mind. I think that the mind is a muscle, so if you get your blood flowing you’ll think better. 🙂

Had breakfast and tea at a great little hipster coffee shop called Torque Coffee. It’s close, and it serves get beverages and pastries.

For lunch, Patrick and I walked up to a nearby park where there was a farmers market going on. Tons of cool things to see, but we made a bee-line for the food section. I couldn’t make up my mind between the ribs or the brisket, so the lady made me a brisket sandwich with 2 joints of rib on the side. (And a salad under there somewhere). So good! I also found a guy with the exact same juicer that Miranda and I own, and he juiced me an apple, lemon and japapeno drink – I’m going to do this at home soon! It was blazing hot out, at above 30C.

That night we went to Tommy O’s, a Hawaiian restaurant. I hadn’t had enough meat this day, so I order the kalua pork and brought a quarter of it home for breakfast the next morning. Tasty food!

After dinner we went back to the gaming hall and pulled some more games out. I had originally hoped to play Malifaux this evening, but I pulled out Eclipse and taught 4 people how to play it instead. Finished that around 1pm and went back to the hotel room a little later than I had hoped – I wanted a good sleep to finish the tournament off, but it’s so hard when there is so many awesome things to do!

I didn’t sleep very well this night, at all. Partially because I was so hyped up by the day of gaming, and partially because of a hilarious and horrible story that I will not share here because the internet is forever. I got about 3 hours of sleep, at best.

Sunday

I was woken up at 6:30am, after I’d planned to sleep until 8. Quickly tossed my running gear on and ran across the bridge to Hayden Island in Oregon. I ran up the island a bit, but it didn’t have much interesting to see until the end of my run when I got to a train bridge and finally some beach access.

Lunch was back at the farmers market with the guys. I love that place!

My team knew that we had done extremely well at this tournament – at the end of Saturday we were quite a distance away from second place. Sunday was a different day however, and we played some tough opponents and had some really hard battles for our points. In the end, my team won Best Overall by 98 points, with a total of 800-something! Our fellow CHOP! team named Boat Anchor won Best Sportsman and Best Canadian, with our President Jamie Stockdale winning 4 Favourite Opponent votes – he plans to win 5 next year. 🙂

After a team photo we hopped into the cars and drove north. We stopped at the El Compadre Mexican restaurant on the way back, same as last year. The food is “alright”, but it’s the hats we go for. Next year I hope to remember that I don’t really like the Super Burrito, despite the awesome sounding name!

Zero line-up at the border because it was 12am and Sunday night for a Canadian long weekend!

 

I’ll follow this post up with one for my games!