Astronomi-con 2013 – Day 2

Day 2 started at 8:45am, after having gone to bed at 2:30am. Sleep is for the weak on tournament time? Old age forces me to try to sleep more at these events…>.<

Game four was against a newcomer to Vancouver, Findlay Craig. He’s been a regular around Facebook for a few weeks now, so I was super stoked to finally get a chance to meet him and play against him! I think I had a couple “the face” moments in this game, as my plan once again crumbled to pieces on turn 4 from a couple bad dice rolls. I redeemed it near the end (I hope!), although he won pretty well – I think I may have gotten 1 point to his 6-7.

Game five, I ended up playing Linton Harrison – another person I was glad to play since I wanted to tell him what a great job he’d done on his snow and forest table. These tables were fairly basic “technique wise”, but because of a strong use of layered elements, excellent colour choice and colour placement, they really popped when you looked at them, and looked wildly different (and better!) than the average tabletop terrain. I voted his snow terrain for best, since it really caught my eye.

Unfortunately, my game with Linton wasn’t my favourite. He said that he was just getting over an illness, which was unfortunate, as he was a little gruff and difficult to talk to. That’s usually ok – people come in all sizes, shapes and personalities, and I wouldn’t judge someone (on paper) for being a little quieter. The problem was, that he was also a very slow player. We were at the end of turn 3 when time was called. The further problem, was that after taking a rather long time with his turn 3, he walked away from the table without saying anything to me. I was already frustrated because we were down to 10 minutes, and then he left. Compounding this problem…we had forgotten a combat in the middle of the table! I started moving my models, not wanting to contribute to the timing problem, and when he got back we did the combat and moved on, but I wasn’t happy, and I’m sorry to say that I rated him down on sportsmanship because of this series of events. Linton, if you end up reading this – I’d love a re-match with a less scheduled time window, and less illness, to clear things up!

The last straw of this game happened near the end of my turn 3. One of the tournament organizers was walking around the room telling people whether to play another turn or not. I’m not certain his criteria, but he told us to play another turn. This was really bad, and I’ve given feedback already that I don’t believe they should do this. I had played my turn assuming that neither myself nor my opponent would get a turn 4, and suddenly at the end of my turn everything changes. Linton was kind enough to let me pull back one of my units, and he mentally went up in sportsmanship a point because of it. His turn 4 was better than my turn 4, as he got a few important pieces into place that I wouldn’t be able to dislodge. My dakkajet was the MVP of this match though, removing an entire termagaunt unit in one shooting phase, allowing me to claim an extra objective. He won this one 5-6.

I was really frustrated after game 5. I had been (unintentionally) slow-played twice this weekend, had my troops run constantly away from objectives and combats they weren’t losing that badly, my expectations had been up and then thrashed suddenly down. I was in a bad mood. Which is why I was incredibly happy about my opponent in game six.

Ryan McGechaen is a staple at Astronomi-con, but I’d never played him before. his Tau look great on the table (apparently he’s selling them), and it turns out that he’s a really friendly, funny and upbeat opponent. We were playing on Jason Dyer’s absolutely stunning “Dyer Straits” trench table, a table that I’d snuck in a midnight game with Jer Newell several years ago. We rolled for attacker/defender and I choose attacker figuring that either way, I was coming to him. In hindsight, this was possibly a bad idea, but I’m not certain it would have changed much.

We set up our lines. My trukks in a straight line in the open since that side of the table has only a few scattered craters for hiding in. And Ryan with his little hoofies in their trenches. And…he Seized the Initiative. I’m sure that I don’t have to go into gory detail about what happens when a Tau player gets first turn against an Ork player when the Ork player has nothing to hide behind, but it was ugly. Turn 2 I still thought I might have a game, but by turn 3 I was fighting to just reduce his number of points. On turn 4, I had no game left and by turn 5 I was thinking about how to ensure that he got full points on this scenario. We went on for a turn 6 and 7, the only game that I played that had actually gotten to the end, and I had an Immobilized and Weaponless Battlewagon as my only remaining unit. I’ve never seen StI be quite so devastating, but I feel that on this table in particular, it’s very very bad. We finished, him winning 0-14 just because there were only 14 points to get on this scenario. (The TOs tell me that this is a mistake.)

I’ll get to the last little bit…tomorrow. 🙂