Time again for the yearly 40k tournament that I look forward to from the time it’s announced until several weeks after it’s over (then I forget about it again for a few months). Get a lot of great people, a great game and some great scenarios together, mix liberally with alcohol and burgers and you have a recipe for a great (almost said terrific) weekend!
I’ll do a small play-by-play after the break, you can skip it if you’re bored easily by long and drawn-out descriptions of board games (and then I rolled a 5 and a 6!), but the first part here should be good.
Aside from the amazing community that comes together for this tournament, the other outstanding part is the scenarios. Astro spoiled me for scenarios from the first time I attended. I’ve always loved jamming on game rules, but…it seems like outside of the Astro organizers, very few people actually want to do this. It leads other tournaments to seem lifeless and limp by comparison. When you play by the basic games in the rulebook, or even some simple modifications on them, you end up with a basic game of “kill the other dude”, a game which I’m not terribly good it.
That game involves tons of study and research amongst 12 (?) armies, with 20 choices each, all with special rules, magic items, wargear, characters that you have to connect together to create the perfect destructive force. I’m not good at that kind of analysis – my brain stops working about 2 pages in. What I am good at – a much more instinct-based form of reasoning, and Astro tends to reward that more. Instead of “kill the other dude”, you play “pick up more boxes than the other dude”, for example. This means you have to think a bit more on the table, instead of front-loading a lot of your thinking, and then applying your choices to how to most efficiently remove your opponents models from the table.
Which, in turn, makes the games much more interesting. For me, at least, because not once in 6 games was I able to out shoot, out melee, or out psychic power my opponent. But 3.5 times I out-maneuvered, and in 5 of the 6 games I felt as though I had meaningful choices to make at every step. That’s a massive change for 40k, in my opinion!
At the end, I came up 2nd in Appearance (painting), 1st in Sportsmanship and 2nd Overall. If I’d known I was a contender for Overall, I would have put more effort into my army list! 😛 Sportsmanship is a really hard thing to win – you have to somehow convince all 6 of your opponents that not only are you a fun-loving guy worth 5 points, but that your army is fun and thematic and worth 5 points, and THEN you have to win more Tournament Points than all the other lucky guys who also convinced their 6 opponents that they and their armies were great. Sportsmanship ties are broken by how well you did at beating people up, the theory being that if you beat up a lot of people and they still loved you, you must be pretty awesome. 🙂 I’ve tied for 1st before, but I’ve never performed so well at the battle part of the tournament to have won that tie-break! Yay me! 🙂
If you want the play-by-play, click the jump. If you don’t, thanks for reading and I’ll have photos of new terrain up soon! (and maybe some photos of the flyer…soooo amazing looking!)
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