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Armada Prime 2020 – Redmond, WA

Posted on February 23, 2020

The Prime in Redmond Washington was the other Prime close enough to consider driving to. Spokane was a little far for a day trip, Redmond is just a long day of driving.

I picked up fellow Vancouver Armadaites Duke and Matt starting at 7:30am and we drove 3:15 hours down the way to barely make it in time for an 11am event start time. I don’t love cutting it that close.

I pulled out the brand new Starhawk that I had opened up on the drive down and plugged it into my lovely display tray. Many ooohs and aaahhs were had. Even though Armada doesn’t have a good hobby culture, Star Wars nerds enjoy Star Wars swag.

My Fleet

Z7 Starhawk 1/torp/biggs (79/397/400)

Starhawk-class Mk.I (140 + 51: 191)
+ Kyrsta Agate (20)
+ Expert Shield Tech (5)
+ Walex Blissex (5)
+ Leading Shots (4)
+ Linked Turbolaser Towers (7)
+ Unity (10)
MC30c Torpedo Frigate (63 + 19: 82)
+ Lando Calrissian (4)
+ Ordnance Experts (4)
+ External Racks (3)
+ Admonition (8)
GR-75 Medium Transports (18 + 5: 23)
+ Leia Organa (3)
+ Comms Net (2)
GR-75 Medium Transports (18 + 4: 22)
+ Wedge Antilles (4)
Biggs Darklighter (19)
Jan Ors (19)
VCX-100 Freighter (15)
2 x YT-1300 (2 x 13)
Advanced Gunnery
Infested Fields
Capture the VIP

I’ve been iterating on a Starhawk list for a while, and this was the final. I’ve tried Mk. II, I’ve tried the Scout Frigate, I’ve tried a couple different squad balls, I had the tractor beams at one point, and completely different objectives.

On Friday afternoon I was agonizing over my Yellow. Days earlier I had Hyperspace Assault, because Admo is quite nice in there. But play testing against James, he easily choose it, and it lost me some deployment advantage and activations as well and I felt it wasn’t worth it. There are many good choices, but I wanted one I didn’t have to practice, thus Capture the VIP and a VCX. That was my biggest regret about the fleet, although there are many things I’m going to change for the next iteration.

Game 1

15 minutes after arriving, I was matched against Shmitty. Yes, the same Shmitty who is Armada-famous for writing for Steel Strategy. Yes, the same Shmitty who 10-1’d me from 4th to 8th in the Vancouver Prime. Yes, the same Shmitty who made me write this prophetic text to Duke at 6:30am:

While he tabled me last we played, I had no expectations going into this game. I had practiced with this fleet, I knew my plan, I knew what I was going to do. He is an excellent player, but even excellent players have bad days.

He tabled me again.

Set up. We played my Capture the VIP, after I choose to go second.

While I made a number of mistakes in this game, none of which were good, one stands out — I dodged Admo on turn 1. I did a little Z-like forward move out, because it was getting to far ahead of Unity and I wanted them together to give multiple targets his Starhawk could get a shot on. It’s so subtle as to not necessarily be noted as a mistake, but it is why I lost this game. (although I could have lost still, with having not done this).

This ended up putting Admo to far out to keep in the front arc of his Starhawk without putting myself into a double arc, so I put Admo in his side. This seems like a fine choice, until a turn later Admo is like 3mm away from being able to double-arc black-dice his Starhawk.

In hindsight, first turn, I should have just moved straight forward and accepted that he was going to 4-Red dice Admo and taken it on the chin.

That was, I think, the game losing move. But a couple other small things:

While trying to get Admo away at the end, I was worried about running it off the table so I turned in a bit, which brought it to close to his Pelta and gave his Pelta a final shot to table me. That was a really stupid mistake.
He had been ramming my flotilla with the 50-point VIP token, and I knew what he was trying to do, but I changed my game plan to react to this to slowly. I set a Repair dial, to get a Repair token, then next turn do a Repair command to get a hull back 1 turn to slowly.

Between these two things, I think I could have brought it to a 9-2 instead of a 10-1, which would have made a notable difference to my final tournament score (see “Results”, below). The score was 400-48, because I killed 3 YT-2400s. Interestingly, no one got the VIP token, because he killed the GR which dropped the token and then he tabled me, so there was no turn 6 and he didn’t get a chance to get it! He wisely decided to kill Admo and for-go the token.

Both our Starhawks rammed 3 times. It overhangs so much we had to take mine off. His had 4 hull left at the end.

Game 2

After getting spanked down to the bottom of the bracket, I prepared myself to play against my fellow 1-pointers. My opponent was a fellow named Chase who had brought a very minimalistic fleet:

3 ISD-IIs.
All with: Leading Shots, Proximity Mines and Gunnery Teams
Admiral Motti

That is a lot of hull. Apparently he got 10-1’d by an SSD that somehow managed to table him. Wow.

I choose second player and he picked Capture the VIP. I bait-deployed with my GRs and squads, as he only had 3 ships, so I put Admo and Unity in position to flank and make him bump himself. He did ok with Nav commands and managed to bring them around, but I got mostly what I wanted, which was to only take on one at a time.

I tried to flank and rear with Admo because I didn’t think it would be able to survive in his overlapping Gunnery Team front arcs, but this decision led to Admo chasing after speed 3 ISDs as second player, which ultimately left it not doing anything useful.

He tried to put proximity mines all around the VIP token, but because I had the VCX I dodged in to put it somewhere safe and picked it up and ran away with it.

I got one of his ISDs plus the VIP token and he got one of my GRs which ended with 175-24, an 8-3 for me. I felt like I needed a 10 out of both of these games to be get somewhere near 3rd or 4th or 5th pace overall, so while it was nice to win this one, the 8 left me out of any kind of position to achieve the goal I’d set out for.

One ISD down, 2 to…wow, it’s turn 5 and there’s just no way.

Game 3

Last game I got up to the middle of the pack. I was setting up and having social banter with my next opponent when I say something about not being much of “something” around here (I don’t remember what “something” was). I meant around this tournament, but he thought I meant the regional area of Redmond, so he responded “I’m not from around here” and I asked “Where are you from?” and he says “Abbotsford”, and I say “Andrew?”. 😛

He’s a local Vancouver-area player who I’d seen on the forums a bunch. He and I are pretty sure we’ve never met, but Duke says we have!

He’d brought 2 ISDs and an Onager Testbed, so very similar list as my last opponent, but with a longer stick. I choose second player and he picked my Infested Fields. I had learned from my previous opponent and did better with Admo, bringing it to a decent spot and allowing my opponent to shoot at it, in order for me to ExRacks+OE his first ISD. I was happy with that, but I’d managed to turn his fleet into a conga-line (no good for Imperials), so I went down the line and cleared the Onager and then the final ISD. Both the first ISD and Onager I got a lucky last shot that did exactly the right amount of damage to remove it. Efficiency!

At the end of this game I had an epiphany about getting tabled by some of the best players in the world, vs the middle of the pack players. The best players I think have a skill at bringing a sufficient “weight of fire” to a focus. In this game, Andrew was firing 10 damage Onager shots at my SH every turn, and every turn I had enough defense tokens to tank it. Other games, I’ve been chucking tokens left and right trying to stop damage from incoming!

This one finished 460-39 for me, a 10-1, and one that ultimately jumped me to the top of the list of players who had 19 tournament points (which there were a few).

Usually you go to events like this to play people who aren’t local to you, but I’m super glad I played Andrew so we could meet!

Results

There were 24 (25?) players at this event, and I came up 7th with 19 tournament points. Even though it’s a similar placing as my last event, this one felt better because it there were a lot more people playing, which means I had more competition for the spot.

I’m probably misremembering, but I think they started calling 19 points at 14th or so, and I was a little disappointed that I was going to be 13th. Then they went through 7 people who all got 19 points, and because I had such a huge MOV on game 3 I got first among the 19 point players. I got 3rd in the Rebel faction too!

This was my largest Armada event, and the largest event I’ve played in since I stopped playing Warhammer or Malifaux, so that’s pretty fun.

This was a great day of rolling dice and moving plastic space ships!

Other Fleet Stuff

I think I’m going to continue on the Starhawk train for Adepticon. That event is a month away, and while I could try a few different things, I really like the Starhawk and I think I’m pretty close to making it work for me.

Although Admo is a great ship, and has been a great ship for me, I think it doesn’t have a place in this fleet. It’s an excellent first player ship, and I’m vying for second. I got to choose first/second every time (with 397 bid!!) in this tournament, but Admo could have helped ensure I get given 2nd, but I think there are better ways for me to spend those points.

The Biggs+1300 ball was pretty effective, but as I only played 4 YT-2400s across all games all day, it’s hard to judge it. Several people who did very well with the Starhawk played with 2400s, so I think I’m going to head in that direction instead.

This lets me save points on Wedge as well. Wedge is a great Officer, but I don’t think I used him as well as I could have. I actually forgot him in my Shmitty game, which then ended up with him overlapping my 1300s which gave them way more movement than they’d have had with Wedge. 🙂

Capture the VIP was the right choice at the time, but is a lame objective that I think I can do better than. That let’s me get rid of the VCX as well.

I’ve got thoughts on some fleet changes!

Tournaments

Armada Prime 2020 – Vancouver

Posted on January 19, 2020

Summary

This starts a little personal, but I promise it’ll even out, and then we’ll get to battle reports!

I had a fantastic day and 3 great games against 3 great opponents, and playing with plastic ships is always the best time, but at about 6pm I had a disappointing shock.

I felt like I’d practiced, I felt like I had a good feeling for playing a fleet that would both hold points and take points and lead to some big wins, and it didn’t at all. My first game, I played the eventual last-place person, which rocketed me into position to play the eventual winner and the eventual second place (who is a previous continental champion and who writes an Armada blog and is internet famous) and between the two of them I got tanked down to 8th out of 10. I felt like 5th was likely, 4th was still possible, but not definitely not 8th.

Shocked, and kind of embarrassed, as several people commented on how well I was doing.

I woke up at 4am the next morning, as one does, to review my performance, I decided that these feelings were misplaced, because this was on me. I decided I wanted to get top ranking, I got the chance I wanted (to be the best, you have to play the best) and I came up wanting, that’s all. This realization was empowering. All that happened at this event was that I got told, in a very direct manner, that I hadn’t done enough work to reach my goals. And if my goal is to earn a ticket to Worlds, then what I’ve learned this weekend is what actions I need to take in order to reach that goal.

Now to take those actions, and get to Redmond.

Games

I’m not going to go into detail of what people brought, largely because I didn’t write it down. I’m hoping it will be in the Prime Data Spreadsheet before long. It isn’t as of this writing.

My Fleet

Assault Frigate Mk.II B
- Admiral Ackbar
- Caitken and Shollan
- Electronic Countermeasures
- Turbolaser Reroute Circuits
MC30 Scout Frigate
- External Racks
- Turbolaser Reroute Circuits
- Admonition
CR90 Corvette A
- Ezra Bridger
- Turbolaser Reroute Circuits
- Jaina’s Light
GR-75 Medium Transports
- Comms Net
Lando Calrissian
Shara Bey
YT-2400
2x VCX-100 Freighter
Gold Squadron
Red: Ion Storm
Yellow: Fire Lanes
Blue: Sensor Net

Fun times: writing that out I just noticed this fleet is not what I had sent the organizer. My fleet builder hadn’t saved my last revision on Wednesday night. >.> Soooo…some minor cheatery. All my opponents thought I played the above fleet (because I thought it was what I was playing), and I played with the above fleet for the entire event, so the only cheatery was in reporting, so hopefully it’s a minor embarrassment instead of an actual problem. <.< (I’ve written to the organizer letting him know.) (and he wrote me back saying all good, it happens).

I came to this fleet because I don’t love Rieekan, Raddus hasn’t worked out for me, and Dodonna has been encouraging me to play black dice fleets that are very glass-cannon and tend to bleed points. I wanted some more durability, and I hadn’t played with Ackbar much.

From there, I examined the Prime data spreadsheet to see what people were playing. I wanted a Scout Frigate, because I think they are cool ships. Initial versions had a Pelta with IF, then Liberator with IF on the CR90, and then gone entirely. I also had fewer squadrons initially, and then a HWK and then it was gone, once I realized that the unspoken goal of my fleet was to subtly encourage my opponents to choose Ion Storm every time. With that knowledge, I dropped the HWK (didn’t need it if I won’t actually play the VCXs for Strategic), and added Gold and the YT.

Then, knowing that Ion Storm was the plan, Ezra joined in so I could move obstacles around to more useful positions for me. As well, the TRCs on all ships was a direct response to expecting Ion Storm all day, because TRCs make less sense on the AF over all.

And although I didn’t do all that well, I’m really happy with how this fleet worked out. I think it heads in a direction that masks a strategic weakness of mine — that I really like throwing my ships into a close melee and taking them off the table. The problem isn’t so much that it’s a bad plan, so much that I’m not good at angling double arcs into making it an effective one. With Ackbar, you just have to get massive side arcs on things, which is much easier for me. I think that future fleet revisions will be trying to make Ackbar work better for me.

Game 1

I randomly drew Alex Yuen, who I’ve played before in Warhammer 40k I believe. He’s a long-time staple of the community, and was even the fellow who gave me the ISD to crash into my Jakku board. He was playing a squad-less Empire fleet with a red/blue ISD, a close-range Harrow VSD, Demo, and a Gozanti.

His bid was 10 to my 9, and he choose first player and picked Sensor Net. I thought this was an odd choice, as I felt like I had enough VCXs in my fleet to prevent anyone picking Fire Lanes or Sensor Net, but no problem, let’s do it!

First turn I squadded my VCXs to pull the tokens closer so I could start gaining tokens. As you can see from the photo above, I deployed to try to circle him with my broadside fleet and I hoped to grab the tokens from him quickly as I could start pinging 4 of them a turn. My hope was also to try to block his ISD with his VSD so I didn’t have to tackle both.

By turn 3 my token plan was mostly working. He ended the game with a single token, but unfortunately I had misplayed a couple of them and only ended with 5. There were a couple times when I had a choice of which token to use, and in my rush I choose the wrong one and then the next ship was out of range of the remaining one. Or the VCX was to far away to bring it back to me.

Mid-game Harrow came in close, and unfortunately for Alex it got focus-fired to death before it could do more than 1 round of shooting. But because of Harrow being able to turn so well, it didn’t block the ISD like I’d hoped. So yeah, had to tackle both. >.>

At one point I bumped one of my ships with my hand while I was measuring movement, and turned a “I’m not sure if this will ram my own ship” into a “yeah, that’s definitely going to ram”, which really hurt. As well at another point I forgot to use an Engineering token on my AF. This turned out ok, as I used it the next turn, but it didn’t have to have gone that well.

Later, the CR90 spun around the back of his fleet and grabbed a token and put the killing blow on the ISD. That was nice, as I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to get it until I had pinged all its shields down and had 5 damage on it from squadrons!

Overall, I feel like I played this game well, but made a couple small mistakes that came from nerves and mainly playing Vassal (where you can’t accidentally bump a model…). It ended 371 to 137 for me, which is a 9-2, an excellent score. And calculating it out now, the missed objective points wouldn’t have gotten it to a 10-1 so that’s nice to know.

Game 2

Bolstered by a good win, but rushed by the event schedule, I moved onto my next game against a now-local Mackenzie. He’s a really solid player, but I don’t think I’ve played him in any local event yet.

He had an ISD, a Corvus Raider and a bunch of bullshit Empire squadrons and that’s it. A bold fleet that did him really well.

He had a bid of 28 points, and hemmed over whether to go first or second and played a guessing game to guess what objectives I’d taken with the fleet I had on the table. He was surprised to hear my red objective was Ion Storm, one he hadn’t played before, so he immediately choose second and that objective, which pleased me as my plan had been to play that one all day.

I set up to broadside behind my obstacle wall, he deployed Corvus and then all his squads and then his ISD. I deployed my GR to the left, trying to bait him to deploy left, but it didn’t work so it was very nearly 20 points completely wasted in this game.

Turn 3 or 4 Mack made this move:

He deliberately flew it off the table. Which I loved. I love when objectives make people make choices they wouldn’t make otherwise. He decided that he was going to lose the Raider anyway, with very little effort on my part, and that letting me ping it for points wasn’t worth it for him.

In that same photo, you can see the AF trying to get away, at the top. A major mistake I made this game was not having enough squadrons to block his bombers from putting a bunch of shots into the side of it, and minutes later it was dead from those same squadrons. This is a weakness of the fleet that I mean to shore up — the VCXs are good at making people play Ion Storm, but very poor at protecting flanks.

I lost this game 128-269, which is only barely an 8-3 for him. I lost all but one of my squads and the AF, but not Admo or the GR, and I got a good number of tokens and only let him have 1-2 tokens.

Game 3

Lastly, after a solid win and an ok loss, I played on the second table against Shmitty, of Steel Strategy fame. I listen to their podcast, so I knew he was coming and I’d fortified myself against getting all fan-boyish.

He was playing a variation on a fleet he’s made a little famous by winning GenCon with it. A Liberty, a CR90, Yavaris, a Pelta, 4 X-Wings, Biggs, Jan Ors and a Y-Wing. He choose first player and choose my Ion Storm.

As you can see, he deployed with his Liberty and CR90 facing towards the edge, which spooked me into forgoing my usual sideways-past-the-rocks plan, and into heading straight forward. I feared that going for the sideways movement would end with me trying to take his Liberty on at the front. My thought was that I could still get a broadside if I turned up.

The GR-75 was used as bait, ineffectively, again. Again, I basically played without it, which was a silly idea. If I do this fleet again, I’m going to stop that.

One good thing about the straight-forward plan was that I found I liked going past the rocks, it felt good to try to stop my opponent from getting close to them by using my ships. 😛 So I’m wondering if a future plan has the fleet doing that more, but not in such a silly way. And then maybe using Ezra to move rocks when I get to far away.

This photo I took after it was relevant. At one point I flew my MC30 forward, expecting that I’d take a bunch of damage but then be able to fly it out and past at speed 3 because his Liberty front arc would get one shot and then fly past me. He used a very interesting maneuver where he hard kinked the tool at the 1, and rammed me at 2, which pushed his ship into a turn that wouldn’t have been legal without the ram. The use of this, was that he did nearly a 90 degree turn at speed 1! Which put his front arc on my 30 and destroyed it.

Ultimately both our fleets met at the same point, just past the rocks and I got a good number of objective tokens, but only killed his CR90 while he tabled me. The game was 89-400 for him, which was a 10-1.

Talking with him afterwards, he thinks I should have gone sideways instead of up, but sped up to meet his Liberty+CR90 past the rocks but still in a broadside. This would have left his squadrons+Pelta a little less useful, or force them to fly hard to meet me, and leave his fleet unable to bring all its power at one point. Instead I did that bad idea to myself. 😛

Conclusion

That’s about it, not much else to say. I’ve got some ideas for how to change the fleet up, while sticking with Ackbar, but I think I’ve got some research on the Prime data to do before I dig in. I’m not sure whether I want to go full Ackbar with a big ship, or to stick with the AF, and there’s a bunch of follow-on effects that will come from that decision.

I also remembered tonight that the Starhawk was my original hope for this tournament, because I was really loving playing it on Vassal. BIG STOMPY SHIP.

Also I need to play more, so I’m going to look into putting my neck out and maybe getting a Vassal game with a non-Duke person. It’s hard because the voice chat annoys my wife, so I try to limit it to once a week. 😛

Thanks for reading, and again huge thanks to James for running it. It takes a lot to sacrifice your time for your community and it it much appreciated!

Tournaments

Wet Coast GT Armada 2019

Posted on April 21, 2019

Someone pointed out that I had gone in a year from learning to play Armada (almost) at WCGT, to running the event there. I’ve wanted to run an event for a while, I had some ideas of things I wanted to try with it, and then The Outer Rimjob Podcast sent me some tournament swag and I’ve been trying to block out the time to arrange it since. WCGT was perfect, as my main stumbling block was having a space to play!

One of the things I wanted to do was to use a solitaire system to make “byes” more interesting. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to do this, which sucked because I had 2 byes today! 🙂

We started at 9:30 and had planned to play 4 games, where usually we start at noon and play 2 games. It was a special occasion and I wanted to mark it with a different format. I love the 2-game format, it fits perfectly with my schedule. But sometimes you just need an all-day event!

Here’s a couple photos from round 1, I didn’t take a lot.

This next photo is the deployment from my first game — I choose Fleet Ambush. I’m not convinced it was the wrong choice, but I got rolled in this game. 🙂

Everyone had a great time, and really enjoyed playing 4 games in a day. We were all surprised that it could be done without killing ourselves! I know from experience playing WHFB/40k that 4 games in a day is a super rough day, but I think being a little flexible about timing, starting a little late or early depending on when folks were around, setting expectations up front (and making sure the schedule is communicated well) and being hard about the game timing worked out really well. Most games ended before the end of the round!

ORJ had advocated for 2 hour rounds with dice down immediately at the end of the 2 hours. I talked with our local community about that, and someone with a lot of experience (who unfortunately didn’t end up making it) suggested that this could be abused by certain lists. We discussed it, and instead decided to go with “after 1:45, no new rounds can be started” and this worked out really well. We started early a couple rounds because people had time, and it just worked.

And then the prize pool! Top left and heading right:

Cards I made
FFG S4 dual-sided Yavaris/Suppressor
(next row) FFG S4 dual-sided Boosted Comms/Slaved Turrets
Outer Rimjob Lando Calrissian
Outer Rimjob Bail Organa
(next row) Outer Rimjob Cymoon
(next row) Outer Rimjob Kuat
FFG S4 Acrylic redirects

The acrylics are weird, because they’ve been printing them on white plastic for the last few seasons and now they’re back in the clear acrylic. I’m happy — the clear looks much much better — but it’s odd that they switched for a short period of time.

You’ll note the first in the list — what I did have time for, was making cards! Here are some photos.

Here are some links to my inspiration:

Front: https://alternativemovieposters.com/amp/rogue-one-star-wars-story-travis-ruiz/

My first inspiration was the movie image of the ISD over Jedha, then I went to Google image search to see what it looked like. While there, I saw this alternative movie poster that really drew me in. I’m not really good at drawing detailed images, but this one had a great mix of geometric shapes that I thought I could use to work from. While working on it, I blurred some of the edges because the strong pixel edges didn’t look great. At some point I added a drop-shadow to one of the things, and I immediately thought of Super Mario World and how it was built of layers of 2 dimensional objects. I also thought of Star Wars Epic Yarns (because I have a child) and felt scenes, which this really reminded me of. Or maybe of like paper art, where one layer is built on top of another. You see where I went. So I tried to texture multiple layers of 2 dimensional objects.

When I was done, I didn’t know what upgrade card it should be. I had originally wanted to make it double sided, with a rare neutral Imperial-box-only and a rare neutral Rebel-box-only card on each side. But when I was done, I didn’t want to draw another thing so then I needed a back, and a upgrade card this image would work with. Duke suggested Hardened Bulkheads, and it fits.

Back: https://imgur.com/gallery/9wowx

I took this and started drawing the outside yellow and the inside symbols in yellow. It looked a little empty and I didn’t want to exactly copy what was there, so I added some gradient lines in Rebel orange. Duke asked if I could do Imperial blue opposite, and I didn’t know there was an Imperial blue so I found it and added those gradient lines. Then the yellow symbols didn’t work, so I changed them to be the same colours as the lines and BOOM, perfect.

I had a bunch of them printed, so I’ll be giving them out to random folks for a while. Hit me up at rythos42 at gmail dot com if you want me to mail you one! (or if you live in Vancouver, come to Ages 3 and Up for an event :))

Tournaments

FoodBowl 2017

Posted on November 6, 2017

FoodBowl 2017! This is a great event for a great cause! 4 player Blood Bowl, 1,250 gold teams and it brings together the two disparate groups of Blood Bowl players in the Vancouver area, so we get to meet some new people. 🙂 Obviously, I brought Skaven which I thought were a good top pick — they have some great speed (since the current event rules nerf elves a bit, possibly the best speed) and great bashiness with the star players.

I sat down at a table with a gentleman I didn’t know, named Kristian, and then two others I did know followed suit – James and Pat. James has a hate on for me after he mercilessly killed my rat ogre in a previous season. You read that right, I don’t understand it either. 😛 Pat is good fellow to sit next to.

This game was characterized by Kristian scoring TD after TD with Skitter-skitter Stab-stab, a special character gutter runner. He scored 3 TDs, which is absolutely ridiculous in a game with 28 players and 3 other people dedicated to ensuring you don’t get to do what you want to do.

Near the end of the game, Pat had a choice between stopping me scoring or stopping Kristian scoring, and he chose to stop K because he knew that K would be vying for a top-TDs-scored prize with a start like his. Because of this I managed to get a TD, bringing me second place in this game! And then because of the final score calculation, I got 10 points (7 for second, 3 for 3 casualties) where Kristian also got 10 (10 for first). 🙂 This was a nice game. 🙂

We went for sushi after. Our game was about an hour over time, and sushi didn’t help.

Here are some photos.

Go forward my ratties!

Lined up again after a TD by SS-SS.

ECLIPSE!!! There was also a goblin fanatic on the table at this point which had been placed in James’ lines. James had maneuvered it away from him, but the fantatic got turned into a goblin as well, allowing the next person to simply move it 6 easy squares back to killing James.

I don’t know what’s going on this photo, but I like showing how crazy the center of the board gets in this game.

Game 2 I sat down at a table next to Rowland, Greg and Pat, all players I play regularly. In hindsight I should have sought out one of the 4 players I never played, but we were rushing a lot after sushi so it wasn’t a great moment of decision making. I also took fewer photos this game.

This was almost a no-score game. There was a sprinkler, making pick-up and throwing and catching harder. The ball was spiked, making pick-up dangerous. There was also a ball clone, meaning there were 3 balls on the table at one point. My valient gutter runner grabbed the ball, dodged tackle zones across the board…only to find he was holding the clone. It was here as well that Greg rolled quad-skulls, which is always something you can count on winning with.

My two ball and chain characters moved up and deftly avoided hitting an enemy who had set up in a perfect cage, and then one ball/chain hit the other. >.>

I spent most of the first half with only 3 players on the pitch, so it was a little boring, but I made do. When the half finally came around I tossed on another 4 and got to play again! I grabbed the ball again, ran it across the field and avoided getting hit a bunch…and found he was holding the wrong ball.

My injury pile.

Moments after the first photo was taken, another model got added to the pile.

Gutter runner cage!

I’d like to say that this story ended with me scoring and winning the game, fans cheering for the Cheddar City Alchemists in their brilliant pink uniforms. Alas, I did not. My ball was across the field. Instead, Rowland dropped a bomb on his ball, knocking it loose and allowing Pat to pick it up and score with it. >.<

I hope I can make time to play this event again next year, because it’s just amazing!

Tournaments

Antares – Wet Coast GT 2017

Posted on July 12, 2017

With the impending homecoming of my daughter, I bravely took to the tournament and hoped she would hold out until I was done rolling dice. 😛

This was an awesome event! Because there were only 3 people signed up, the TO arranged to change the format of the event so it was one large game on Saturday instead of a the 5-6 game tournament format that is common around here. They dropped the price by half and we got one more person to sign up and played a 4 person 2500 point game on a 6×8 table. 10,000 points, 95 dice in the bag. It took us about 8 hours to play, thanks to some exceedingly efficient dice pulling — the puller would draw 2, and then decide whether the first dice would affect the second dice, and if it didn’t, would give the second dice to be played as well. We often had 2-3 people going at once, which really helped speed the game up so we didn’t take all night, and also keep it fast paced and exciting!

Here’s a break, because there are about 40 photos in this post.

Musings & Meta Tournaments Work-in-progress

Blog Comments and Batter Drones

Posted on July 5, 2017

I noticed the other day that comments on old posts were closed, which is not a situation I want to be in — I’d like people to be able to comment on anything, at any time in the past! I just found the setting that was messing with that and turned it off, so hopefully its fixed now!

I needed more batter drones for big games of Antares. One of our guys bought an army online that had some drones done up like this —

It’s the metal spotter drones (of which I have a million extras) and the phalanges from the subverter matrix. Cut off the drone wings, glue on the phalanges, and be very, very patient.

The price of Wet Coast GT this weekend went down by half, because the TO decided to make it a one-day event. Unfortunately, with summer finally here in Vancouver, the event isn’t getting as much love as it should. So if you’re in the area and want to play a big megabattle, and get some swag, come on up to Vancouver (or down to us, or sideways)!

I’m still really hoping I get to go. My brand new daughter is still in the hospital, and isn’t allowed to leave until she shows she can survive outside of a medical environment. She just has to figure out “eating” and she gets to come home (she’s premature). If she does that before this weekend, it’s all hands on deck at home as we struggle to figure out what life looks like in this new world order!

If I do get to WCGT, I’m planning to bring my good camera and I’ll see about getting some quality photos up here next week. I think I also need to replace my phone camera lens, if possible – it’s become very hazy.

Featured Images Tournaments

Blood Bowl – Foodhammer MegaBowl Sunday

Posted on November 28, 2016

MegaBowl was a lot of fun yesterday! There were some definite hi-jinks in play, including Greg leaping a Slann into a boxed off ball, picking up the ball on a 6, throwing it on a 6 and catching it…on a 6. But for me, the highlight of the day was seeing my boards being played on!

I played an Undead roster of:

Count Luthor Von Whatever
Hack Enslash (no ref means Chainsaws were everywhere!)
1 Wight with Guard
4 Ghouls — 2 with Block, 2 with Wrestle
4 Zombies – 1 with Tackle, which I never used.

Here’s a photo of the middle of the board on turn 2 of my first game:

That’s a lot going on in a few squares.

Here’s the setup:

The dugout come out looking great, even though I enlarged the images by a bit, this was my biggest fear!

Every $5 you donated gave you $100,000 in Blood Bowl cards, and you had to give $50,000 to 2 different opponents (out of 3 people). This was a clever scheme to keep the game balanced while encouraging a little bit of screwing over your friends, but in the end it felt a little petty and arbitrary to exclude one person.

My team! I was planning to put a photo of my Luthor proxy/conversion up, but forgot to take a clear photo of him. It’s a Guild Ball Ghast model from the Morticians faction. I think the Guild Ball models are some of the best looking modern models I’ve ever seen, and I’m a little sad that I bought them and never truly got into it. This is the first GB model I’ve ever painted, and it’s not even for the faction I play!

I don’t plan on doing a version 2 of the board right now, but here are a few notes I took from playing on it:

The little “+”s that demarcate the squares, should be white with black drop shadows. This is what FF-Fields does, and it’s specifically so that the squares can be found no matter what the background is. The black “+”s looked fine on the snow background sections, but in the middle with the dirt they were very hard to see properly.
The rules hadn’t been finalized before I finished the board, so I didn’t know that the Line of Scrimmage on this board is straight across the lines of the dugouts, not at the center where I’ve depicted it. I would add another 4 lines to note this.
The rules have an oddity to them whereby you can’t cross the two squares at the very corner of each of the dugouts. I didn’t realize it until I played the game, but this is to prevent people from having an easy out around the corner – it’s much harder to block this passage without this rule. However, the rule is an “exception” to normal movement, and so could be forgotten. I thought to add a little spiked-thing or something, jutting out from the corner of the dugouts into that square, to help remind people they can’t travel that way.

A few rules issues that bugged me, but overall a great day of Blood Bowl!

Musings & Meta Tournaments

Blood Bowl – DeathBowl/MegaBowl/Whatever Board

Posted on November 21, 2016

This one I’ve been keeping under my hat for a while because I didn’t want to ruin the surprise for Clark. I designed a special board for the Foodhammer Blood Bowl event this weekend!

It started by Clark asking if I could modify an existing board, or make a new one, to make it CHOP!/Foodhammer themed. I said maybe and looked at the board he wanted to modify. The image was about 1000×1000 pixels, which when printed at 300dpi would be about 10 inches squared, which is much too small. So you print it at…I dunno, 100 dpi and it becomes 30 inches squared but would look pixellated and likely awful. And I told him I didn’t think I could design a board, just getting the squares right would be next to impossible!

Then something ticked over in my brain — I could write a computer program to generate the squares! I spent an evening and got it writing out a PNG that was a cross of two 26×14 boards overlapping each other. Then I told Clark I’d think about it. 😛

Days later I had built a prototype. I don’t remember the exact steps, but there was a lot of layering in Paint.net. I had an all snow background on the bottom, then the logo and dugouts on top, then words over that and then the squares overlaying it all.

Then came the process of making it cooler. I showed the draft to Clark and he had a great number of suggestions on how to make it better. I cursed, and went to work again. 😛

Here’s a look at the final board:

And the final copy from the printers came this weekend!

Here’s a few things that came out of this:

I learned how to make realistic blood splatter. There is a blood splatter font, and you can use masking and such to make it look pretty gruesome.
This is the only part I “borrowed” from the internet – the dugouts are made from these dungeon tiles. They were almost the right size, and I wanted dungeon dugouts but didn’t want to draw them myself so I resized them. We’ll see if they look good. >.>
I learned how to make an almost realistic snowy background over dirt. You can see the end result above, but before I did that, I made a small prototype to see if I could make it look good:

It’s two different dirt textures with careful erasing, and a large variety of white textures with careful feathering and erasing.

Here are two links, but be warned they are massive images. In order to get a 35 inch square game board to print at 300dpi, you need to have 10748×10748 pixels, which ends up being 252mb.

The final PNG (252mb)
The Paint.net file (365mb). This version has all of the layers separated so you could potentially edit and make your own board from it! Let me know if you do so, I would love to see if anyone else makes their own from it!

This was an exciting experience as it’s the largest thing I’ve ever graphic-designed, and I’m not really a graphic designer but I’m really enjoying drawing all of these gaming aids! I’ll get to play on it this weekend at Foodbowl!

Tournaments

CHOP! for Xilos – Scenario 3 – Exploration

Posted on November 10, 2016

Following quickly on playing scenario 2, I managed to convince a group of people to play the multi-player scenario 3!

Even though we only got through turn 2 over ~2.5 hours, the game went very smoothly. Everyone had a good time, very unlike massive GW games. I think the alternating activation, and quick activations (except for assaults) keep everyone mostly engaged at all times! I was also pretty militant about pulling the next dice – with 5 people and 46 dice in the bag (in turn 1) I needed to keep things moving!

This was also the first game of Antares for one of our most passionate game players. He’s the guy who owns mostly every game played in the club, but unusually he’s also the guy who runs tournaments for most every game played in the club. 😛

I took a ton of photos!

46 dice! We added another Distort dice in turn 2, as per the scenario special rules. We had some odd pulls – in both turns Dan received most of his dice before anyone else, and Clayton received most of his dice after anyone else!

Pretty much at the beginning of turn 1. We had the Freeborn allied with the Ghar, as Clayton’s Freeborn had been paid off by them to help hold Xilos, and also to give the new player an ally. We changed some of the other rules — we gave the non-Ghar players a 15″ deployment depth, and had the “Ghar” come on from the table edge on turn 1 since I wanted people playing right away and didn’t imagine we’d get to turn 3. 🙂 We told the “Ghar” players they couldn’t assault on the first turn as well, since assault is pretty brutal and they were pretty close.

I deployed my C3 in the closest corner of the table in the photo, Ryan deployed his Isorians to my left, and Pat deployed his Algoryn opposite me.

My corner of the board quickly became a quagmire, with the Algoryn opposite and some of the Builder Relics between us. Then the Freeborn and Ghar came on the table edge and started shooting things!

This was funny. The Ghar put on their Command Crawler, just the one unit, behind the Isorians battle lines. The Isorians spent both turns trying to make the Crawler go away, but just kept being completely unable to do anything about it. I believe that Ryan is looking forward to Isorians getting some heavier weapons.

The problem on my side didn’t dissipate. I moved forward and tried to “cross the streams” of the Batter shields of my T7 and the Algoryn Avenger? I don’t know what that thing is, all the Algoryn’s look alike. 😛 (a little casual fantasy racism for ya!)

While the Isorians were focused on the Command Crawler, these Ghar suits snuck up behind them and started pounding on them.

Behind my view, the Algoryn had a mag mortar and x-launcher on a hill and were trying to pin these suits to death. After they were removed, the mag mortar pivoted and took part in the middle of the battle a bit more, but 2 turns is hard to do much in. 🙂

I moved Arenal Yu up the hill to use her IMTel Stave to remove the Avenger, but whiffed. I was corrected, in that I thought she had 3 shots at SV3 but she actually has a single shot with D3 hits. Because of this, I didn’t give her a Spotter drone, since I didn’t think a model with 3 shots needed it. It turns out that Spotter drone is just a 10 point mandatory upgrade!

Clayton has been super excited about his Nuhu, calling them the best models in the range! I don’t know if I can agree – I don’t really get behind the “dance party” aspect that he’s loving so much, but they are pretty awesome! Apparently his Nuhu are a pair of Space Germans from Space Berlin who are constantly on the look out for the next EDM dance party. The constant oontz, oontz, oontz from his side of the table is pretty hilarious.

I didn’t mean for these to be comparison shots between the Freeborn M4 and my T7, but here it is! This is the best model in the range! I love the hell out of it, and wish that I could get a T7 and an M4 into a 1000 points (or even 1250 – 1250 is “possible”, but super difficult!). It just looks so cool!! (also, the more I look, the more I think the bottom photo is from a different game…).

Tactics?

If you got this far in reading, I commend you.

The Nuhu’s use is getting more solidified in my mind. I put her into the T7 with 2 Shield Drones, and the T7 had 2 Shield Drones. This is a lot of points in one place so I wanted to protect it well on it’s way up the table. This also helps give the Nuhu a lot more mobility since the T7 can move 10″ over MOD2 and then she can move another 5″ and still get her shots off. Since the Stave is fairly short range, this additional mobility is pretty important. I do regret (as above) not giving her a Spotter drone, but that’s easy enough to fix.

I took my max number of Get Up!s this game (didn’t get to use them), which I will prioritize in future games. Having a unit that you need to not be Down, but be unable to roll a good number for, lost me my last game and it just doesn’t need to happen.

Drop Command are nice with Acc 6 and a medi-drone, but not as nice as I want them to be. Like others, I do with I could take a Drop Squad without needing to take the Command first. The limitation means that there isn’t room (with my current models) for the Squad, which limits those all-important Lances!

I’ve put on order an Algoryn Plasma Cannon I’m going to use as a C3 PC. Because I need more high SV weapons, I added the Nuhu into this list for her SV6. But she’s ~200 points and limits what else I can fit into the list. The PC has SV6 and is a lot less mobile, but is also ~100 points cheaper so I could get my heavy weapon and still be able to fit more mobility into the list. Movement is key in all of the games I’ve played so far, so having those Drop Squads in the list is going to really help out with that!

Fluff?

The Algoryn and C3 have maintained hesitant ties throughout the Xilos initiative, but when actual resources are on the line communication breaks down and the gloves come off. Maybe their fractured alliance can be repaired, but maybe this is the end of their common ground.

You can never tell with any given Freeborn whether they’ll deal with you, or kill you, but this band of space DJs appear to have been heavily bought off by the Ghar Empire and didn’t even ask if there was a counter-offer on the table.

The Isorians have had very little presence on Xilos so far, but showed up just in time to help out their ancient and incompatible enemies, the C3. Arenal believes that their assistance was given only because they were distracted by a Ghar Command Crawler, and they didn’t have time to worry about other things, but I believe the ancient human saying is “any port in a storm”.

The Concord led by Arenal continue to receive a beating at every opportunity given, even simulated opportunities, and there is a good chance that the NuHu will take some time to meditate on the correct forces to send into the next battle. Reinforcements may be necessary. They may also be unavailable.

Tournaments

CHOP for Xilos – Scenario 2 – Counterattack!

Posted on November 9, 2016

I once again failed to get many photos for this game. I played Dylan in his first game against 1000 points of his Boromites! The first Xilos scenario felt complicated with the deployment mini-game (which has me thinking a lot, by the way, about unique deployment methods), but once you got into the game it was fairly straight-forward. This game was straight-forward to start with, making it a decent beginner game.

The forces of Arenal Yu stood resolute against the cold metal bulwark of the Last Tree on Xilos (not actually the last tree, just a symbolic name created by the IMTel to encourage troops to work harder. Ideals are easier to promote than Reality). The hard working men and women of Adama’s work gang had a job to do, to dig a giant hole under the Last Tree, and they weren’t going to let the C3 stand in their way. Unfortunately, the Last Tree was also the site of an in-progress transmat station that the 21st Regional had been ordered to protect and construct. This timing was exceedingly poor in the end, as the coincidental arrival of the Boromite workers put an end to the construction of the transmat station and thus also set back the C3 progress on landing their heavier support on Xilos.

Afterwards, Clark pulled out his Tsan-Ra. I love and hate those elbow spiders! I can’t wait to see someone paint and play with them!

I lost the game by being overwhelmed. I rolled to build the transmat 3 times, rolling a 1, a 2 and a 5, before I lost enough troops to lose the game. I used some of my troops poorly (I failed to Ambush twice while lavamites approached…), and made some poor decisions in army selection (Batter drones from my X-Launchers would actually have been a good idea here, as opposed to the last time I did that). On the other hand, this was the first game I’ve played where I felt like my troops actually had some teeth. Before this, I would get removed quite quickly while merely putting a few pins on a few opposing units. Here I removed a couple units, pushing them back to the table edges.

This was my first game with my new Drop Command as well, but they spent most of the game pinned and down. 🙁

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