An 8am tournament start comes early when you’re 2 hours ahead of your own timezone…
The continental breakfast in our hotel was sparse, but not terrible. Instant oatmeal, an orange and an overly sugared muffin later I’m good to go. The tea was a horrible proposition, but I solved that problem tomorrow.
This event was my favourite at the con. I had so much fun practicing my games with Patrick, playing against two other people. It didn’t feel painful in the way that normal multi-player games of Fantasy feel.
As well, our fluff, such as it was, was hilarious. I should get Patrick to send me a photo of the ransom letter he scribbled out with a black jiffy that says “Dear lizardmen, we have your slann. We’ll give him back if you fight 3 battles for us. Promise! Love, Ajani”.
Our first game was fun, but not the sort of Warhammer I usually play. It was against a brotherly team of Dwarves and High Elves. One of the brothers was much much more into Warhammer than the other, and he pretty much ran the game for the two of them. They stood back and fired war machines until our stuff was dead. We had a chance part-way through the game to salvage it, but a sequence of failed charge rolls left us high and dry. Not even our savior, the Comet of Cassendora, could help us from the deadly dwarven war machines.
Our second opponents.
Our second game was better, in my opinion, and our opponents had a great theme going on. They played skaven and nurgle warriors and had a few conversions in their army that brought the alliance together – dragon rat ogres, for example. Also, because one of the allies was skaven, they rolled to see what their alliance actually was (suspicious, desperate) and played it up pretty well. These guys got our “Favourite Theme” and “Best Opponent” votes. We won this game due to double dimensional cascade on the second to last turn. Skillhammer!
Our third game was against 2 high elf brothers. One of them was so drunk that he didn’t recognize me the next day. The team rules gave bonus points for having different races in the alliance, so these guys lost a ton of points for having dual high elves.
Here are a selection of the most awesome armies around this tournament.
These guys won some award, but I was pretty tired and I forget which one. They were playing undead and orcs and their fluff was that the orc warboss had died and no one had noticed. “Which way should we go boss?” “urrrrrrrrrr…” “Sounds good, boss.” Their display tray was simple, but very well done. I wouldn’t have really noticed much of it, except that when he picked it up to walk past me, I saw the back of it, which had a cave carved into the back. Love it!
These next guys were playing chaos dwarves and ogres, and their display tray was phenomenal. An idyllic fishing village at the top and a gapping hole and massive door underneath. During the Fantasy Championships, one of the guys had built up a massive 3x2x2 treasure chest with an incredible pirate ship on top of it. (Stupidly, I didn’t get any photos of it. >.<)
This was another of my favourite setups, which is saying a lot since it was Empire and Wood Elves and I think they are both silly armies. 😛 It was a large wood on a hill and the Empire were crossing a bridge in a marching formation. Simple, but fantastic looking.
A few Fire Elementals on one of the Chaos Dwarves lists. A surprising number of Chaos Dwarves at the tournament.
This was simultaneously one of the coolest and silliest (in a bad way) armies there. These guys had spent hours converting a Despicable Me army, which was super fun and looked great. The problem was, that it’s very hard to tell what it was – Chaos Dwarves and Skaven – and it looked to much like a 40k army for my tastes. Lots of industrial piping, big guns, rivets, etc. It was a great conversion and great idea, but it left me with a doubt in my mind when I walked away.
Patrick and I were energized by this tournament, and we spent most of the drive back to Vancouver talking about what we think we should do for next year. More on that when we get to it.
(Apologies to those people who saw these photos early – my tablet Published the article while I was still writing it!)
