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 IÂ did have time for, was making cards! Here are some photos.
Here are some links to my inspiration:
Front:Â 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:Â 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 :))
