tournaments

Patrick and I slept in until 10ish and it was glorious. Dale had gotten up much earlier for a flight around 8am, but ours was at 12:40pm. A few things to take care of, back at the Westin for a bit we got to say goodbye to the Bad Dice guys and head on our way.

Our entire way home Patrick and I spent brainstorming about what we would do for the Fantasy Team tournament next year. When we first left, I hadn’t been convinced that I would come back. It was a lot of effort to get there, and if I added every convention I attended to my yearly schedule, I’d have to vacation time left, so I have to choose carefully. Since our frenzied idea planning, I think that if we can pull it off, it will be amazing. No spoilers here, but there’s a good chance that the modeling and painting of said army will be shown here.

I always leave these events feeling super jazzed about doing more with my hobby. I love building and converting things, I love that I’ve been pushing my painting for the last few years, I love traveling with my buddies and I love meeting and playing games against new and interesting people, I love that I have a gaming club that affords me the ability to organize bigger events and help support others enjoyment in the hobby.

I’m writing this on a plane to Hawai’i, and don’t get me wrong, but I wish I was painting my Dreadball rats, or finishing up the amazing Stegadon conversion I started earlier this year.

Big thanks to the CHOP boys, and in particular Patrick for traveling with me and paying for the hotel when my credit card was defrauded and canceled, walking with a huge heavy box full of booze, and convincing me to go back upstairs and play my damn game.

Thanks for reading everyone!

Went downstairs after saying bye to all of my Blood Bowl opponents and walked into the Fantasy tournament room. It was completely empty of people, except for a small gaggle of organizers playing a game of Guillotine. In stark contrast to the thriving, overflowing room that I’d seen for the few days beforehand. I must have seemed lost, because one of them asked if they could help me, and then directed me towards the main room where the awards ceremony was being held.

One giant event to cover all of the championships didn’t work out well with my group. When I walked in, there was some 40k award being given away and no one around me was paying attention. I couldn’t tell you any of the awards that were given away during the 40 minutes that I sat there because it was a bunch of events that we had no attachment to, we didn’t know the players nor the in-jokes that the MC made, nor any of the awesome things that they had done to win said award. If there was a Fantasy award in the mix somewhere, I couldn’t have told you.

One sweet thing – as I walked in someone pointed at my shirt and said CHOP! which I naturally turned around to. Turns out that I was being hailed by the hosts of the Deployment Zone, a west-coast podcast which I’ve never listened to. (I have ears only for Peter :P)

We hummed and hawed over food and who to eat with for a bit, before starvation and people forced us to go to McDonald’s…second time in 8 hours…

Back at the Westin, some folks were playing board games in a back room that once contained tournaments. I surveyed the game table and noted that there was only a single game on it that I had even heard of. Very, very strange. I play a lot of board games and to have Alien Frontiers be the only one I knew is shocking!

We pulled a random game out and I set about reading the rules when a fellow walked past and asked if he could play, and that he’d played once or twice. His name was Kevin, and he was a joy to speak with. I later described him as the sort of conversationalist that makes you feel good to talk with, and I’m very glad that even after our first game fell apart that he pulled out Pandemic and we found two more people and set about trying to save the world from biological disaster.

There was another table of board games to give away. Partway through the night someone from D6 Generation pulled a game out and gave the folks in the room a task – act out a Colonial Marine. I’ve attached Dale’s rendition for your enjoyment.

Hours go by before another game is given away, and he machine guns a whole slew of theatre-sports based competitions before deciding to raffle the rest. I won a game called Milestones in the raffle, and after having read the rules I think that it is a low-to-medium complexity game that might suit for my household. Looking forward to playing it!

Once again, sleep that night came very quickly after my head hit the pillow.

Felt a lot better this morning, had a decent sleep and no alcohol the day before. Still off by 2 hours, but not bad.

My first game was against another skaven player. He was pretty good, and had a good grasp of certain positional plays that helped him a lot. At one point he had “no way” of scoring a touchdown, but saw a push-surfing method of moving his ball carrier one extra square, and got the kick-off result that moved his guys one more square and pulled it off! Was very exciting to see, even as he pushed a solid win for me into a draw with it. Minutes later he had scored again, and I blame the fact that we were rushing to finish, since I didn’t have enough time to really protect the ballcarrier to create a draw.

After that game, I asked the primary organizer if models were going to be set up in the other room for paint judging, to which he replied that paint judging was only yesterday.

…

He apologized and I said it was ok, but I was crushed.

I went downstairs and stood at the base of the elevator wondering whether I wanted to quit the tournament or not. Randomly ran into Patrick and we went for food and I told him what had happened. After losing 4 games in a row, and then having my dreams broken, I kind of just wanted to do something else instead of losing another 2 games badly. Patrick told me he wanted me to go upstairs and yell CHOP and stand on a chair and win that tournament, but I didn’t have it in me.

I went back upstairs anyway, in the theory that I could still go play some demos during the last game and I could decide if it was worth continuing. My second game was against a Wood Elf player. He was ok at the game, but for the most part my dice continued to fail me. A hitting team that can’t take models off the table is really just a useless team – and I’d even replaced my dice the day before! Towards the end things picked up a bit – my continued perserverance in trying to take the S6 A10 treeman off the board paid off when my Mighty Blow Saurus casualtied him! Followed by no less than 3 skull/double-down rolls in a row for my opponent (who was out of re-rolls at this point) made me the victor of this game.

A win felt good, so I decided to stick with it. Last game was against an orc team, and finally I got to the kind of BB I remember playing – standing around hitting each other until someone won!! It helped that we rolled the rain again, so the ball was hard to pick up.

My opponent picked up the ball and made a standard orc cage. I put some saurus in front of it, put the skinks behind the saurus for block assists and then knocked off and/or stunned most of his models. I think my dice were feeling sorry for me, as at one turn I stunned all 4 of his Black Orcs. I won this game as well.

Lastly, I won the only award that team CHOP brought home from Adepticon — the Salter something award for most touchdowns scored in day 2. It came with a little certificate and my choice of models – I took home John Doe, the Faceless MVP from Dreadball. 🙂

Blood Bowl Impressions
I left that tournament thinking that Blood Bowl is actually not a good game, as modern games go. There are two sides to it. The amazingly tactical, positional side which is tons of fun and is a great game. You have to think hard about where to put your model, how best to support and push your opponents models around, and what risks to take in what order. This is a game worthy of being played by a large community 25 years later.

Then there is the game where if you can’t break armour, ever, you fail. Or when your opponent breaks your armor and kills 5 of you guys, such that you have no models to even try to succeed with. Or when you roll 3 double-skulls in a row and lose 3 full turns. This is a horrific game. When your opponent gets a streaky roll of failures, no one can feel good about that. When (as in my first game) your opponent gets a lucky roll, that allows him to make a deeply positional play that nets him a goal – that’s amazing. But when 2 dice consistently screw your game over, all you have left is “I’m sorry” and to keep playing and keep trying to smile. Blood Bowl is absolutely brutal and it hates you.

I’ll still play it, and I still have a beautiful team of models to use with it, but I think I want to try to squeeze some more of the first game out of Dreadball. It could have within it the same sort of tactical play, but the dice are much less brutal – you have to do some crazy things to lose your turn or fail a non-opposed roll.

James Wappel posted a photo of my skirmisher movement tray on his blog!

*swoon*

After the photography class I had about 3 hours to spend wisely before my glazing class. When I arranged my schedule I was cursing this chunk of unused time, but when it came I was glad to have a few hours to rest. The timezone change, late nights, early mornings and jam packed days had started to beat me down.

I went to find my friends and they were all in the Fantasy room talking. If you follow my blog, you’ll know that I’m a huge fan of James Wappel – he’s directly inspired most of my recent hobby activity and he was playing in the Fantasy tournament. I kept looking over at him, but he had a constant stream of fans around him and I didn’t want to interrupt with my useless fanboyism. (I’m miserably shy around celebrities I admire).

Patrick sees me looking over and says I should go say hello. He uses the words “this is about taking it to far”, grabs a sharpie and tells me to get one of my movement trays (the design for them came from James blog). I waved, James waved and says “I didn’t think I brought my trays with me!” He was happy to autograph my tray, and I’m stoked to have had a small conversation with my hobby-idol!

Peter had ordered 3 of a particular type of deep-dish pizza. Everyone we spoke with said “You know that you can only eat a single slice of that, right?” I had 1 and 3/4 and it was intense. We ended up giving away pizza to anyone who wandered past us. 🙂

After food, everyone slowly wandered off to head to a pub and have some drinks. I had another class, and was absolutely exhausted to boot so I stayed at the con and wandered around a bit.

Another shot of the giant gargant.

This guy is so badass.Want!

The “on display” of this thing is awesome. That’s an ork army rocking out to a concert. The bright thing in the middle is a TV screen showing a music video. They had music playing and were selling CDs. Yeah!!

A Tau and Necron alliance.

After that (actually, during that) I was done. I contemplated going back to the hotel, I was so tired. Instead, I found a couch and slouched down into it. My phone was low on power, but it didn’t matter – I was either going to make it, or I wasn’t and I was bored then and desperately needed something. Every time I looked at the clock it had only moved another minute, this was a damn long hour of waiting!

While slouching I saw these 3 fellows climb onto another couch, and then onto each other and do a triple-layer piggy-back.

Somehow I made it to class.

This is a photo of one of the tournament rooms, the larger one that had the 40k team tournament in it all weekend long. Add another room about 4/5ths of the size for Fantasy, another two for Warmahordes and Malifaux, a couple rooms upstairs for Blood Bowl and some of the hobby seminars, a room full of every vendor you can reasonably imagine, and a random amount of people wandering and demoing games in the halls and you have AdeptiCon. Not nearly as large as PAX, but certainly much larger than any tournament I’ve ever been to!

We wandered the vendor hall during our breaks. I wish now that I’d had a shopping list before we went, as I continuously browsed their wares, desperately searching for something I wanted to buy now that the smörgåsbord was in front of me. I left with multiple Dreadball teams, only one for myself. (Somehow I’ve been overcome with a desire to play the rats…)

That afternoon Dale and Chris arrived in the hall with a loud CHOP! and it was nice to know that they were successful in their flights. That evening we walked for a half hour to a local pub (…nothing is walking distance away…) and there we were met with a great surprise – Peter had flown to the con as well! Last we’d heard he wasn’t coming, but apparently the night before he had a change of mind and bought a plane ticket. He hadn’t brought his army and was going to hang out, drink, talk with people and try to record for the Chumphammer podcast.

I got pretty drunk in celebration. 🙂

Tomorrow is the Blood Bowl tournament!