Monday, September 12, 2011

40K Tournament Review

Despite the premonitions of doom, I managed to run what I would consider to be a pretty successful tournament.

Initially, we had 10 sign-ups, but one dropped out. It’s honestly pretty good to get 5 tables filled up at the FLGS. Fantasy has a bit of a critical mass, so while we have a lot of people that enjoy playing 40K, it’s just easier to get Fantasy games. It was nice to see that when they got a chance to break out the round bases, the guys responded.

Things kicked off at the crack of 11 and managed to stay pretty much on time throughout the day. We had a pretty interesting distribution of armies. Players brought two Guard, one Blood Angel, one Ork, one Tyranid, one Chaos Marine, and three Daemon armies. I can’t say for certain, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what the metagame looks like at the uber-competitive events. It did make for some unique match-ups though.

Missions were intended to be fairly simple, with the primary win conditions being the same or similar to standard 5th edition missions. Secondary win conditions were somewhat similar to old-school 3rd edition missions, but with a more comparative element intended to break ties and ensure that even if a player was losing, they’d be scoring something. I think that was successful, as none of the 15 games had to go to victory points to determine a winner.

The missions can be summarized this way:

Round 1, Primary: 4 Objectives. Secondary: Get units to the opponents deployment zone

Round 2, Primary: Kill Points. Secondary: Rescue (I.e. find the secret number and carry it to your end)

Round 3, Primary: 2 major objectives, 4 minor objectives. Secondary: Victory points with bonuses

Because of the tournament length and the number of players, we had two players, one of the IG’s and the Nids player, go undefeated. The Nids managed to get the edge in battle points. Chaos Marines finished third.

As I said, we had nine players come to play. I had made a few inquiries about finding a ringer, but no one could commit to playing all day. I asked a couple other guys that came to hang out if they wanted to play a game, but no one brought an army. That meant that I ended up having to both play a game in the tournament and try to answer questions. Thankfully, my first two rounds were matches against guys that I’ve played before and have been playing the game for quite some time. On the other hand, I’m getting ready to move soon, so the only army I have available for play is my all Terminator army, which, while not the most competitive, is still difficult for some armies to handle, no matter how inefficiently it gets built.

There weren’t a lot of rules questions. Honestly the most frequently asked question was, “Is there random game length?” There was also confusion when scoring mission 3. People tended to not look at the bonuses and just score straight VP’s. Though it might just have been because it was the end of the day, I probably need to do a better job of outlining things like that in the packet. I also want to use scoresheets next time, which I think will help simplify things.

Other than that, I really think things went well, and honestly, I am looking forward to the opportunity to run something again.

Additionally, thanks are due to one of the local guys for taking all the pictures.

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