DUNDRACON!

Road tripping all the way to the bay area and back in less than 48 hours means about 16 hours of total time in the car. 

Totally worth it.

I drove up with some friends who had committed to helping run the 40K tournament.  They were asked to do some of the judging and to help make sure things ran smoothly.  They asked if I wanted to come along, and while I hesitated at first, I'm glad I did.  Geoff, who ran the tournament, did a great job.  Rounds started on time.  The missions and explanations were clear.  Everything just seemed like it came off with zero hitches without too much fuss, which can certainly be a lot harder than it seems.

Nice venue and definitely an interesting Con

In round one, I got paired against Nick who was playing a Daemons army.  The mission had three objectives with one in the middle and one in the center of each deployment zone.  They were weighted so that the objective in your opponents end was worth three, the one in the center was two, and your ends was worth one.  We had a pretty close game, but a few mistakes and few lucky breaks ended up deciding things.  I cast Murderous Hurricane on the wrong unit of Fiends.  He managed to immobilize my Dreadnought, which would have tied up his Bloodletters in the next turn.  I didn't support some of my units enough.  I whiffed a lot with my Thunderwolf Lord and had a few rough turns of saves.  In the end, he held the center and my end, while I was on his end's objective, but it was contested by the second Great Unclean One who had decided to wander over there.  Logan did manage to handle the first one which was pretty awesome.

I hate Daemons so much!

Game two was against Mark and his Eldar army.  The mission was kill points, but added a number of bonus kill points for killing things like tanks and HQ's.  Unfortunately, this meant that my list jumped from thirteen kill points to twenty one.  This weakness came to the fore by the end of his second turn, when two fire prisms and Eldrad's ten man wraithguard unit opened up on the squad with the Rune Priest and Wolf Priest and he picked up a quick seven kill points.  Just like that, I knew I pretty much had to table him to win.  The Thunderwolf Lord went into the Wraithguard by himself.  Logan's unit was just out of range and got counter-charged by Asurmen and a squad of Dire Avengers after eating a full turn of fire.  Logan and the Thunderwolf went to work, while the remaining storm shields tried really hard to just not die.  Eventually, Asurmen would finally make it to Logan, who was on his last wound, but by that time the Lone Wolf had arrived and he doubled out the Phoenix Lord.  Meanwhile, once Eldrad and the warlock went down, the Wraithguard dropped pretty quickly.  I did end up tabling him, but Mark was a lot of fun to play and he had a great attitude whichever way things were going.

The final game of the afternoon was against Jon and his Blood Angels with multiple win conditions.  I lost Logan early, and things were looking pretty grim.  He fulfilled the kill point portion of the win condition early by nuking drop pods and independent characters, then had his scouts show up in my table quarter to further complicate things.  The game turned when the Thunderwolf Lord made a pair of Belt of Russ saves and killed Mephiston.  He then assaulted a pair of assault squads that had teamed up with a Furioso Dreadnought to whittle one squad down to a single Wolf Priest.  The Lord went crazy, killing seven marines.  Both squads failed morale and the still intact squad fell all the way back off the table.  That swung the game.  I still needed until turn six and some good shooting to pull off the win, but I did it.

So 2-1 for my first tournament of the year.  I had a great time.  I played well.  You can't really ask for much more.

Hobby Accomplishments!
-Won tournament games!  Finished in the top half. 
-Finished the menhir and a Daemon Prince.  Did some work on the Land Raider.
-Mocked up Space Hulk bases.

Hobby Goals
-Finish all the red on the Land Raider.
-Varnish the Daemon Prince and the Menhir.
-Do some work on the Vargheists.