Tournament Recap

This weekend, two friends and I ran a tournament at the local shop.  We were blessed to have a long lead time and a lot of publicity going in, based mostly on the fact that the owner of the store put up a pretty substantial sum for the grand prize.  You can find an independent review of the tourney here.

Overall, things went extremely well.  We had a full house of 24 people, even with a $20 entry fee.  Between that, the grand prize, and some prize support donated by some sponsors, our total prize pool broke a thousand dollars.  That allowed us to put out some substantial awards, beyond just Best General/Painted, to the point where ten different people got to walk away with something to show for their efforts.  Of course, the downside to having a full house turns out to be that the game store just barely has the space to support twelve tables.  We were pretty much bumping back sides for most of the day.

The missions we ran were a variation of standard book missions.  We ran, in order, Big Guns Never Tire, The Scouring, and The Emperor's Will, all with slight variations.  Every mission included a Kill Point component added in, however, there was a cap to the number of points available depending on the mission.  Big Guns was fixed at four objectives.  Beyond that, it was fairly straightforward.  The second mission, The Scouring, saw more changes implemented.  Rather than random values, we went for a pair of four pointers, with four more two pointers.  That fixed my biggest gripe with the design of the mission. Finally, for The Emperor's Will, we doubled the value of the objectives.

This all seemed fairly simple to us, however, we ran into a pretty common problem for TO's.  No one read the $%&# missions.  Somehow, despite me explaining it to what felt like every table in the first round, I was still explaining how to score the mission in the third.  I have been in tournaments where the mission packet gives a whole page of instructions to a single mission.  In this case, there was never more than a paragraph.  So, as always, simpler is always better for players.  The one thing that keeps getting pounded into my head from tournament to tournament is that most people won't take the extra time to digest the words you write down.  Make it as simple as possible.

It's always interesting to look at a tournament and try to understand why people chose to take certain things like armies, units, etc... According to the web, only certain things are "good."  Yet, I can't remember a single codex being extremely well represented.  Looking back at my notes, there still isn't anything that makes an impression.  There are a dash of Space Marines, a pair of Necrons, some Imperial Guard.  The IG also showed up as allies in a number of forces, but not in more than two or three armies.  Really, the only thing that was common was the Aegis Defense Line, which was pretty much ubiquitous as a fixture throughout the top tables.

The armies that ended up on tables included Sisters of Battle, which ended up taking Best General, plus Chaos Marines and Space Marines, all of which went undefeated.  On those very same tables were Black Templars, Space Wolves, and Tyranids.  So, not much of a consistent thread there.  I chalk that up to a couple things.  First, a high percentage of the guys were just locals who showed up with their favorite things.  Second, the top players were top players.  Apparently, we had four of the top ten players in the country as per one of the national rankings sites.  A lot of them really seemed to want to win with something that would be a challenge, which led to armies that I would consider unique.

The Sisters absolutely brought the thunder, tabling all three of their opponents.  It turns out rending Heavy Bolters are nasty.  Who knew?   The Black Templars player ended up taking Best Overall.  Despite the one loss, he scored a ton of battle points, had the second highest paint score, and maxed out his sportsmanship.  He ended up with a score just two-tenths of a point higher overall then the undefeated Space Marines player.  Adding in the results after the final round was about as crazy as Excel can get. 

Overall, it was a great tournament.  Everybody had mostly good things to say, and I think everyone had a good time.  I know I did and would love to continue running tournaments given the chance.

Tournament Missions and Recap

Setting up for round one

This weekend, one of my buddies and I had the opportunity to run our first sixth edition tournament for 40K.  We had seventeen players, which is three less than our max capacity, so almost a full house.  Things seemed to go really well.  I say that because nearly every one of the players came up to me during or after the tournament and said things went really well.  A portion of that may simply be that we provided a reason to play games for eight hours, and who doesn't love that?  But we also had no real logistical issues, managed to produce pretty clear winners, and were able to answer all the rules queries with pretty minimal fuss.

We opened the day with Crusade (Seize Ground) and Dawn of War (Pitched Battle) as the mission and deployment type.  We figured this would make for a pretty easy first mission for the day.  Everybody has seen it before.  Everyone knows what to expect.  Theoretically, no rules questions to speak of.  It's also a good way to ensure that everyone has a chance to score an equal number of points, since we preset the number of objectives at five.  We were operating on wins to determine the Best General award, but because of the number of players, it was likely we would need victory points as a tie breaker.  This is what eventually pushed us away from using Purge the Alien (Killpoints) since second round match-ups would favor those that scored more victory points.

Tau and CSM:  Surprisingly well represented

Round two pitted the high and low seeded winners against each other with Big Guns Never Tire and Vanguard Strike as mission and deployment type.  Again, we preset the objectives, this time at four.  This allowed for a little more variance in score, as Heavy Support choices gave away victory points, but the window for variation was only three points.  Things actually played out very cleanly for us, with one tie amongst the initial winners.  This ensured only four undefeateds going into the final round.  Even better, two of the players had a significant edge in battle points.  This was significant as they would be paired against each other for the title, barring a draw.

Our final mission was The Relic with Hammer and Anvil as deployment type.  We had judged this mission to be the most likely to produce a winner, while agreeing that we didn't want last editions "roll dice and tie" or The Scouring (because that most definitely is the worst designed mission, whether playing competitively or otherwise).  You may note that there are only six points available in this mission.  That was also an intentional decision.  The hope was that most of the points for establishing yourself as the top contender needed to be earned in rounds 1 and 2, while round 3 would be focused solely on winning.  Additionally, it meant that tanking your score to get an easier round three opponent was mighty risky.  Because of this, we felt like we could pair the best players of the day against each other with everything riding on just that one game.  Again, things turned out how we hoped, with one of the top table contenders winning his mission going away. 

Wolf on Wolf action.  Those on the left would take best painted.

At the end of the day, Tyranids (Tervigons and Gaunts) ended up beating Dark Eldar (hybrid gunline/Wyches) on the final table for the top spot.  It seemed to come down mostly to a few rolls, but that's how it goes in a dice game.  Chaos Space Marines also managed to go 3-0 with an interesting monster mash list, outlasting Eldrad with Eldar.  The Chaos Marine army won best overall, with some fantastic conversion work and paint. 

Interestingly, the field was incredibly diverse.  Seventeen players showed up with twelve different armies.  Miracle of all miracles, none of them were Grey Knights.  The most represented army was Tau (3), followed by Chaos Marines (2), Blood Angels (2), and Space Wolves (2).  Not counting Deathwing, only seven of the entrants were power armored armies.

Maybe interestingly, we tracked First Blood victory points against first turn.  The results may not be what you might have thought.  Out of eighteen games (we counted the first two rounds), ten of them resulted in the player with first turn getting first blood, and that figure includes a couple games where it was not earned on the first turn.  That is a majority, but hardly the runaway number some may have expected.  Granted, I would not consider this population normal, so I hesitate to say we've achieved a statistically significant figure, but it could be interesting if you're a stats nerd.

More pictures and such to come...

Tournament Planning

At the worst, we'll have great tables to play on.

For any of you out there in the San Diego, I and one of my buddies will be running a tournament at At Ease Games on July 21st.  Check in kicks off around 10, games at 11 if you're interested.

It will be my first official tournament experience with sixth edition, which makes being the boss of it kind of intimidating.  Someone has to be the first, I suppose.  Of course, that comes with a can of worms in the form of the lack of a successful, preexisting template already being in place.  Because of that, I have a myriad of concerns in my head racing to be the biggest and they're all winning.

With the newness of the edition, we've decided to stick mostly to book missions.  The theory is that nobody has played (half of) them enough that they've gotten particularly stale, so why go out of the way to create a wholly different framework?  That said, how do you best string a chosen three of these missions together to promote a healthy, balanced competition?  Especially when it has been made abundantly clear that the intent of the edition is to push for more narrative gameplay.  Though perhaps that's not the best point to bring up when trying to sell a tournament invitation.  Mostly, it's been a process of trying to pick and choose between the new stuff that seems to provide something close to equal footing, then filling in with the holdovers.

Wanna team up, bro?

One decision I'm content with is excluding allies and fortifications for the first tourney.  I know it's in the rulebook.  Three weeks in, it's just more complication than I want to deal with.  I don't know the edition nearly as well as I'd like to for judging, let alone the way all the extra interactions from new combos will work.  Players haven't had a lot of time to experiment or see what is out there either.  Give it a bit more time, and then we'll get real crazy.

Theoretically, it should be that simple, but with a positive turnout, we come to one of the common problems faced by three round tourneys.  Obviously, I'm referring to how to stratify multiple undefeated players in an equitable manner.  We have room for roughly twenty players, meaning three 3-0's is in play.  And while one of my racing concerns is no one showing, I'd guess we'll be running out of space before we're struggling to fill tables.  In 5th edition, I typically rotated the three missions as primary and secondary, with something a little funkier for tertiary.  I used the system both as a way to score battle points and to break ties.  With six missions, it seems odd to leave any of them out, and with so may of them being objective based, they tend not to combine quite so well.  That is to say, how the heck would play The Scouring and Crusade?  Not a lot of folks bring eleven scoring units, even with Fast Attacks thrown in.  That would pretty much tip the scale all the way to MSU style armies before a die gets cast...  Though if it means no Draigowing...


So that's kind of where things stand.  I'll have more about mission selection and the actual format after the tourney, plus whatever observations I have as far as results and data.

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 5^th edition missions. Secondary win conditions were somewhat similar to old-school 3^rd 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.

40K Tournament Prep

I'm running a tournament on Saturday. Things are pretty much set. I have all the missions written, I have objectives, and I have enough players. I'm still very nervous. This is gonna be the first time I try running something like this, and while I know the guys and plenty of them have experience running tournaments, I still imagine things going so badly that the building somehow burns down and it's my fault. Hopefully things go well, and if not, well, I'm headed across the country in a month.

I got in a game on Tuesday. I played a Meeting Engagement against a Beastmen Doombull bus with a big Minotaur unit. To say the game was going to lack subtlety is an understatement. We deployed a little over the 12" apart. He had 3 units, including the Minotaurs with a Doombull and 2 Gorebulls, plus two units of Gors and a level 4 Shaman. Essentially that amounts to about 1500 points in the big deathstar, meaning that if I get that unit, I win. He went after one of my units with his big scary one, smashed it, but didn't go far enough to get out of my counter-charge arcs. I hit his flanks with 10 knights, a Lord, and about 20 Halberdiers. I lost a lot of guys from the Warrior unit, but the knights cleaned up and with a ranked unit of heavy cav in the flank, he was disrupted, so he wasn't steadfast, and at that point, the game was pretty much over. I still don't understand the Deathstar philosophy. I really believe that you need enough units on the board to be able to exercise a measure of control over it. I can see the value of points denial, but I really think over the course of a game, it's not that hard to get the whole thing if you have the counter for it.