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Ok, so it's been a long week of geeking as we struggled to get ready, but the inaugural London 40k GT is over and a semi good time was had by all, possibly. It's a long report this time as much of it is about the drama leading up to the event and how it was run, which is why I've decided to call this a 'review'. All criticism is meant constructively - there were good and bad points about the event, and maybe the organisers will take on some of these points in future events. In the end though, fun games of Warhammer are had and beer is drunk. Here goes...

The Event

This event popped onto our radar near the start of the year and seemed a great idea - I've been to NOVA in the US, and many friends have done LVO or Adepticon, and it would be great if London had an event of that size. It might take a few years to grow, but if it could happen anywhere in the UK it would be in London. The organisers had booked a very nice central London location (part of the University of London's conference rooms, I think) over the bank holiday weekend, a stone's throw from Euston station. Great idea.

However, a few things immediately struck us (and a lot of the community) as odd. The event was being run by the London Warhammer Gaming Guild, apparently the 'biggest club in central London'. Now, I'm a member of HATE Club (Hackney Area Tabletop Enthusiasts) and we regularly have events with The Overlords and the Titans club, all very large and popular London clubs - HATE, for example, pulls around 70/80 people on a normal Wednesday night. As far as I could tell, no-one had ever heard of the WHGG, which seemed weird. This lack of any recognisable community presence meant that sign-up was very slow. The event was billed as a 256-person tournament, but there were a fair amount of questions on their Facebook page from people who didn’t want pay £40 to travel all the way to (expensive) London to play in a regular 30 person event. All of this could have been solved by getting the rest of the London clubs involved early on - by mobilising the large existing community. With a bit more openness and groups like The Overlords (and their podcast) involved, the event could have sold out.

Instead of this openness, they chose to appear as a small, closed group which I think turned a lot of players away. This facelessness was exacerbated by the event’s way of dealing with questions. Everything on their site was very polished and nicely designed, but it was sometimes very hard to get any answers through their Facebook page or Facebook event (it wasn’t clear which one they were using). A lot of requests went unanswered. The event organisers appeared on Signals for the Frontline billing it as an ITC event, before switching it to an ETC event at some point later (which pissed off some people who had bought tickets thinking it was ITC). Prices were dropped and group discounts introduced after some people had already bought their tickets. The cutoff for new rules was set to the day before list submission, giving people no time to test or change lists. Lots of little things that could have been handled better.

Even so, we wanted to support the idea of a London GT, so a few of us bought tickets and readied our armies.

My List



We at the HATE club are a fluffy bunch of players, and not fans of uber-cheese super-competitive lists. Even though it looked like the tournament itself would be pretty competitive, hopefully you just get bumped down to the bottom half after the first game, and then have fun with the interesting lists. I bought a fun list with a few teeth - nothing that would defeat a ‘top-tier’ army, but enough to make games interesting. Here’s the list:



- All Renegade Infantry units go into Ongoing Reserves on a 2+ when destroyed. When they come back they Outflank.
- All Renegade Infantry units grant a 3+ cover save to everything else in their detachment.
- All units within 12" of the Baneblade are Zealot.
- The Earthshakers leave Dangerous Terrain areas once they've exploded because CHEMICALS
- All flamers in the army are Gets Hot, Shred weapons because CHEMICALS

It look a lot to get ready. Here’s my girlfriend painting movement trays the night before the event, and the ‘extra’ models completed in the week before and ready for varnishing.



Arriving at the event

We made our way to Mary Ward House, which is a really nice old conference centre in central London. The rooms were light and airy, though a bit tight for space, and the floors were wood, so no aching legs from concrete! In the end, there were about 90 attendees, and the event had overflowed from it’s main room and into the basement. I have no idea what they would have actually done if 256 people (as they originally advertised) turned up.

The building was easy to find but we were immediately disappointed by the tables. Every single table looked like this:


Lovely mousepad-style Urbanmats on every table but the terrain was just these pieces of tiny, unpainted MDF. No line of sight blockers at all, massive areas with nothing on them, every piece of terrain was Ruins. Given that, in the run up, the event organisers had insisted on totally painted and based armies, and I’d spent a week frantically painting to get everything ready, the idea that they couldn’t even be bothered to paint the terrain was pretty annoying.

As far as I remember, there was no big speech or intro to start. The TO just announced that they’d be starting soon, and put up the pairings. Once everyone had found their tables and started going through armies with their opponents, they realised that some of the pairings were wrong, and everyone had to move tables to the correct pairing! We started about half an hour late, but at least we started!

Game 1 - Iron Hands

My first game was against Dom and his (very blue) Iron Hands battle company. Hey, it’s a tournament, right? Nobody was gonna play the chapter they’ve actually painted!

He had a whole ton of Rhinos and Razorbacks full of basic five-man squads, plus the Vindicator super-pie plate formation. We were playing Big Guns Never Tire as the first objective with a Maelstrom secondary. I deployed to totally fill the deployment zone with goons, so when his two Drop Pods of Dreadnoughts landed, they had to land right in front of the whole army, and the Dreads were dealt with relatively quickly. Most of the game was spent popping Rhinos and pie-plating the marines inside, and he didn’t really have enough firepower to take out much of my force. However, more Drop Pods and tons of ObSec units (I had none!!) meant that at the end of the game, he still held more objectives, and won!

The game was great fun, though. Dom’s marines were gunning down renegade goons left and right, big guns were blowing up marines, goons were re-appearing without number. It felt very thematic.

Technically a loss, but a great game nonetheless.



Game 2 - Taudar

So, this was weird. Having lost the first game by LOADS of points, I found myself up against a really, really nasty Taudar list which had stomped through it’s first game. Five riptides, a wraith knight, scatbikers and seers. We went to ask the TOs if there had been some mistake, but apparently they were running the first TWO games as random pairings. This struck both me and my opponent - who turned out to be John from the Aceface youtube channel - as pretty weird.

It was pretty clear to me that our armies weren’t a very good match, and this wouldn’t be a very fun game to play, so after a late night and a rushed lunch (the TOs cut lunch in half to get the event back on track) I really wasn’t up for putting down 200 models only to slowly take them off again. Thus, I stuck to my plan in this situation and put down one single command squad in the open as deployment, had them blown off the table in turn 1, and was insta-tabled! Game over and everyone moves in the direction they want!

I felt quite bad at denying someone a game - as did John, who was worried that he’d brought a (his words) ‘dick army’, but sometimes these things happen when you bring a fluffy list to a tournament, so instead of playing we went to the pub! John turned out to be lovely guy - we bitched about the event so far (he was one of the people who’d joined because it was an ITC event), had a couple of pints, rated each other full marks for sportsmanship and went to cheer on our friends! I’m going to try and make it to an event he’s running in July and urge you all to check out his Youtube channel - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcPD7Yq4ZFPWGIdqEpueXKQ

Here’s the only photo I took - his army on it’s tray…



Game 3 - Blood Angels

So, John went up a load of tables, and I moved down into the basement where I played my next game against Johnny from The Overlords podcast. We’d met lots of times over the years, but never actually played a game together, so this was fun. He’d repurposed his WIP 30k army as a 40k Blodo Angels army, all painted in shiny, shiny red. He had a bunch of squads in Drop Pods, a Formation involving a Deathstar with a Librarian, a Captain and Vanguard Vets, plus a couple of non-scattering Assault Squads, a Xiphon Interceptor and a Dreadnought Drop Pod with a Leviathan Dread.

The mission was Kill Points with secondary Maelstrom, so I was pretty sure I’d have no chance at all - I’ve got so many units! It was Vanguard Strike deployment, though, which I like as it allows me to fill the deployment zone and still keep my big things far away from where the Drop Pods would land, so Johnny had to land directly in front of me and try and wade through all the goons. At first, this went well - the Leviathan made great headway slowly lumbering forwards flaming things, but the assault squads and leaders were pretty quickly brought down by template weapons and waves of troops, and the Xiphon was ignominiously brought down by the Hydras as soon as it came on.

By some miracle, I managed to pull off a win on Kill Points, my only win of the day. Johnny even seemed to enjoy being overwhelmed by the unwashed masses - again it was a very thematic game with marines gunning down the hordes before being overrun.




Game 4 - Iron Hands (again)

Yeah, yeah, everyone is fething Iron Hands nowadays. Ross had brought a very, very small, elite army made from beautiful Heresy models. One Fellblade, an Achilles, a Deredeo Dread, and then one super grav/storm shield bike captain mega-unit and a few squads of scouts. We were playing The Relic with Maelstrom again, and setup in the customary manner.

It was really worrying how small and elite his army was, and the game was a little bit of a walk-through because of it. My spawn grabbed the objective pretty quickly, and his bikes were penned in by lots of goons to limit their usefulness - they ended up being tarpitted for most of the game. The Fellblade and Baneblade traded fire, but I got first turn and managed to reduce it to half-hull points in one go with all my Rapiers, so when I finished it off half way through with Krak Grenades there really wasn’t much left.

Another fun game, though, and solid win again for the horde!





Game 5 - Dark Eldar

So, my last game was The Scouring against a beautiful and very fast Dark Eldar army - two Ravagers, some haywire Scourges, some Warrior and Trueborn squads in Venoms and Raiders and a Haemonculus / Corsair fear-bomb with Medusae and Grotesques arriving with a Webway Portal! the deployment was Vanguard again, and I filled it out again to receive Deep Strikers, but because his force turned up piecemeal (and he took first turn), I was mostly penned in for a few turns - spreading out a little, but not enough to leave gaps he could exploit.

My opponent played the game brilliantly, though. The fear bomb landed right in the centre and took out loads and loads of goons, though he was careful to leave one or two alive in each unit so I wouldn’t get them back as quickly. I had to run the remnants of squads into combat to try and kill them off! In the end, my massed firepower had wiped out the vast majority of his army, but my goons had been so slow reappearing from reserves that I was quite far from any objectives, and he still had just enough flyers to take all the valuable ones. We ended on turn 5 with him winning - if there had been a turn 6 I think I would have tabled him - but it was a fun game nonetheless, and brilliantly played.



Conclusions

So, two wins and three losses - better than I thought I’d do at an event like this. For perspective, the top ten or so lists were all Eldar, Tau or some combination of the two, and there were SIX Supremacy Suits, one Revenant and one Warhound in attendance, so the meta was pretty silly.

The prizes were announced, again without much ceremony or celebration - there was a full-scale painting competition but I’m not sure may people had entered so the same person won a lot of the prizes. The actual prize selection was fantastic - the tournament had evidently spent a lot on prizes and most people who won something got both an UrbanMat and a £60 starter set, with lots of smaller conversion packs for Faction winners. One annoying thing was that the same person won Best in Faction, Best General and Best Overall - in my opinion this usually means that the Best Overall prize scoring favours the games a bit too much - I’m of the opinion that if you have lots of separate prizes, you should try and spread them around!

The actual event was fun in the end - all my opponents were great people, and I didn’t ever meet ‘that guy’. The games all went well, and the organisation (after the initial problems) ran on time, helped by a massive projected count-down in the main room. The people helping the TOs, from the room judges to the scoring guy, were all really nice, chatty and friendly and eager to help, but the TO himself seemed a bit surly and uncaring - his tone was very much ‘get in, play your games, finish’. Generally, though all the people were nice, there was very little sense of being at an ‘event’.

Would I go again?

Maybe. I think a lot of the issues they experienced were teething troubles, though it’s annoying that they could have avoided all these by getting some more of the community involved and being more open from the start, and could have created a better every by caring bit more about the attendees, the terrain, and the community. I'd like to think that these would all be solved again, but given how willing they were to listen to feedback, I'd be surprised.

In the end, I had fun, but it was because of the people I played against, not the event I attended.



..

Great review, thanks!

 ArbitorIan wrote:
SIX Supremacy Suits, one Revenant and one Warlord in attendance, so the meta was pretty silly.

Did you mean a Warhound?

beast_gts wrote:
Did you mean a Warhound?

I did! Edited...

I was at a ten person, 1500 point tournament on Sunday and there was a Revenant and a Warhound out to play. Seems to be getting more and more common.

beast_gts wrote:
I was at a ten person, 1500 point tournament on Sunday and there was a Revenant and a Warhound out to play. Seems to be getting more and more common.

Yeah, but I think, given that it was originally billed as an ITC event, the amount may have surprised some people. Six freakin' Supremacy Suits!!

Thx for the report Sir. Would be nice to get some painted terrain.

Hi mate,

Glad to hear your view of the London GT. I did not attend in the end as I had a feeling that the standard of games, the terrain (of which none was shown previously in say a blog or something) and the expected outcome was a big factor of me spending a lot of money to travel and stay there.

In the end I am glad I did not bother as it does seem very poor that no introduction was given (for the new supposed biggest GT of the UK), no priot matchups was done to build excitment and ease of play, two rounds of random pairings (what the actual F....) and an absolute mess of cheap unpainted useless terrain.

I am sad to see such a hyped (albeit by the organisers) event was poorly run, attended and did not have anything to show for such a high ticket price considering the numbers they wanted.

I suggest they have a re-think and have a discusion with seasoned tournament players on how it should be run and perhaps people like myself who have attended LVO and NOVA so have first hand experience on seeing how a large event is run.

Alex

 ArbitorIan wrote:


However, a few things immediately struck us (and a lot of the community) as odd. The event was being run by the London Warhammer Gaming Guild, apparently the 'biggest club in central London'. Now, I'm a member of HATE Club (Hackney Area Tabletop Enthusiasts) and we regularly have events with The Overlords and the Titans club, all very large and popular London clubs - HATE, for example, pulls around 70/80 people on a normal Wednesday night. As far as I could tell, no-one had ever heard of the WHGG, which seemed weird. This lack of any recognisable community presence meant that sign-up was very slow. The event was billed as a 256-person tournament, but there were a fair amount of complaints on their Facebook page from people who didn’t want pay £40 to travel all the way to (expensive) London to play what might be 30-person tournament. All of this could have been solved by getting the rest of the London clubs involved early on - by mobilising the large existing community. With a bit more openness and groups like The Overlords (and their podcast) involved, the event could have easily sold out.

Us South Londoners found that a bit odd as well "the biggest club" in town and no-one had ever heard of them! I don't think any of my club members went to the event in the end and it was met with mass indifference. I think they may be confusing number of people clicking "like" on farcebook or something with actual paying club members. Wouldn't mind putting my head into there one night for a look, but as they insist on GW games only, I'd not be able to play anything.

Terrain was pretty much as expected then.

You guys can moan about the titans and suprems, but out of 6 suprem lists only 1-2 did well, and the guy playing the revenant and the guy playing the warhound both didn't do well.

The real enemy here is eldar, who claimed all the top 3 spots, all with seemingly eclectic lists. Two of them were balanced lists with hornets, bikes, warp hunters and a wk, the final one was 60 spiders.

Moreover, if big FW things hadn't been allowed the event would not have pulled the number of players it did - southerners are notoriously difficult to drag to a tournament, bringing their big toys serves as encouragement.

Also, if the event hadn't had the big guys and was 3+ detachments the top tables would have all been deathstars, and I'd say playing against an invisibly untouchable super unit is marginally less fun.

Are there any links to rankings & lists? The winning list is on their FB page, wondering about the last.

Its 40K - its all about big toys and the expensive models winning the game, isn't it? "He who spends the most, wins the most" and all that.

Fenrir Kitsune wrote:Its 40K - its all about big toys and the expensive models winning the game, isn't it? "He who spends the most, wins the most" and all that.

Well, I'm not sure - Scatterbikes aren't so expensive, and I fought Fellblades, Dreadnought Drop Pods, Leviathans and Achilles on the lower tables. There's definitely a colossal imbalance at the moment, but I'm not sure it's entirely the fault of big models.

feliks6 wrote:You guys can moan about the titans and suprems, but out of 6 suprem lists only 1-2 did well, and the guy playing the revenant and the guy playing the warhound both didn't do well.
The real enemy here is eldar, who claimed all the top 3 spots, all with seemingly eclectic lists. Two of them were balanced lists with hornets, bikes, warp hunters and a wk, the final one was 60 spiders. Moreover, if big FW things hadn't been allowed the event would not have pulled the number of players it did - southerners are notoriously difficult to drag to a tournament, bringing their big toys serves as encouragement. Also, if the event hadn't had the big guys and was 3+ detachments the top tables would have all been deathstars, and I'd say playing against an invisibly untouchable super unit is marginally less fun.

Yeah, I generally agree, though I think the ITC rules of 'big things but not titans' wouldn't have made much of a difference to attendance.

Also, I question what you mean by 'did well' - I didn't see any of those titan-sized armies on the basement tables. They weren't in the top three, but they weren't exactly doing badly!

KillswitchUK wrote:
I suggest they have a re-think and have a discusion with seasoned tournament players on how it should be run and perhaps people like myself who have attended LVO and NOVA so have first hand experience on seeing how a large event is run.

Yeah, I think this is what a lot of us were thinking. Some of the decisions (really late decisions on which rules are in use, etc) made us think that the TOs hadn't really been to a large event before.

Great report, Arbirotlan. I always enjoy your thoughts about the status of games you play, they seem measured and well-thought out.

The warhounds and Titans might not have been the overall winners, but I very much doubt people enjoyed playing against them.

Yeah in general the problem isn't the allowance of big things, but the overall balance of armies..

@Accolade: I dont know, I quite enjoy playing titans because they are actually very easy to kill and make up like half of an opponents army

Nice report

Friend of mine went to the event as well -- he had similar thoughts about the terrain.

Well played though, good to see one of the less well known armies doing well.

Bravo for the report Ian, great read - and great army as well, though I feel like I say that a lot about your various crews

- Salvage

Nice review. Hopefully they can fix some of this year's issues and we can get more HATErs there next year.

 Fifty wrote:
Nice review. Hopefully they can fix some of this year's issues and we can get more HATErs there next year.

Yeah, or HATE, Overlord, Titans and all the other London clubs could get together and organise the inaugural East London Open (An ITC event) in the Troxy or something with Heresy tracks and balanced 'Best Overall' judging. Maybe. Fingers crossed, eh?

I'm curious about your movement trays - did you make them or is there a supplier? I've avoided infantry heavy Nid lists due to time constraints and this looks like a great option!

 ArbitorIan wrote:

 Fifty wrote:
Nice review. Hopefully they can fix some of this year's issues and we can get more HATErs there next year.

Yeah, or HATE, Overlord, Titans and all the other London clubs could get together and organise the inaugural East London Open (An ITC event) in the Troxy or something with Heresy tracks and balanced 'Best Overall' judging. Maybe. Fingers crossed, eh?

After the success of HATECon One, I am sure it could be achieved.

Even the BGWMC could probably house about 30-35 games at once, if we could secure the entire venue, or better, find somewhere bigger nearby. A school gym, for example.

SBG wrote:
I'm curious about your movement trays - did you make them or is there a supplier? I've avoided infantry heavy Nid lists due to time constraints and this looks like a great option!

The long thin ones and the blob round ones were made by friends (including Fifty!!). The long thin ones space units out, but were probably a bit much - the blob round ones were very useful. I supplemented these with these five-man ones from Warbases, which were actually really useful. If I were doing this again, I might just buy tons of those!

http://war-bases.co.uk/index.php?route=product/product&path=68_97&product_id=994

They were really useful in this tournament and really sped up the game, as long as everyone was ok with a bit of abstraction as to how they moved through cover and blobbed around for assault. Once the squads were small I'd remove the trays. However, part of this was that the terrain was so fething terrible there was plenty of space to slide them across the mats. I imagine on textured boards with denser terrain they may be less useful!

Sorry to hear about your issues with the tournament. I agree about the terrain, that surprised me. I was also surprised to win all 3 awards but I obviously can't complain about it

 ArbitorIan wrote:

 Fifty wrote:
Nice review. Hopefully they can fix some of this year's issues and we can get more HATErs there next year.

Yeah, or HATE, Overlord, Titans and all the other London clubs could get together and organise the inaugural East London Open (An ITC event) in the Troxy or something with Heresy tracks and balanced 'Best Overall' judging. Maybe. Fingers crossed, eh?

That'd need the london clubs to coordinate and communicate with one another, whereas there's a lot of them dotted about sealed into their own members and needs. Take these fellows who ran the tournament, I work about 10 mins walk away and had never heard of them before this, nor had any other club members where I go or friends who play.

I'd be interested in having a look at the club, although as a non gw gamer I don't think I fit their scope

It'd be good for London clubs to communicate, I must say.

thanks for the review. sounds like you had fun and it was interesting to read about the games. hopefully the organisers can get their poo together a bit better next time, as it sounds like they didn't really know what they were doing. being nice, i guess that if its the first time organising something you always find that its not as easy as it looked.