Somnicide wrote:I wanted to go but wasn't able to so I need to live vicariously through anyone who went - what were the lists there? How were the missions? Any good drama? Inquisitorial minds want to know.
I flew down from Santa Clara. Won't be writing up any full reports, but here's a brief summary of my experience.
First: the hotel, while nice enough, has nothing to do with the event. No reason to stay there, unless you like Embassy Suites that much. (Also, bubble-tube Zenith televisions? Haven't seen THOSE in a pricey hotel in a while....)
Second: the venue. (JUST the venue, not the people running the event.) It closes at 6pm, which means no late gaming, no open gaming, and having to rush to get out at the end. Air conditioning could be better (or so the Fantasy people kept saying - it was cooler down at the
40k end of the hall).
Third: the people. Very friendly people running everything. Best concessions, too - pretty much all Costco frozen foods, but they would heat them up on-demand. $3 beer (and GOOD beer). The SCGWL is full of lovely people. One minor organizational hiccup on Sunday, as a computer glitch ate the
40k tournament organizer's packet o' missions before they could be printed - this led to an hour delay, but Charlie was fantastic about getting thing rolling - we finished by 5pm, when I *had* to be out the door.
Fourth: the terrain. Simply fantastic. Lots of actual
LoS blocking stuff, some very attractive large building pieces; made for very dynamic battles.
Fifth: the team tournament. Unfortunately, I finished the team tournament with rather mixed feelings. There were only 8-10 teams (the
40k events were added rather late in the game), and there was none of the team unity that Adepticon has so inspired. Yakface & I were there, in our Dakka bowling shirts, rolling in our freshly-created Dakka dice trays, with our Dakka dice, using 2000 pts of the
DD1 Tau army, and the only comment was "there's no theme to that - you're just playing a 2000 pt Tau army!" I do think we had the best-appearing army there, but there weren't any painting awards.
Mission 1 saw us fighting Blackmoor (the traitor!) and Hulksmash. It ended with 2 living Sisters of Battle, and many surviving Tau.
Mission 2 saw us fighting Nob Biker Orks & Daemons. Some poor luck on the Daemons player's part, coupled with markerlights & railguns, led to a solid victory here, too.
Mission 3 we wished we weren't playing, starting about 3 minutes into the game. Our opponents (Guard & Nurgle Chaos) were so obviously uninterested in enjoying the game, and could do little except whine about cheesy Tau and the "open" field (still some lovely
LoS blocking terrain there), and occasionally get rules wrong. One of the least enjoyable games I've played of
40k ever. They ended up winning overall, and got Baneblades (I think). Jon & I, in third, got some glue & zip-kicker as prizes (which I left w/Jon - airplane travel doesn't mix well with glue).
The missions themselves were good, with multiple levels of victory, and mixing objectives, kill points, survival of units, killing of units, and location-type conditions well. One minor issue involved a mandatory outflanking unit of Troops in round 3; I'm just not a fan of forcing Reserves like that, and the value of forced outflanking varies dramatically across different armies.
(One other note: checklist sportsmanship is fine, but for the tournaments I run, I'm going to heavily weight the "Did I enjoy the game?" question. If you have the highest score, but none of your opponents enjoyed the game, you will not win. Chatting with some of the other participants the next day, it sounds like at least one of those guys wasn't interested in playing the whole tournament.)
Sixth: the
RTT. Small turnout (10 players or so). Armies in various states of painted/unpainted. I was using Tyranids (37 genestealers, a dakka-flyrant, 2 T6 W5 Sv3+ boomfexes, 9 wound-allocation-abusing Deathspitter warriors, 10 w/o number spinegaunts, and 2 Warp Blast/Scream Zoanthropes).
Mision 1: Dark Eldar Wych cult (5 raiders, 3 Ravagers). Ick. Fortunately, a fairly new player. The game ended (via random game length) on turn 6, while I happened to be winning. He would have won on Turn 5; it would likely have been a draw on Turn 7.
Mission 2: Pedro-marines. Nice guy, sharing shots of Jack w/everyone all day long. I stole initiative here, which got Pedro dead from scouting genestealers. Ended on Turn 7 with complete tabling of the marines.
Misison 3: Blackmoor (the traitor!)'s Eldar light vehicle brigade, in Dawn of War Annihilation. Ouch. I can see, in retrospect, what I should have done differently for a better chance, but the approach I tried didn't work. If we've had 9 turns, the flyrant by himself might have changed the outcome; we didn't have 9 turns. For those who haven't experienced it, though, 72 scatterlaser shots per turn is truly an excellent broom for sweeping units off the table...and that's only 540 points of an 1850 pt army. It's a philosophy that often works well in
40k - roll a ton of dice, and make your opponent make a ton of saves.
Same nice mix of mission types, and same (very minor) quibble with mandatory outflanking in one of them. One oddity - there was no chaos present.
Blackmoor finished in first (and won a Baneblade); I finished in third, and Blackmoor picked up my Sentinel for me (as I was gone - scheduled my flight too early). I don't know if there was any painting award; I suspect not.
On the whole, I'm glad I went. Outcome was small, but I met some very friendly people, saw some very pretty Fantasy armies, and caught up (in person) with 2/3 of my DD1 teammates at something other than Adepticon. Hopefully,
40k participation will pick up in future years (with more warning). I wish the spring
40k event SCGWL runs was in the fall, though - I can't travel twice for
40k in a month, and Adepticon remains the place to be at that time of the year.
