This was my second trip to the 'Ard Boyz semifinals, and I brought my DarkBloodDeathAngelWing this time around. Same list as in the
preliminaries, with some minor tweaks (combimelta instead of a combiflamer on the scout sgt, Fear the Darkness & Unleash Rage on the librarian).
Rednekgunner, Skarboy & I made the journey to Olympic Cards & Comics in Lacey,
WA. Damned impressive store,
btw--if you told me that the dollar figure for the inventory they had was over a quarter million bucks, I wouldn't be surprised. There were 38 players, with heavy representation by
IG aircav,
BA, and roughly equal divisions of most everything else. Notably absent were Daemons,
DE, and Necrons.
Game 1
I squared off against a
DH player. His list was... interesting.
LRC full of
GK termies, several squads of
PAGK with as many psycannons as he could cram in, a couple squads of
IG hvy weapons (lascannons), a 50-man blob squad, and a twin-las dreadnought. I gave him 1st turn, went all reserve, and watched him spend his first two turns wandering towards the center of the table.
The blob squad strayed within 20" of my table edge, which meant that my crusader full of furious changing assault terminators was able to pounce on it when they showed up on my 2nd turn. Enter the first Rules Issue of the day. Looking at the blob, it seemed easy pickings. While the commisar would ensure I'd need to wipe the whole blob, the only visible special weapons were a plasma gun or three.
After my claws chew through 13 or 14 guardsmen, he then picks up 25 dice and tells me "these are the power weapons."
"Uh... where are the power weapons?"
"All the sgt's have power weapons."
"Those are chainswords, dude, this is supposed to be
WYSIWYG."
Without missing a beat, he responds with, "Show me where in the rules it says that chainswords aren't power weapons.
They have a motor, so they're powered. They're power weapons."
"No, those are
CCW's.
That's a power weapon" (I pointed at his nearby
HQ, equipped with a power sword).
"That's not a power weapon--I just gave him a
CCW."
*facepalm*
Now, if he'd asked if it was okay to proxy at the beginning of the game, I would have been okay with it. I don't mind proxies in casual games, and while I find the practice very irritating in a tournament, I've always let it slide in the past. If he'd said, "yeah, sorry about that--I wasn't able to change the weapons in time, is it okay if I proxy?" I probably would have let it go. Reacting as he did (i.e., with a sense of insulted outrage that I'd even raise an eyebrow) was a different animal entirely, so I called over a judge, who ruled in my favor. Two turns later, we also needed a judge to verify that, yes, if I put scouts into a
LRC, that becomes a scoring vehicle. After getting the word on that, he told me that he'd "never heard of anyone who ever played it that way." I really had no answer for that, so we just moved on. At the end of the game, he had his grand master, one terminator and two
PAGK's left.
All said and done, even with the
WYSIWYG issue, he was a nice enough guy. It seemed more a case of his having played against the same small pool of players (and being familiar with a small pool of assumptions) than actively trying to cheat, so I wouldn't avoid playing him again or anything. 23 point Massacre for me.
Game 2
I was paired off against an
IG player, who also had 23 points. He was running mostly horde gunline, with a smattering of vehicles. Creed in a chimera, a manticore, two basilisks and a vendetta were the only vehicles. 187 infantry, with three stubborn 50-man blobs. A pile of lascannons and a psyker squad rounded out the list. He won the roll, but elected to go first. All four objectives ended up in a roughly 4"x7" square in his deployment zone. I went all reserves again.
Unfortunately, my army came in very piecemeal with my large terminator squad not showing up until turn 4. When my terminators did hit his lines, I ran into
the same exact "chainswords are powerweapons" routine, right down to the "
Show me where it says that chainswords aren't power weapons." I didn't notice, though, until after he'd already killed most of the small terminator squad. After forcing the issue in the first game, I felt kind of stuck. If I didn't say anything, I expected that my first opponent would be pretty pissed when he heard about it. If I did say something, that would be twice in a freaking
row. I decided that my best bet would be to stay consistent, so I pointed out the problem to my opponent. While the first guy reacted pretty calmly, this guy got *very* upset. Even when another player (a judge?) showed him the description of
CCW's in the
BRB that gives chainswords as an example, he refused to accept it. When the judges tried to explain the difference between proxying and counts-as, he just threw up his hands and muttered 'bull$hit.' In an effort to placate him, I didn't ask to redo the combat or replace my dead terminators. I just wanted the game to finish. At this point, though, I'm wondering if there's something in the water in Washington...
At the end of the day, the comissars killed it for me. I reduced all three blobs to 7 or 8 guardsmen apiece (killing well over 100 guardsmen in melee!), but couldn't ever get any of them to fail
Ld twice. With two of the objectives directly under one of the combats, there wasn't anything to be done. I tankshocked him off the other two, and had a chance to consolidate onto one of them (after a scout squad wiped out Creed's squad), but rolled a 1 for their consolidate distance. 11 point tie for me.
After the second game, I went over to the judges and apologized for having them intervene in both of my games for the same issue. The guy I spoke with (the head judge
IIRC) told me not to worry about it, since "
WYSIWYG is one of the only rules for this thing. Those guys had no excuse." Even still, I don't like having to go to the judges. It then dawns on me that the
IG player and I are still only one point apart. I go over to the
TO and verify that we can't play each other twice, and am assured that it won't happen.
Game 3
Of course, I'm paired with the
IG player again on table 3. After a few moments of frantic paper shuffling, we swap with table 2 so that I'm playing against a
BA player. He's got a stormraven
(from this thread) full of death company/lemartes/
DC dread, Mephiston, a
LRR full of termies + Corbulo, a second librarian, two rhinos full of assault marines, and a sniper squad. He wins the roll and decides to go first, placing his sniper squad on a small hill in the center of his deployment zone. The only thing I deploy is my own sniper squad, but I gamble a bit and put it in a corner rather than in the center of the table. Unfortunately, he rolls that same short edge as his and pounces on them with Mephiston. Everything else in his army surrounds the melee in a pretty tight cluster.
At this point, I'm thinking the world is about to be my oyster. Everything of mine rolls onto the table and prepares to annihilate this juicy cluster of targets. I'm prepped to pop the stormraven & torch the
DC inside with a flamestorm, and I should have plenty of other firepower to kill or cripple the rest. The stormraven is freaking *huge* in person (the front section alone has a bigger footprint than a landraider), but I still manage to scatter THREE demolisher cannon shots completely off target, and both multimeltas also fail to so much as glance. That's when Everything Goes Wrong. The stormraven pops one crusader with its own multimeltas, the DCdread eats the contents, and it all goes downhill from there. Mephiston flies from scout unit to scout unit. One Baal manages to incinerate 9 of 10 scout snipers, but the last man (with the missile launcher) automatically regroups 1/8" from the table edge... and then procedes to stun the Baal every turn after that. When I do eventually nuke the stormraven and start dropping pieplates on the death company, he manages to make something like 9 cover saves. At the end of the game, I've got one vindi and one Baal predator left. He's got roughly 1500 points of his own. 0 point massacre against me, dropping me to 16th place. Despite being nearly tabled, this was easily the most fun game I've had all day. Since it was essentially over for me on turn 1, I felt zero tension for the rest of the game. My opponent was extremely cool, and even apologized for his behavior at the start of the game (which wasn't anything beyond seeming a little tense, really). We ended up shooting the breeze for quite a while after the game, and he and a couple of his buddies joined rednekgunner, Skarboy & I for post-tournament beers.
Rednekgunner took 1st, the
BA player I fought in the last round takes 2nd, and the
IG player I fought in the second round takes 3rd (he massacred his final opponent).
Overall, I'm very pleased with my army's performance. Other than a couple minor tweaks, I can't really think of anything that I would have done differently in terms of play. At the end of the day, it all came down to a couple of weak rolls in the second game (reserves for one squad and a consolidate roll) and a heaping pile of spectacu-fail in the third. Despite having three vindicators firing over 12-16 rounds (well over 35 shots), I only managed to roll a "hit" on the scatter die *twice* all day. If my dice hadn't turned on me in a couple rounds, I think I could have placed much higher than I did.
If nothing else, I should have a choice of fully-painted armies for 'Ard Boyz, next year...
