Birmingham Games Expo Tournie

So, a few weeks ago I went to the Birmingham Expo 40K tournament. It’s been insanely busy at work, plus I was playing RuneQuest, so I’ve not had time to write it all up. Here it is in short form: I didn’t have a chance to take photos (there was a tight deadline to work to for the games!) It was 1500 points, and I was running the Grey Knight list I used for the LWA tournie (two psydreads, two small PAGK in psyrazorbacks, a librarian, 10 termies and a chimera loaded with melta wielding Inquisitorial henchmen and an ape.)

Game one was against some lad running a Necron army. The terrain was tightly packed, blocking most LOS and preventing my Knights from effectively shooting. Never having played Necrons before, this was all new to me. I figured that I should just dive on in, and at least I’d leave the tournament with some idea of how a Necron army worked. It was a give objective match, dawn of war style, and I think I reserved everything. I sat off, shooting Necrons at long distance. Boy do they take some shooting! After turn one I quickly became acquainted with their ability to come back from the dead and figured that the best tactic – the *obvious* tactic – is to obliterate a unit in one turn. That worked relatively well, and my boys managed to take the shooting back. My foe deep struck his Monolith which, in the tightly packed environment resulted in a mishap. I got to place it wherever I wanted, and opted to place it right next to my melta unit and demon hammer wielding librarian. This proved to be somewhat of an error as it didn’t half lay down some firepower and he teleported some of those close combat fighting Elite necrons through the monolith portal and, it turns out, they could easily go toe to toe with my termies.

I should’ve lost. Near the end I had one objective, with two dudes charging towards another objective, with a unit of his men were sat off about 8” away in easy striking reach of both. He had a boatload of boys in between two objectives which could easily congo line between the two, whilst the boat could’ve swooped on in to contest one of the objectives I had. In the end, he just simply didn’t do any of this (he was, to be fair, about 15/16? Something like that?) So he had one objective to my two, and that was that. In this sense, it was underwhelming. His knowledge of the rules also marred the game somewhat, and I’m still not convinced those necrons were being used quite correctly.

Game two was a spearhead two objective game against Imperial Fists. The guy running them was dead nice. His army was one of the named ICs, some thunder hammer/storm shield termies in a Land Raider, a 10 man (well, 2 combat squadded 5 man) tac marines in a landing squad, a scout squad and a Contemptor dreadnought from Forgeworld. Oh, and two Thunderfire cannons. He won the first turn and took the side with the terrain. This kinda screwed me as this meant I was deploying in the open, and going second. After umming and arring I settled on just deploying, taking the pain and working from there. Frankly, that bit of the plan worked out just fine. I deployed and he blew a gun off the Razorback. No biggy! This, however, was as far as my luck lasted. His Raider rolled on in, and dropped off the termies, distracting me from my plan of just blowing away his troop units. And they took the pain. All saves were being made, and my guys were just failing theirs. It was so unfortunate. His dreadnought landed in a pod, and between the lot of them they mauled my army to oblivion within four turns. Tabled. He had a better army list, played better and the dice gods were clearly well pissed off with me that game. Fortunately, he went on to win the Tournie, which at least gave me some comfort.

So, let’s Segway into a discussion about Forgeworld by talking about that Contemptor. It’s easy to see why the tournie allowed FW models. It was meant, and was, a friendly bash about and why, then, *wouldn’t* you want to get those models out. But is it gamebreaking? I think the answer is ‘no’ but ‘it’s still a helluva lot better than the other condex stuff’. That DN came in at 175, the same cost as a venerable. It didn’t get the venerable reroll power, but it did get 1 extra point on its front armour; fleet (fleet! It’s a frickin’ DREADNOUGHT!); *way* more options as to what weapons it can take (you can give it BS5 for Emperor’s sake!); and has a 5+ inv save in shooting and 6+ in close combat. I think the inv save alone makes up for losing the venerable reroll power, so I think it’s *way* underpriced.

Shocking, eh?

Game three was against a 12/13 year old lad. He was running a Guard list of 5 flying vehicles: a medley of Vendettas and Valkyries, loaded up with units of melta wielding guardsmen. The aim of the game was to get our units into the foe’s deployment zone. I asked Mal what he thought I should do against flying gunship spam, and he said he thought I was unlikely to win. I set up my dudes, fired at the ships from afar, but unfortunately wasn’t wholly successful. The problem was that I was grounding the ships, but not destroying them, so they kept firing at me. But I think near the end there was only one left. I timed legging it to the other side of the field at about the right time, sending a termie unit, and two PAGK units charging across the battlefield to get into his DZ. The lad had it all wrong: by this time, his vehicles were down and only one could transport guys in, although one more unit had managed to sneak on in from a crashed gunship – they had taken the pain, though, on the way in and were fortunate to have survived. Whereas I was doing a sprint to the other side, ignoring everything in between (and I mean *everything*), he was still lining up gun lines and firing at me at a point in the game when that was too late to make any real difference. Alas, my run rolls failed me and at the end of the game two of the units were ¼” out of his DZ with only one in. If it’d gone to another turn (it lasted 5 turns, with a 50/50 chance of turn 6 under these tournie rules) I’d have managed to get all three in, and the chimera on the back could’ve obliterated the already under-strength unit sat in my DZ. But them’s the breaks. This was a really fun game. The lad had a good idea of how to play (unlike player one), knew all the rules (ditto), and it was close as hell (unlike game two.) He was also very pleasant.

It also gave me an insight into how one can vary the mission variables to get something new and interesting. I’m hoping that the new edition of 40k has more missions in it, to monopolise on these sorts of variations  (I’m somewhat sick of the ‘capture objectives’ and ‘kill points’ missions AND NOTHING ELSE – and I know we could make stuff up, but it’d be nice to have some missions that were playtested for competitive play.

Game four.

Oh god. Game four. I don’t want to think about it, so I’ll keep it brief. To avoid reliving the experience I’ll give it to you in powerpoint-style  bullet points.

* Young girl, maybe 12, with a Tau army. Even though we were playing the Swiss system I was paired with her even though her points allotted was a lot lower than mine.
* Didn’t know the rules. At all.
* Units often shot twice. When Deep Striking, she’d roll the dice and *then* pick where they were coming in. She made numbers up when asked for the wounds, toughness etc. of her guys (and every time we consulted the codex there was a fraught argument.) All kinds of rules were made up, such as ‘I can’t move towards a unit without making a Night Sight roll.’ It was like hell.
* Took ages to do anything.
* At the end you had to calculate which unit near the centre had the highest point value. I had a 10 man termie squad at ~400 points. She had a Devilfish and some dudes. She claimed it was higher. I asked for the army list. She DIDN’T HAVE AN ARMY LIST! She just picked up the book and went through every option for the Devilfish and the associated unit, claiming that she’d given it everything. This went on for five minutes before I despaired and pointed out to her what she was doing. Worse, when we calculated victory points she told me the unit in question was only 80 points.

This was a hellish experience, and not fun at all. Especially as she’d lost every game and REALLY WANTED TO WIN. I mean REALLY. I was like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y77n--Af1qo&feature=related

If we’d actually played a game, I’d have probably given her it. Really, I would. But I couldn’t forgive the fact that it was such a blatant collection of made up rules and outright cheating. Maybe that makes me a bad man (I *did* judge my four year old nephew for cheating in Ludo one Christmas – he could grow up to be Idi Amin, but – dammit! – I don’t want the guy to cheat at games!) Whatever: I never want to think of it again. And just look! I tried to keep it brief, but said more about this game than the others.

Overall, I came in 19th out of 35, falling a gnat’s breath away from those above me. If only I hadn’t have got wiped out in game two, I might’ve placed around 14/15. It was kinda enjoyable, but playing against so many kids was deeply unfun and the last game really removed the sheen off of it for me. But the middle two games were good, and I could easily imagine going to more organised tournies. Although I *think* I might need to rethink my army. The Grey Knights were fun and all, but they really can’t hack the hacked lists – anything remotely designed to monopolise on a codex’s good points proved problematic for me. C’est la vie!