Better Late than Never

Last weekend I participated in a Warhammer Fantasy tournament. Here's the AAR (after-action report for those not in the know) as well as some general thoughts.

I went into the tournament talking quite a bit more trash than is my usual, fly-below-the-radar style. For the none-of-you out there who don't know but do care, I play demons. In general this is like bringing the '96 Bulls against the 1996 CYO Mt. Carmel 7th Grade A-team. It's just not a fair fight. The tournament had put in quite a few restrictions to try and hamper my army, but I'd play tested a bit, had my army nice and ready to go and was confident that I could pull out a victory.

The first round I was paired up against a lizardmen army. Lizards have a lot of different abilities that are tailor made for going up against demons, and the guy had an army that looked reasonably well put together. He had made a few choices that I thought of as sub-optimal, so I pegged him as a good-not-great player. He ended up being one of the better players at the tournament, and my early misappraisal of his abilities definitely hurt. In the game I made 2 mistakes, and had one run of truly terrible dice rolling. I should have switched the deployment of two units, I thought something was within 20" of me when it was actually 20.25" (ouch), those were the mistakes. On the other hand, I managed to get three of my main combat units into a fight with his one main unit, a fight where I'm roughly a 75% favorite. Sadly, the dice came up on the 25% side, and my army ended being completely wiped out.

The tournament used "battle points" to determine an overall winner, and after the first game I was at 0. My opponent had picked up 20. I knew then that I had no hope of winning, but figured I could make a good charge at the "top something" by wiping my way through the losers bracket. The round two pairings came up and I was being pitted against the youngest person in the tourney. One of the tournament organizers (with whom I'm pretty good friends) came up to me and said "be nice". I replied, "of course, but there's only so much I can do".

The kid had a very nicely painted chaos warriors army (turns out his dad painted it) and he was a pleasant enough opponent who knew the rules pretty darned well for someone his age (13 I later found out). That said, he just had no hope. His entire strategy revolved around charging into combat with me. The problem was that given a modicum of intelligence on my part (which I displayed in this game) the units he was trying to get into a fight with me had no chance of winning. I ended up tabling him after turn 4 (of 6). I really tried to be nice, and he seemed to have a good time of it, so I didn't feel too bad.

After getting 20 points from the kid I had gotten some of my pride back, and had the equivalent of two draws. That said, there were people in the high 30s, so I still had a lot of work to do. Game 3 I was pitted against another chaos warriors army. This opponent had driven all the way down from New Jersey, and was a really nice guy. That said, his army suffered from the same issue that my previous opponents had, although to a lesser degree. Also, the huge amounts of Capt. Morgan and Coke he'd been drinking probably didn't help that much. He had a slightly sub-optimal army (chose the wrong type of spells - Nurgle instead of Tzeentch, and yes Mom, Nurgle is the guy who has the Great Unclean One) and he split his army into slow and fast sides. I was able to deploy across from only the fast side, and pretty much nullify his slow moving portion. The dice didn't screw me and my guys were just better than his. Still, because I ignored half his army I was only able to get 14 of the 20 possible points.

This put me at 34 points after 3 games. The top tables had roughly 50, so again, no hope of winning. That said, I'd managed to eke my way back above several of my friends who'd won their first few games, so that was nice. My last game was against yet another chaos warriors army. My 4th opponent had played another of my friends in game three and I'd been able to watch enough of it to know that he knew what he was doing. Also, he had the best army build for chaos warriors that was possible under the tournament rules. However, his build requires one model get a certain spell in order for it to be most effective. Spells are randomly rolled, and he had a 1/6 chance to not get that spell. Fortunately for me, it was that 1 in 6, and so I wouldn't have to fight his army at its peak.

Unlike my previous opponent, this guy's entire army was mounted, so I couldn't just ignore one half. Fortunately, my guys are still better than his. In one instance one of my hero models was surrounded by ten of his basic troops. My guy was just flat out better and won. It was that kind of a fight. It was a pretty close fight until the last turn when I forced his general to charge mine. He threw in another unit as well, but I was able to use a rule which allows only our two generals to fight. Mine slaughtered his (mine was a 20 foot tall demon, his was a wussy wizard, it kind of makes sense) and ran down the other unit. This was a big enough swing to give me a 16 point victory.

At the end of the day I managed to finish 10th out of 50 with 50 battle points. The tournament winner had 68 although 20 of those came when his last opponent forfeited the game over a rules dispute... On the whole I'm pretty happy with my comeback. I'll definitely be haunted by the possibility of what might have been if that one charge in the first game had actually worked out. Especially looking at the top tables near the end of the tournament I know that my army would have an AWESOME match up against anything it would have fought there. Oh well, play better next time.

Overall the tournament went well, and I thought a lot of the individual balance restrictions that were in place worked well. That said, I think most of them worked because so many of the attendees assumed the restrictions would work, and so brought sub-optimal lists. From a pure power perspective I think there were maybe 2 or three other lists in the tourney that could match me, and so I'm still pretty annoyed that I only finished 10th. That said, 50 points in 3 games isn't too shabby so overall I'm pretty pleased.

I do still think that demons are utterly broken, and on my road trip across the country this summer I plan on proving that point. I'm going to be stopping at stores across the country and challenging people to games. I'll definitely be blogging about it (that trip is a main reason this blog started), so expect fairly regular updates about the state of play in Illinois, Missouri, Arizona and California at least (we'll see if I make it down to Texas). And that trip is coming up in just about a month, now all I have to do is get the financing in place (ugggggh, anyone have $70k they want to loan me? I'm good for it I swear! I just don't want to deal with the loan application process, BOO WORKING!)