2015 Bugeater GT

For those of you that don't know what the Bugeater GT is it's a tournament for both warhammer fantasy and 40k that's held in Omaha, NE for the last 5 years I believe. The TO is a teacher at one of the local high schools, which is where the tournament is . The tournament is used as a fund raiser for the high school debate team. The debate team runs the concession stands and ferry drinks and snacks to the tables which is kind of nice.

This was actually the first year I've been able to attend the full fledged GT event. Last year I played in the team tournament which was great fun, but I wanted to get one of my armies painted up to 2500pts.

Getting my army ready was pretty much a year long project. It sounds like a lot of prep time, but between work, school, and my wife and son, I knew I'd need pretty much that entire time in order to be ready. As soon as the tournament pack was released I created a list and started painting towards it. What was interesting was that this was the first year that the Bugeater would be using Swedish comp. I was excited. I've always liked the idea of comp, so I took about a week making lists to try to get the most bang for my comp score. The list I settled on scored about 10.

Much to my disappointment the TO decided to change his mind about list  creation about 3 months before the event. Definitely not enough time for me to change anything. So I resigned myself to getting raped all weekend. Yeah...I'm still a little annoyed about that.

Here is the list I ended up taking.

Eltharion the Grim
Death magic
Stormwing

Archmage
Lvl4

Book of Hoeth
Talisman of Endurance

Noble
Bsb
Reaver bow
Potion of strength

15 Archers w/ musician

15 Archers w/ musician & banner

30 Spearman w/musician & banner

19 Phoenix Guard w/ full cmd
Banner of eternal flame

19 Swordmasters w/ full cmd
Banner of the world dragon

5 Shadow warriors x2

Bolt thrower x2

2500pts on the nose.

My High Elf army in all of it's glory

So before I go into the summary of each game one thing to mention is that the tourney used secret objectives caller "tarot cards". Before each game you'd select which card you'd be using for the game. The card had a mission associated with it along with a one use ability. If you used the ability you couldn't complete the mission. If you completed the mission you got a bonus 300VPs.

Game 1 - Hold the Pass vs Beastmen

Both my opponent and his army were pretty awesome. He brought an all chariot beastman army! It was pretty neat to see. Fortunately for me the deployment favored the shooting components of my list. There was some tense moments, but I took care of a lot of chariots with shooting. The pivotal moment was when 3 chariots (2 of which had characters) all charged into my Swordmasters. He killed 15 and I saved the 16th work a 6+ armor save. I retained my steadfast and held. My phoenix guard then hit one chariot in the flank,  overran into the next one,  and chewed through both. After that it was just trying to get as many points as possible.

I won the game 20-0.

The Beastman chariots rumble towards the High Elf line.

Game 2 - Blood & Glory vs Legions of Chaos

I wasn't looking forward to this one. Essentially his army was a bunch of solo nurgle spawn, a kitted out slaneesh daemon prince, and a big block of khorne warriors with halberds. Thankfully he didn't have a whole lot of fortitude. I knew I'd I could just kill his general I had the game. Turn 2 I was able to get a single bolt through his Tzeentch BSB on Disc's ward save and killed him outright. I won the Blood & Glory scenario right there (bonus 500VPs for me!)...however, that was not enough. His daemon prince chewed through Eltharion and had just 1 wound left on him when he went into my block of Phoenix Guard. Unfortunately for me, since they had the flaming banner and he had the dragonbane gem he got a 2+ ward save against everything I threw at him. He ended up regaining most of his wounds through souleater, and yeah, the rest of the game wasn't pretty. 

By the end of the game I don't think I had much left on the board. I lost 0-20.

Game 3 - Hold the Center! vs Warriors of Chaos

In this scenario there was an 18" square in the middle of the table. At the end of each game turn, you counted how many standard bearers were inside the box for each player (BSB counted as 2). Whoever had the most got an extra 100VPs, up to 500 VPs at the end of the game.

My opponent had a pretty nasty close combat list that would just love to chew through my T3 elves. So his first turn he marched up his Khorne warrior block that had a standard and the BSB and sat in the square. In retrospect, I probably should have been a little more aggressive putting my own BSB and Phoenix Guard in the square, but I didn't. He ended up getting 500VPs from the scenario objective.

His nurgle daemon prince ended up being amazing in this game. Making ward saves when he needed too and getting his nurgle lore attribute to gain more wounds and toughness. I did enough wounds to kill the original model, but with that lore attribute he ended up surviving the game with 1 wound remaining. 

Eltharion did pretty well, smashing through 2 Khorne chariots. He ended up charging the daemon prince in the rear, but just was killed for his effort.

At the end of the game I didn't have a whole lot. My opponent got a bonus 800VPs from the scenario and tarot card. 

I lost 0-20.

Eltharion the Grim flanking some Khorne chariots.

The High Elf Spearmen and Phoenix Guard fight for their lives. Spearmen actually had Mindrazor on them at this point...but to no avail.

Game 4 - Meeting Engagement vs Skaven

There wasn't any scenario mission in this one. It was a modified meeting engagement. Essentially one player setup first, and then the second player deployed (winning to go first on a roll of a 6). 

This was my opponent's first tournament after taking about a 15 year hiatus from the game. Pretty nice guy, but he did make some mistakes that made him frustrated and didn't know all the quirky rules for his army. It was all good though. Some highlights of the game was my being stupid and having Eltharion getting squashed by a Doomwheel. I had no idea that they were that effective. 

I ended up wiping out every single unit in his army except for his lvl 4 caster general. Surprisingly, even though he only had 1 model left on the table I only won 14-6. 

Game 5 - Return of the Relics! vs Orcs & Goblins

Another fun army made up almost entirely of Savage Orcs. My opponent was also a local guy that runs a local Warhammer club. It's always a pleasure playing him so I knew this would be a great game to end the tournament on.

My opponent's Savage Orc army

The scenario was a bit odd. Standard line deployment, but there were two "magical conduits" placed on opposite ends of the table. After deployment, we each got to select a unit that would carry a relic. At the end of our player turn, if the unit carrying the relic had at least one model resting within 3" of the opponent's magical conduit you could either drain the conduit or charge the relic. 

Draining the conduit would subtract one power & dispel dice from the opponents turn for the remainder of the game. This was cumulative.

Charging the relic would give the unit carrying the relic d3 shield tokens. Unsaved wounds would just remove a shield token.

You could do a mix of either up to 3 times, and each time would give you a bonus 75VPs (max of 300VPs)

So needless to say I gave Eltharion the relic, got first turn, flew up to the relic and drained the conduit. After a couple turns of that I pretty much could dominate the magic phase since he lost 2 power dice and 2 dispel dice each turn. 

The action in the game accelerated rather quickly as during my opponent's first turn he cast hand of gork and moved his giant block of savage orcs with multiple characters installed right in front of my swordmasters and phoenix guard. I gladly obliged him and charged right into the action. After a couple rounds of combat I killed the majority of the unit and most of the characters and they broke and fled. Eltharion was up to a bunch of schenanigans in this game, the best being charging a unit of savage orc boar boys in the flank, accepting a challenge, killing the character, and then breaking and running down the unit. 

I ended up tabling my opponent. I won 20-0.

Post-Tournament Reflection

In the end I came out of the tournament 3-2, either winning big or losing big. My overall tournament result was 13th out of 48. Not too shabby for an all infantry High Elf list! 

I had a lot of fun at the tournament. Since I haven't been able to play any games of Warhammer for about a year it was great to have an entire weekend filled with it.

My only critique of the tournament is that with the combined mission and tarot cards it makes for too much of a VP swing. To win 20-0 you just have to have a 1500+ point difference from your opponent. The descending brackets are just a difference of 150pts. That means that you can have a relatively close game of only 500pts difference which would be a 13-7 win, but if you got your scenario and tarot card objective you're catapulted to a 20-0 win. In a 2500pt game there are a lot of points on the table to get. It possibly could have been my own experience, but it seemed like most games were 20-0 games. I feel like there's no point to using that scoring system if very game is a 20-0 result. You might as well use a W-L-D system then. 

I'm interested to see in what the tournament will look like for next year with Age of Sigmar coming out. If they'll stick with 8th or move to the new edition/system. With their waffling on using Swedish comp or not, I know now that I can't rely on what rules are posted by the TOs until a few months out from the tournament. 

Goal for next year

Bretonnians! I really want to get a complete army of these painted. I have about 1000pts painted now, and we'll see what Age of Sigmar brings, but I really want to see these on the table painted and in a tournament. The part that I hate and love about painting them is that I'm painting them somewhat historically to represent as 12th century feudal european army (mostly french). That means each knight has their own heraldry with perhaps their retinue wearing their lords colors. Makes for a very colorful and unique army...but takes a long time to paint since you can't just paint whole blocks of figures. 

My hope is that Age of Sigmar has smaller forces, that way I can just focus on painting for that, and then work up to getting a 2500pt army completed in case people are still playing with 8th edition rules. Time will tell! Age of Sigmar should be here in about a month! I'm excited! 

I'm back...perhaps :)

Well, it's been about a year since I've made a post. I'll admit that I'm one to get easily sidetracked. I'll sum up what's been going on with me in the past year.

• Started going back to school part-time, one class/semester on top of working full-time
• Being a dad (little one is almost 1.5 years old now)
• Being a husband
• Changed job/career
• Bought a house and moved

So yeah, we've been pretty busy. All the while I tried to get as much painting done as possible so that I could play in the 2015 Bugeater GT. I'm just glad that I got all of my painting done. 

Check out my Google+ page B1acKn9ghtGaming to see all the photos that I took this year. Some pretty cool stuff. I might even write another blog post about that experience. Unfortunately, no battle reports. Since I haven't even played a game of warhammer in over a year, I just wanted to soak in as much warhammer as possible without worrying about taking pictures of the game and trying to remember everything. 

Well, here's to hoping that I have time to post more! :) 

Sportsmanship

Principles of Sportsmanship
Before I get started I'll first explain how my personal sportsmanship code while playing games. I play to the best of my ability, to the natural end of the game no matter how it might be going for me, with respect to my opponent, and I always shake their hand afterwards. I've won my fair share of best sportsman awards at events, the largest being at the 40k The Friendly Tournament at Adepticon.

Having played in a variety of sports from age 5 until high school good sportsmanship was an easily identifiable thing. You play to the best of your ability with respect to your opponent during the game and line up and shake hands after it's all said and done. Now, there is always the exception to the "playing to the best of your ability" part of that. When your pounding the other team into the dirt, it's always polite to not play your absolute best players, try out some new plays, etc. The principle of sportsmanship is easily translatable to every single sport, BUT for some reason the wargaming community seems to have difficulty with this.

As there are many different approaches to wargaming I'll break it up into a few different categories since I believe wargaming sportsmanship does change depending on what environment you're playing in.

Pick-Up Games
Going into a store or club and playing someone completely random. Could be a complete stranger or could be a good friend, but this was not a prearranged narrative game and you're not playing in a tournament. Just a couple of guys (or gals) that are looking to play with your toy soldiers. Here is how I would define good sportsmanship in this scenario:

1. Play with respect to your opponent
2. Play to the best of your ability
3. Shake hands after the game

Alright, pretty easy to understand, right? With #2 there is going to be some lee-way if you have a demanding lead in victory points. Should you wish to ease up and not play to the best of your ability, I believe that's perfectly acceptable, but in the end that's up to the individual. Either way, if you play following these tenants you'll get a tip of the hat from me good sir. 

Narrative Games

These you don't see happening in the stores or clubs very often, but I have a feeling they are the predominant mode of playing games for all of our basement-dwelling wargamers (and I don't mean that they live with their parents, that's just where the games generally take place). Here is how I would define good sportsmanship while role-playing you're favorite character on the tabletop:

1. Play with respect to your opponent
2. Play to the best of your ability
3. Shake hands after the game

Yep, nothing changed from pick-up games, but I'm guessing you're not surprised with that. In regards to #2 you could play that depending characteristics of the general being fielded on the tabletop. Would a bloodthirsty rampaging vampire let the poor beleaguered guard flee the battlefield? HELL NO! (Well, at least my bloodthirsty rampaging vampires don't...unless you're into Twilight or something...) What's cool about this though is that you can reflect you're characters attitude in your style of play. Should you're noble honorable knight think it dishonorable to kill every single peasant in enemy village, so be it, stay your sword good knight!  

Tournament Games

Be it a one-day, two-day, weekend, 10 player, or 100 player event a tournament is a tournament. You're attending for the competition to see who can come out on top. This is how I would define good sportsmanship in this scenario:

1. Play with respect to your opponent
2. Play to the best of your ability
3. Shake hands after the game

Huh, that's odd. Nothing changed. That's right folks! The tenants of sportsmanship don't really change at all! Addressing #2, I would say in a tournament situation you don't have to worry about easing up on your opponent. You play to the best of ability and give it your all the entire event. Especially if it's scored on the 20-0 scale you don't get bonus points for easing up on your opponent, so feel free blast away until all that's left of your opponents army is some shoes smoldering in a crater. This doesn't mean you have to play like an asshole, whooping and hollering when you do well and crying like a giant-asshole baby when you don't, but you just play smartly and don't hold anything back. 

What I Don't Agree With

There are a lot of things that I see around on the interwebs and blogs that I don't agree with at all. For example, two of the things I see commonly are playing the kind of game your opponent wants to play; not choosing certain lores or spells because to do so would be unsportsmanlike; and the whole concept of sportsmanship and composition being confused in event scoring. 

Playing the game your opponent wants to play.

I'm assuming this is saying that don't play a casual pick-up game with a tournament game mentality, but if not, it's not on you to make sure that your opponent is having a good time (of course while being a polite, courteous, and decent human being) it's up to your opponent to do that for themselves! If they are upset because a unit that they thought would win them the game got blown of the table and start complaining and whining about it, guess what, it's them that's being unsportsmanlike! Not you for killing the most valuable high-priority target! They should stop crying and get back to playing the game. Maybe this hobby has more than the average amount of man-children, but this is something that I see a lot that I find incredibly infuriating. Maybe I'll rant about that at a later time though. 

Not choosing certain lores or spells.

While I agree that certain lores/spells have definite advantages over others (looking at you Purple Sun and Dwellers) to just have them in your arsenal and perhaps use them is not in itself unsportsmanlike. In fact, these spells are one of the main, and sometimes only, tools that a player has to deal with deathstar units. While I agree it would be silly to pronounce your prowess of a game due to your ability to roll dice for a specific spell, I don't think that it's unsportsmanlike. 

Sportsmanship/Comp Scoring

Again, here is something else that it's own post, but I'll try to summarize. Sportsmanship and comp should be scored in completely different categories; however, I've found in many of the events that I've attended that they are not. One question commonly asked is "Rate how much you'd like to play this player again", now what army that player has an effect on their opponent. Did they just get tabled? Do they not enjoy playing against their opponent army? Well, then they might rate their opponent low for that question; however, that does not address their opponents sportsmanship! At all! The questions that should be asked in the sportsmanship section are the following: "How many times did your opponent complain about his/her dice?" "How many times did your opponent curse at you?" "How many times did your opponent throw dice or models?" Alas, they do not. 

 

Gaming Guide for New Parents

Earlier this year my wife and I brought our first little one into the world. He’s amazing and everything is going great, but as all of you veteran parents out there know things are going to change. One of the things that I quickly realized I had to change was my gaming habit. Now that a several months have passed life is starting to settle down and I think I’ve learned some tips that I wanted to share with my fellow parents (and prospective parents). 

1. Reduce gaming frequency. Yeah, you thought you were going to get away with playing just as much as you used to, didn't you? Nah, it’s just not going to happen. It just isn’t. I used to go to my local gaming club twice a week, Tuesday nights and Saturday mornings. On the weekend sometimes I wouldn't get back home until the afternoon. That just doesn't work anymore. You’re SO is going to really appreciate all the help they can get with your spawnling (which is vital for tip #2) so make sure you’re actually around to help. So far I’ve reduced it to once a week during a week night, and that seems to be working out pretty well so far. 
2. Cultivate those brownie points. Grow and lovingly nourish that pile of brownie points. This is the key to getting in some gaming. Help out as much as you can around the house. Do dishes. Change diapers. Fold laundry. With all of your good deeds how can you not but be rewarded? 
3. Redeem brownie points. When you go to play games on your game night, or when you want to get some painting in, cash in those brownie points to play or paint guilt free. Well, maybe a better way of saying it is that you’ve at least payed your dues and earned some game/paint time. 
4. Try to stay awake. Gone are the days of 4-5 hour painting sessions. If you want to get some painting done you’re going to have to do it in small increments, which means paint while baby is sleeping. Or better yet while the baby and SO are sleeping. Sure, this means YOU’RE not sleeping, but those models aren’t going to paint themselves, are they? 
5. Game consolidation. Pick a few of the games that you truly enjoy and stick to them. You’re not going to have as much time to game now, so make sure that when you do you’re at least having as much fun as possible. Personally, I’ve been sticking to painting my Bretonnians to getting in games with them as I can. 
6. Plan games. Planning games ahead of time can be a huge time saver (it also helps with tip #7). You can arrive at the hobby store ready to play straight out of the gate and you know for sure that you have a game. There is nothing more frustrating then leaving to get some games in and standing around twiddling your thumbs. 
7. Communication. Good communication, as it often is, is vital to a healthy relationship. Make sure that you communicate with your SO any events or games you might have scheduled far in advance so that it isn’t a surprise to anyone. 
8. Enjoy your family. Our own little man nugget has only just arrived and already it seems like it’s going by way to fast. Enjoy your family because while games come and go, your family will always be there. Cherish the crap out of them. 

That’s the guide! Follow it and reap the gaming happiness that it brings you. And in no time at all, you’re little guy or gal is going to be ready to play games with you too! I know that my son is pretty much destined to be as much as a gamer as his mom and dad. :D

Kicking this sucker off

I’ve been thinking about starting my own little wargamming hobby blog for a while now and today I finally got the random gumption to start it. So first, how about a little introduction.

I’ve been playing wargames for quite some time now. I first got into Warhammer Fantasy back in 1999 when I came across some figures in a Gamer’s Paradise store at the mall (I don’t believe that retail chain exists anymore...le sigh, things that make you feel old). That Christmas my parents got me the Warhammer Fantasy starter box with Bretonnians and Lizardmen and I’ve been hooked ever since. Sure I’ve had periods when I might not have played as frequently, namely in college when I didn’t have a designated hobby space, but the drive to collect, paint, paint and play has always been there. A few years ago I got into Warhammer 40,000 at the tail end of 5th edition mainly because 40k is much more popular than Fantasy is; however, I'm not only just interested in Games Workshop games. I’m interested in starting Dropzone Commander as well as historical games such as SAGA, Tomahawk & Musket, and Warhammer Ancient Battles (or whatever the equivalent is since there is not longer support for that game).

Well, that’s it for now. Expect to see more posts about my hobby progress, general thoughts gaming, and whatever else is generated by this thing between my ears. Until then, may your dice be good to you!